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| Review by Lily Fierro |
With the rise of new, alternative spins on plenty of superheroes, I tread carefully any time I pick up a revamp of an existing character in the DC or Marvel universe.
I have enjoyed the reboot of Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye but I have bypassed the new Thor and Wolverine.
More minor characters have risen up to the surface, and we’ve seen established characters become women or different races; comicbooks are trying to modernize to our more politically aware world, but there are plenty of blunders along the way, especially when the change in the character’s gender or race does not provide a story that actually captures the experience of the character’s identity.
Consequently, when Black Canary came up as one of the renovations to review, I had to consider whether or not I would dig into the series, but Annie Wu’s art and Lee Loughridge’s coloring talent convinced me to take a look, but I was surprised by what I found.
To freshen up the Black Canary tale, writer Brenden Fletcher has kept Black Canary’s Dinah Lance’s appearance intact; she’s still caucasian; she still has a head of flowing blonde hair; she still dons a leather bodysuit with fishnet stockings when she steps into her superhero role, but now, she’s the frontwoman of the Black Canary band. In issue one, we first meet Dinah, known simply as D.D. in the music world, through a report from the Burnside Tofu zine that discusses her penchant for pugilism and the tour of costly destruction for the band.
At first, in the new Black Canary, Fletcher refers to Dinah’s past as a character and as an established DC property in fragments, spending most of the time in on Dinah’s life as a musician. By the second issue, after aliens descend on a Black Canary show in Detroit, Dinah’s past as a former secret agent emerges and the ghosts of her past life begin to interfere with her music life. Different groups of people want Ditto, the silent and, for all we know, juvenile guitarist, and Dinah rises up to keep Ditto and the band safe.
As the mission to protect Ditto gets more dangerous and the investigation to determine why people want her, more and more of Dinah’s past returns to her, including her amnesiac husband Kurt Lance, a former agent as well. Though she helped the Justice League on a project and was a member of Team 7, Dinah hoped that she could live a more normal life as a musician and eventually have enough funds to start a new life, but as the issues progress, signing the contract to tour with Black Canary for a year carries a greater burden than just performing and puts her farther away from her hope to cash a check and live away from her extraordinary past.
The first seven issues have aliens, government spies, music references, and villains that eliminate voices in sound, the exact antithesis to Dinah’s superhero voice and the sounds that the Black Canary band make, and while the battle between good and evil manifested through sound and silence seems like a solid and clever standalone idea, the execution of the concept just does not work.
The problems do not stem whatsoever from Wu’s art or Loughridge’s colors, which are excellent throughout the issues. Wu illustrates Dinah with almost a fashion illustration looseness that suits her updated persona well. Loughridge’s mix of muted and neon colors could not be better. The execution error lies in the script, which feels too clunky and just too out of touch.
Fletcher wants the new Black Canary to have this key element of music, but rather than integrating it in a more natural way, it feels like sequins and piping trying to hold together a plain dress. The music elements feel too forced, and as a result, come off as triggers for nostalgia for past rock culture, specifically that of the 1980s.
Beyond the music chunks glued in, nothing feels new about Dinah as a superhero. The types of villains are unspectacular: a government agency and aliens, and we do not get any chance to understand them. Then, as a character, we really do not get any chance to explore Dinah’s psyche in a novel way. She has trouble reconciling her past with her present, but which superhero who has an alternate identity in reality does not experience this in the trajectory of their development?
Beyond the staleness of the superhero conflicts and the awkward interruptive music elements, the most devastating blow to the Black Canary update is its similarity to Scott Pilgrim in its sequences to use music and walls of sound to defeat enemies. Despite the great visuals, the action sequences feel regurgitated from the Scott Pilgrim battles, which ultimately make this version of Black Canary feel like a completely corporate script meant to capitalize on the success of Scott Pilgrim and to sell eventually as a movie or television show.
As much as I was disengaged with the series by the sixth issue (the last one collected by the volume one trade), I will say that the end of the newest seventh issue has some promises of a more innovative turn, but even that promise looks like it will take heavy cues from Warren Ellis, so I’ll proceed with caution.
