Back in Action: ACTION COMICS WEEKLY #616

Previously...

Every Wednesday, I review an issue of Action Comics Weekly featuring a backup story starring Black Canary among others.  Each installment of Back in Action will look at Dinah's story and touch on my favorite or least favorite moments from the rest of the strips in these issues.

Black Canary's eighth appearance in ACW was in issue #616, which marks the end of her first story in the series.  The issue sports a typically awesome cover by Alex Toth, depicting Janos Prohaska, the pilot adventurer known as Blackhawk who thrilled me in last week's issue.  I'm a pretty big fan of Toth, and he drew a fun little two-part Black Canary story from Adventure Comics #418 and #419 that I plan to review after New Year's.

Black Canary

"Bitter Fruit" Part 8: written by Sharon Wright, penciled by Randy Duburke, inked by Pablo Marcos, lettered by Steve Haynie, colored by Gene D'Angelo, and edited by Mike Gold.  One more time, Dinah's story is the last strip featured in the comic, after the letters column.

Dinah Lance breeches the surface of water she just jumped into while the lawyer Barry Neiman calls her crazy from the safety of the pier.  Dinah swims in front of Doug Vallines' seaplane and grapples onto one of the landing skids with her belt.  As the plane takes off, she hauls herself up and into the plane, only to come face-to-face with the working end of Doug's pistol.

At a private island retreat, INS scumbag William MacDonald tries to convince CEO scumbag Vincent Scales that there is too much attention on their illicit dealings and they should lay low after transferring some of their cancer-causing agricultural products to Central America.  They finally make the whole convoluted plot clear: Scales' company was poisoning their illegal migrant workers, so he had MacDonald deny the workers citizenship so they couldn't bring suit against Scales.  Pretty simple when stated that way but it's taken us eight chapters to make that known.

Aboard the seaplane, Dinah convinces Doug that his plan to rush Scales out of revenge is foolhardy and she'd be better suited to get the information they need to punish Hector Librado's enemies.  The plane lands on the shore, passing over the cowboy Gary DeMott's tiny little fishing dingy.  Dinah gets out and enters the compound, but Gary finds Doug in the plane and takes him prisoner.

Dinah sneaks into Scales' office and finds a tape recorder.  She also flips through some medical charts and discovers that Scales is dying of cancer caused by the same chemicals he tested and developed and unleashed on people like Hector and Doug.  Dinah and Scales have a stare down and she rescues Doug by nailing Gary in the face with a lamp (hilarious!).  Then she leaves with Doug.

In the epilogue, we discover that MacDonald no longer works at INS, but is that because he was fired for doing a crappy job or did he transfer out to handle Scales' business?  Dinah attends the funeral for Hector Librado.  She still has the tape recorder from Scales' office, but what's on the tape?

End of "Bitter Fruit".  Black Canary will return in issue #624.

Well, the conclusion does a lot of what the finale of a mystery is supposed to do.  The hero faces the villain and leaves at a relative stalemate, except Dinah does have some leverage.  The separate, seemingly unconnected plots are tied together and made known, even if the whole story isn't really resolved.

Sharon Wright scripted this story, but I feel a lot--a whole lot--of editor Mike Gold's fingerprints on it.  This is classic noir fiction.  This is DC's version of Chinatown.  In this chapter, Doug Valliens asks Dinah if she is some kind of private investigator, to which she replies "sort of", but that's exactly what she is here.  She's no superhero; she's not even a vigilante, because she's not avenging any crimes or bringing any criminals to justice.  She's met with a mystery in the beginning and she plays it to its inevitable, ambiguous conclusion.  "Black Canary" isn't an identity in this comic, it's just Dinah Lance's disguise when she goes out looking for information.

And I'm okay with it.  This is a different type of story, a genuine mystery novella, that we don't see a lot of from either of the big publishers these days.  I would love a regular Black Canary or Birds of Prey book done in this style, but not this format.  The problems of this story are compounded by its short-short chapter delivery.  The complex plot and minimalist art style works when taken in as a whole, but so much not separately.  I got frustrated reading this story peace meal, but now that it's over, I find more value in Wright's script and Duburke's art, though I still don't think the inks or colors supported the pencils as well as they needed to.


The Rest

Peter David and Richard Howell continue Hal Jordan's adventure as Green Lantern.  At the start of the chapter, Hal is trapped inside a safe lined with yellow paint at a science convention that has just been robbed by two goofy super villains.  Since un-labotomizing himself a couple issues ago, Hal has regained the ability to, um, fear.  So suffocating in a yellow coffin triggers all sorts of anxiety in him, but he manages to chip away at the pain and uses his ring to drill a whole in the wall.  Then he breaks free by creating a green Hulk, basically, which is great because Peter David was also writing that character across the street.

In The Blackhawk by Martin Pasko and Rick Burchett, we meet some more of Janos' partners.  Co-pilot, Andre Blanc-Dumont, and navigator, Carlo Sirianni, have joined Jan and Natalie Reed at the aircraft hangar to learn the details of the mission.  Meanwhile, their flight engineer, Lt. Weng is fighting his way out of a frat house after raising some cash in a game of dice.  The mysterious man who arrived at the end of last chapter is Leslie Richardson and has hired the Blackhawks to fly him to a remote part of Southeast Asia to learn what happened to his wife, a possibly-dead pilot who was more likely taken prisoner by... someone.  Fun story.

The story of Wild Dog by Max Collins and Terry Beaty takes more of a modernist deconstructionist take on the vigilante story.  The news is reporting on Wild Dog's return to take on criminals.  The boy, Daniel Crown, who witnessed Wild Dog in action last issue has become a local celebrity because of his eyewitness account.  Kids in a comic store debate the merits of Wild Dog's superhero status and costume.  They also talk about creating a Wild Dog comic of their own and seek Daniel's help as a technical advisor.  Seriously?  I would've thought this issue was written two years ago, not twenty-five!

Superman's two-page strip by Roger Stern and Curt Swan continues to entertain me.  Last time it looked as though Superman had accidentally killed a man in a scuffle.  This issue lets Supes off the hook, as he uses his X-ray vision to find a miniature transceiver inside the dead assassin's brain.  The killer's employers used the device to kill him when it looked like he'd be captured, and then they send another signal through the device that causes a small explosion, but Superman saves the doctors and nurses in the area.

Boy, I wish that out could've been used in Man of Steel somehow... somehow...

This chapter of Nightwing by Marv Wolfman and Chuck Patton is full of action!  Roy Harper has finally tracked down Cheshire's hideout, but her elderly man-servant Wen Cheng catches Roy and beats the ever-loving crap out of him.  Seriously, it's embarrassing for him.  Meanwhile, Nightwing's contact at Scotland Yard is complaining about all the locals Roy beat up in order to find Cheshire.  He reproves Dick for this kind of behavior and Dick can only plead that not all Americans are assholes (which is a lie--we totally are).  Nightwing follows Roy's trail, interrogating the same hoods that Roy had.  Before he gets a lead, though, Cheshire appears, having poisoned the hood Nightwing was talking to.  Nightwing and Cheshire engage in a brutal fight and the chapter ends with Cheshire about to slash Dick across the face.  Good stuff!

That's it for Back in Action until after the holidays.  I don't have issue #617 so a lot of these stories will proceed unknown to me.  In January, I'll come back with my review of Dinah's next adventure in issue #624, which sports one of my favorite comic covers!

Back in Action: ACTION COMICS WEEKLY #615

Previously...

Every Wednesday, I review an issue of Action Comics Weekly featuring a backup story starring Black Canary among others.  Each installment of Back in Action will look at Dinah's story and touch on my favorite or least favorite moments from the rest of the strips in these issues.

Black Canary's seventh appearance in ACW was issue #615, which features a cover highlighting the return of Wild Dog drawn by Barry Crain and inked by Rick Magyar.  Even though I don't know much about this character, having previously only read the final chapter of his first story in this series, I really get a kick out of this cover.  "Wild Dog Breaks Loose" certainly suggests the action in the book's title, and the machine-gun fire backs it up.  But what I really love about this cover are the dogs.  I'm a dog lover and their inclusion in this image both warms my heart and cracks me up.

Black Canary

"Bitter Fruit" Part 7: written by Sharon Wright, penciled by Randy Duburke, inked by Pablo Marcos, lettered by Steve Haynie, colored by Gene D'Angelo, and eddied by Mike Gold.  In keeping with the rest of her story, other than her first chapter, Dinah's story comes at the end of the comic, after the letters column.

The penultimate chapter begins with Doug Vallines--the real Doug Vallines, the bald-headed fatty, not the cowboy--coming home to Seattle and hearing the message Dinah left for him regarding the attack on Hector Librado.

Doug goes to a public park the next day expecting to find "Bonnie Cardinal" but he finds the Black Canary.  After the initial shock that the Doug Vallines she's meeting isn't the cowboy who charmed her and maybe threw her unconscious ass in a dumpster wears off, Black Canary finally gets some answers.  Which means we the reader finally get some answers.

Doug explains that he was a pilot and sales representative for Scales Agriculture and recently discovered that he got something like cancer from his years of exposure to unsafe, untested products created by Scales' company.  Hector Librado has a similar disease, and Doug's lawyer, the goatee sporting Barry Neiman, had been looking for Hector when the goons put him in the hospital.  Dinah suspects that Scales and his cowboy enforcer, Gary DeMott, tried to silence Hector to shut down Doug's lawsuit.  But that doesn't explain the whole situation with the INS...

Meanwhile, William MacDonald from the same Immigration and Naturalization Service is aboard Vincent Scales' party yacht, informing the CEO that one of their problems will be taken care of any moment.  At the same time, the good-hearted INS agent Ellen Waverly comes home to find a hit man waiting for her.  Two gunshots bring her down.

Back in her civilian clothes, Dinah Lance goes to check on Hector at the hospital when she learns his condition is worsening and he's been moved to the intensive care unit.  As she's leaving, she overhears another man asking about Hector's condition.  She may or may not know that this man is Barry Neiman, the lawyer Doug Vallines told her about, so she decides to follow him from the hospital.

Barry goes to the apartment of Ellen Waverly, walking right by the anonymous assassin.  When Barry sees her body, he makes a run for it, but Dinah catches up with him at his car.  Barry pleads his innocence to Dinah, and then calls Doug to report that Waverly has been murdered.  Doug lets them know that Hector, too, has just died.  Doug is furious that all of his contacts and support in his case against Scales keep getting bumped off, and threatens to take matters into his own hands.

Barry drives Dinah to the pier.  They arrive in time to see Doug pulling his seaplane away from the dock.  Dinah dives into the water after him.  Concluded next week!

It's both sad and telling that this second-to-last chapter is the first time I haven't had any problems with the artwork.  Marcos' inks finally heighten Duburke's pencils rather than muddle them and the color doesn't ever confuse me about which character i'm looking at.

There's something else I noticed for the first time in this chapter.  We really haven't seen Dinah in her Black Canary costume much in this story, and this is the first time I really noticed the big gold jewelry adorning her neck and the black headband across her forehead.  The band is a nice nod to her Justice League International costume, though it's not keeping her hair out of her face.  The jewelry, though, seems like it's meant to evoke her old choker, but it just comes off as garish and flashy.

This Black Canary doesn't wear a costume.  She just has a change of clothes that happens to include a wig.  That fact makes itself all the more obvious when you consider her major dramatic action in this issue--leaping into the ocean to chase a seaplane toward the story's main villains--she does in her civilian clothes.

This story isn't really a Black Canary adventure so much as a Dinah Lance pseudo-mystery.  Unless you don't consider Black Canary an alternate identity.  Hell, she even calls herself Bonnie Cardinal when she's "in costume".  It seems as though this story is trying to run as far away from the normal tropes of a superhero comic as fast as it can.  And that wouldn't be bad except that's what she is, those are her roots, and it comes off as if the creators are ashamed of that part of the character.

The Rest

Peter David begins a new Green Lantern adventure, this time with artist Richard Howell.  Hal attends a science convention where his girlfriend, Arisia, is modeling for a self-defense object.  There's some woman named Veronica who is apparently beautiful, but we never get a look at her.  The joint is robbed by two super-criminals named Siphon and Castle, who look utterly %@#$ing ridiculous, but they actually have cool powers.  Siphon gets trapped in a box but swaps places with Hal, sticking the Green Lantern in an airtight safe lined with yellow.

In the surprise of the week, Martin Pasko and Rick Burchett kick off a new featuring starring Janos Prohaska, better known as Blackhawk.  The story is set in Singapore, 1947, and combines elements of pulp and serial adventure, like a cross between Casablanca and Raiders of the Lost Arc.  After a daring shootout with some drug smugglers, Jan is reunited with an old friend from Russia named Natalie Reed.  He hires her on as the crew chief and engineer for his plane just as he receives a mission to investigate a mysterious plane crash.  I really like this story, I love Burchett's art, and one of my favorite things about it is the title: "That Was No Lady."  It reminds me of Lady Blackhawk, another leggy blonde familiar to fans of Black Canary from pre-Flashpoint Birds of Prey.

Max Collins and Terry Beatty bring Wild Dog back for a story called "Fatal Distraction".  The story opens with the police and press investigating a serial murderer who targets men outside singles bars.  Since I missed most of the character's last story arc, I learned a lot more about the man under the hockey mask and why he does what he does.  He keeps a mission log, ala Punisher's war journal, and he has friend and confidant in the press, ala Daredevil's silent accomplice, Ben Urich.  He shoots up some creeps robbing a convenient store, but aims for their knees so as not to kill them.  The rest of the story is narrated by an impressionable child who witnesses the vigilante in action, and the woman who is going around murdering men to avenge someone named Bobby and redeeming herself to someone named Jordan.  If I had to guess, she was raped by someone outside a singles bar, causing her to miscarry an unborn child named Bobby and disgusting her husband named Jordan.  That's my first take.

In the two-page Superman strip by Roger Stern and Curt Swan, the Man of Steel barges into a hospital room to find an assassin smothering the man Superman intends to question.  Superman violently pushes the killer, who is dressed as an orderly, into the wall.  The nurse on duty says the man in the bed is comatose and can't answer any of Superman's questions.  Then a police officer tells Superman that the would-be killer died when he slammed into the wall.  But... but wait... Superman doesn't kill!  I'm sure there was an argument about that online recently!  There must be more to this story!!!

In the Nightwing story by Marv Wolfman and Chuck Patton, Cheshire continues to successfully murder her targets, while her one-time lover Roy Harper not-so-successfully tracks her down.  Meanwhile, Nightwing meets a high-ranking official in London and tells him about his work with Speedy from the Central Bureau of Investigation, and how they're trying to catch Cheshire.  The official, Lord Hill, is pissed that nobody from the CBI informed him that they were operating in the United Kingdom.  Cheshire returns to her home where she takes care of her and Roy's daughter, Lian.  She insists to the old man who might be family that around her child, she is Jade, not the killer known as Cheshire.  Roy threatens some lowlifes to get a lead on Cheshire, then he asks Dick to meet him that night.  Dick, growing ever suspicious of Roy's motives, calls in support from the rest of the New Teen Titans.  Some boy named Danny who I don't know drops the bomb that Roy no longer works for the CBI.  He's operating on his own.

Next week, I'll look at Action Comics Weekly #616, which concludes Black Canary's first adventure in this comic, as well as continuing the sagas of Superman, Green Lantern, Nightwing, Blackhawk and Wild Dog.

Back in Action: ACTION COMICS WEEKLY #609

In May, 1988, Acton Comics, the series that birthed Superman and the whole superhero genre and, well, comics as we know them, changed format.  Beginning with issue #601, Action turned into a weekly anthology book showcasing half a dozen-or-so characters in short, serialized adventures.  The stories were as varied tonally and thematically as the heroes included.  Superman, Green Lantern, and Deadman anchored the series, while Nightwing, Phantom Stranger, Wild Dog, Phantom Lady, and groups like The Blackhawks and The Secret Six made appearances over several issues.

Why this is of concern to my blog is, of course, Black Canary had two different backup stories run through Action Comics Weekly.  The ACW format lasted forty-two issues, of which Dinah appeared in nearly half.

Starting today, every Wednesday is Back in Action!  I'll review Black Canary's story and touch on my favorite or least favorite moments from the rest of the issues she appeared in.

Suck it, Stephen DeStefano!

Black Canary's first appearance in ACW was issue #609, which boasts not only one of my all-time favorite images of Black Canary, but one of the best covers to grace Action Comics!  I doubt Brian Bolland was intending to channel Howard Chaykin with this cover, but I see a lot of the latter's style, particularly in the shape and bounce of Dinah's hair and the glint of deadly playfulness in her eyes and smile.  This reminds me of Chaykin's Black Kiss, which would have been coming out around the same time.

As for the content of the cover: I love it!  I never liked Black Canary's new look from Legends and Justice League International.  The design was fine, albeit extremely dated, but it just wasn't Black Canary.  That she's giddily burning that costume and proudly donning her classic fishnets look makes this one of my favorite covers.

Black Canary

"Bitter Fruit" Part 1: written by Sharon Wright, pencilled by Randy Duburke, inked by Pablo Marcos, lettered by Steve Haynie, and colored by Gene D'Angelo.  Mike Gold edited the feature, and I'll be talking about Gold much more when I eventually review Black Canary's mini- and ongoing series from the early '90s.

The first chapter of "Bitter Fruit" opens with Hector and Miguel, a pair of illegal immigrants from Mexico, working in the orange groves of California.  Though there is an inconstancy in the writing and art that makes it difficult to identify which man is which, their scene is fairly simple.  They came to the U.S. for job opportunities, and even if/when they get deported, they will try to return so they can support their families.  This is the positive, uplifting, and inspiring face of undocumented immigration.

The "ugly" face rears up on page 3, where we meet William B. MacDonald, a senior agent at the Immigration and Naturalization Headquarters in Nebraska.  He's on the phone with someone, and it sounds like his agenda to detain and deport illegals extends a little beyond "duty".  He addresses the rest of his staff and shares a list of convicted felons and dangerously disturbed Asians and Mexicans who need to be captured.  I'm assuming that some, if not most, of the names on his list will be innocent migrant workers and not the dangerous criminal caste MacDonald describes.

Somewhere in a different city, a young man named Luis is chased into an alley by two white men who beat him up.  A young woman witnesses the assault from her window and goes outside to protect her friend Luis with a baseball bat.

In the apartment above Sherwood Florist in Seattle, Dinah Lance burns the costume that had been her Black Canary garb for the last couple years.  Dinah explains her cathartic creation of that costume while still holding onto the classic costume to her boyfriend, Oliver Queen.  "I'm going to rely mainly on more functional dress," she says, "but fishnets and black can have some practical applications."

Dinah has invited a girl named Rita over for dinner, and tells Ollie that she hopes to give Rita a job in the flower shop.  Rita is a recovering drug addict who crashed through the window back in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters #1, and even though she uses the doorbell this time, her arrival is just as shocking to Dinah; Rita's face is bruised and beaten, and we discover that she is the girl who went to defend Luis from the punks who beat him in the alley.

The story ends with the teaser: Next Week: Educating Rita.

Update: PAGES!!!

Click the images below to enlarge.

That's it for the first chapter of "Bitter Fruit".  We never see Black Canary in costume; we barely get to see much of the costume she's incinerating in the fireplace.  Dinah doesn't appear until page 5 of an eight-page story, so most of this is set-up.

Just from reading this first chapter of Black Canary's story, I can tell this tale will play out very similarly to how Dinah's mini- and ongoing books did in the early '90s, despite having different creative teams.  The commonality between them is editor Mike Gold, who tried to make Black Canary a sister title to the Green Arrow book he also edited.  For good or bad--and I think a lot of it was bad--Dinah was a key supporting character in Mike Grell's Green Arrow.

Picking up on the themes from the O'Neill/Adams run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Grell made Oliver Queen a socially conscious hero in a grounded world that tackled current events-style problems, like drug use, human trafficking, rape, post-traumatic stress disorder, things like that.  "Bitter Fruit" feels very much like a one of those stories told from a different perspective.  The topical issue of this story is illegal immigration, and how a privileged white woman will deal with it.  Will the story enrich the characters and entertain the reader without coming across as too heavy handed?  We'll see!

It's hard to gauge much of Wright's, uh, writing based on this small snippet.  Dinah and Ollie's dialogue rings true to their voices established by Grell.  Duburke's art is pretty simple and… I guess "roomy" is the word that comes to mind.  A lot of white space and room in the panels between characters.  Nothing wrong with it; if this were a more action-oriented story, it might fall flat, but as this seems like a much more philosophical and street-level story, it kind of fits.

The Rest

The other five stories in ACW #609 continue stories already started in previous issues.  Having not read those issues, all I can do is comment on what I find in these chapters.

Deadman's chapter was written by Mike Baron and drawn by Dan Jurgens, with Tony DeZuniga inking.  For some reason, Deadman is attending a State Dinner in the body of the C.I.A. Director while looking for Satan.  Yes, Satan.  In this chapter, Deadman and Satan bounce between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and then their spouses Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachova.  I have no idea what Satan's goal is in this story, but it's a funny bit of political caricature twenty-five years later.

The Secret Six by Martin Pasko and Dan Spiegle is hard to grasp without reading the previous chapters or prior knowledge of the characters.  My experience with the Secret Six is Gail Simone's book starring Catman and Deadshot, so the only name in this story I recognized was the enigmatic and unseen Mockingbird.  I like Pasko's writing, but this chapter isn't new-reader friendly.

Superman gets a two-page spread by Roger Stern and Curt Swan… or, rather, Clark Kent gets the spread.  Clark talks to a man who was saved by Superman and now believes that the Man of Steel is a messianic god-like being.  It's a really great idea that I'm surprised I haven't seen in a Superman story before.

Wild Dog is a character I barely remember seeing when I first started reading comics.  I knew nothing about him, and had completely forgotten about him until I picked up this issue, which includes the last chapter of his story (for a while).  The thing is, though, I really dug this finale to a story I hadn't been reading.  The look of Wild Dog is perfectly of the time, reminiscent of Casey Jones from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so many other "anti-heroes" of the era.  Writer Max Collins and artist Terry Beatty, who created the character together, drew me in enough with these eight pages that I look forward to reading Wild Dog's other appearances.

The last story in the issue is a Green Lantern chapter, written by Peter David and drawn by Tod Smith. I figure someone is always complaining that there isn't enough Oprah Winfrey in comics, and Peter David said, We'll see about that!  So, yeah, the Hal Jordan Green Lantern is on Oprah's show trying to justify being sans fear without coming across as a lunatic with zero sense of self-preservation.  It's an interesting question, one that seems to disturb Hal.  The chapter ends with him taking off his ring to fight a madman with a sword, to test, it seems, whether his bravery is the result of the ring's defensive powers or something inside him.

Next week, I'll look at Action Comics Weekly #610, which includes a new tale starring The Phantom Stranger, and, of course, the next part of Black Canary's story!