Black Canary Sketch by Joe Quinones

Following my review of Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell, drawn by Joe Quinones, is a nice little sketch he drew for a woman named Alyssa on Free Comic Book Day.  I don't remember if Quinones posted this pic to Tumblr or Instagram or what, but I found it on Twitter about a week ago and thought it would be a good capper to Bloodspell.

Black Canary & Zatanna: Bloodspell Part 3

Click here to review Part 1.  Click here to review Part 2.

Earlier in Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell, Black Canary foiled a Vegas casino heist by a thief named Tina Spettro, but not before Tina tricked Black Canary into a bloodspell that binds her fate to the now-dead Tina's ghost.  Needing a magician's touch to get her out of this magic predicament, Dinah recruited her old friend and Justice League teammate, Zatanna Zatara.

Five years ago on the planet Apokolips, the sadistic Granny Goodness and her Female Furies had captured Zatanna, Black Canary, Wonder Woman, and Plastic Man.  The heroes were bound in Granny's gladiatorial arena and subjected to one of her elaborate deathtraps that Mr. Miracle cut his teeth escaping from.

Granny mocks Zatanna's notoriety as the Mistress of Magic's mouth is covered (by part of Plas, no less) preventing her from uttering any of her spells.  But at the last second before the trap is sprung, the captive heroes swap places with Granny and her Furies.

This little three-page vignette has no story connection to the rest of the tale.  Writer Paul Dini just drops it in as a means of showing Zatanna's resourcefulness and quick-thinking.  And it gives artist Joe Quinones a chance to draw our lovely heroines in older costumes, as well as a few more heroes and villains from DC's vault.

Back to the main story, Black Canary and Zatanna are riding to Las Vegas in Zatanna's enchanted trailer, which is being towed by an enchanted car that drives on its own.  Inside the trailer, Dinah takes a nice, refreshing bubble bath while trying not to arouse the displeasure of Zatanna's pet tiger, Sasha.

Zatanna's plan calls for them to travel to Vegas undercover so as to not warn Tina Spettro's ghost that Z is helping Dinah save the other victims of the bloodspell.  But the "undercover" part of Zatanna's scheme involves Black Canary posing as her magician's assistant.  And that involves Dinah wearing an outfit even skimpier and more revealing than most female superheroes wear.  Zatanna casts a magic costume-and-make-over spell and...

The ladies arrive at Xanadu in Las Vegas and meet with the hotel's owner, Dale Hollister, the same man that Tina Spettro planned to rob before she died.

Zatanna fills Hollister in on the situation with Tina's ghost, and in gratitude for Black Canary's earlier service, he offers to book Zatanna and "her assistant" in one of his showrooms to help them set the trap for Tina Spettro.

But as Hollister and Zatanna shake on the agreement, her tiger freaks out and lunges at both of them, slashing at them with his massive paws and drawing blood from each of their forearms.  Z reprimands the animal, which immediately seems confused and unaware of is prior attack.  Zatanna casts a healing spell on herself and Hollister.

That night, Zatanna performs her magic act for a packed house of spectators.  Her tricks include making Sasha the tiger vanish and reappear in a shrunken state.  Dinah watches the show from the wings; while backstage, she's passed a note from Dottie, the second-to-last surviving member of Tina's gang, asking for a meeting at her place that night.

If Dinah and Z were expecting a desperate woman when they meet Dottie, they're a little shocked to find a woman who has, for all intents and purposes, given up.  Dottie explains how crummy her life has been in the past year and, well, she doesn't exactly welcome death from a vengeful ghost, but she doesn't feel her life is all that worth living.  Dottie even goes so far as to ask Zatanna to change her into something else like an animal so she could just move on with a completely different life.

Zatanna refuses to cast that type of magic spell and explains that that sort of transformation spell is nearly irreversible because within hours the human brain begins to cede its faculties to animal instinct.  After a few days, Z explains, what remains of the human mind and soul would be totally supplanted by the animal and Dottie would be, essentially, dead and gone.

Instead, Zatanna plans to cast a protection spell around Dottie, but as she speaks the words, she inexplicably casts a different spell that transforms Dottie into glass.  Dinah reacts to Zatanna's sudden betrayal, an in the moment succumbs to her anger and becomes possessed by Tina's ghost.  Tina/Dinah then tries to shatter the glass Dottie, but Zatanna recovers and casts a protection spell that kicks Tina's ghost out of Dinah.

Tina's ghost curses at the ladies and announces her intention to kill Joy, the last name on her hit list before destroying Black Canary completely.

I guess putting the glass Dottie in Superman's impenetrable Fortress of Solitude is as good a place for safe keeping as any.  I didn't know it was ghost-proof but sure, whatever.

Zatanna reasons that Tina can now possess both her and Black Canary, but only one at a time, which means they still have a chance of stopping her.  They rush back to the Xanadu showroom, where Dale Hollister has been possessed by Tina's ghost.  She's using Hollister to murder joy with one of Zatanna's stage traps because since Joy switched out for Black Canary during the heist last year, she never actually took part in the bloodspell.

At that moment, however, Black Canary and Zatanna arrive to save the damsel in distress.  Tina was thrilled to possess the body of her billionaire ex-boyfriend, but she gets a much better rush when she takes over Zatanna again.

Tina/Zatanna turns on the machine set to kill Joy, then casts a spell turning Dale Hollister into a toad. Before she can squash him under heel, though, Black Canary jumps her, gagging her so she can't say any spells.  Tina/Zatanna fights her off, but then Dinah releases Sasha the tiger on her mistress.

When the tiger leaps at Tina/Zatanna, the ghost bolts from the magician and takes over Black Canary.  Tina then jumps back and forth between the women, using each one to attack the other, but not being able to say in one form for too long because the tiger can sense which woman is possessed and attacks that woman.

Tina/Canary uses her sonic scream to blow Zatanna off the stage and into the orchestral pit below.  When she follows her down, she finds Zatanna curled up, nearly catatonic.  Tina's ghost then leaps into the prone form of Zatanna... only to discover too late that she's been duped; that wasn't Zatanna's body.

The real Zatanna pops up and casts a containment spell trapping Tina's spirit in the body that was magically charmed to look like Zatanna, but was, in fact, a dove from her performance.  Tina Spettro's spirit is now trapped in the body of a bird.  Before the ladies can rest on their laurels, though, they realize that Joy is still in danger of being butchered by a giant drill.

Zatanna casts another spell reverting Dale Hollister back to his human form.  Luckily, he wasn't trapped in the form of an animal long enough to lose his mind and soul--unlike Tina Spettro.  As the sun comes up over the Nevada desert, Tina is totally supplanted by the bird.  Her spirit, at last, is dead.  They release her to the wind, nothing but a dove now.

Before the ladies can head to a margarita bar, Black Canary gets a call from Green Arrow telling her that Metropolis is under attack from alien robots.  The Justice League needs their help, and the ladies head out to the next adventure.

That's where the story ends, but there's nearly 40 pages of added content in both the hardcover and digital version of the graphic novel.  This includes character sketches and sample pages in various stages of the art process by Joe Quinones, and a copy of Paul Dini's full 94-page script for the book.  It's awesome material that I recommend fans check out.

So.  What did I think of Black Canary's first original graphic novel?

I loved it.  As I said earlier in my review, Paul Dini knows the characters so well that everything they do feels in-character.  Like their characters in the DCAU, these are iconic and timeless versions of Black Canary and Zatanna.  That's what a Dini story feels like, whether it's a cartoon or a book painted by Alex Ross, the characters feel timeless, infused with all the greatest attributes of the Silver and Bronze Age.  But his script moves with a modern, easily readable pace and tone.

My only complaint with Dini's story, though, is that the villain isn't all that memorable.  When I heard about this graphic novel about a year ago, I was hoping it would contribute a real heavy-hitter to Black Canary's paltry rogues gallery.  Tina Spettro is decent, but she'll never be used again after this story.  Her costume was simple, a drab grey jumpsuit--not exactly a visual feast, and for most of the story, she exists solely as a spirit inhabiting other characters.  She'll forevermore be counted as one of Black Canary's enemies, but she won't add a whole lot to that list.

As for the art, Quinones mostly knocks it out of the park ("mostly").  He caught my eye back in Wednesday's Comics a couple years ago, and I was really excited to see what he would bring to this story.  Given Dini's storytelling sensibilities, it seemed obvious that Quinones would bring a lighter, almost animated style like Bruce Timm or Darwyn Cooke to the art.  It fits the story, and Quinones brings an incredible amount of expressiveness to each of the characters.  There's never a question of what the women and men are thinking and feeling in every single panel.

And yet... part of me wanted something a little more from the art.  Black Canary and Zatanna are beautiful women known for wearing fishnets.  They are sexual and sexualized characters, and I kind of expected more cheesecake from the story.  I'm not saying I would have preferred Ed Benes on this book, but I thought there would be more "Good Girl Art"-style imagery.  The only time Dinah's sexuality is really played up in this story is when Zatanna makes her over to look like a buxom assistant that deliberately doesn't look like Black Canary.

Instead of sexiness, Quinones emphasizes the toughness of Black Canary.  Nothing wrong with that; it makes her a more credible hero and probably a more compelling and likable protagonist.  But sometimes, just a few times, she looks a little too square-jawed and so spunky that she's not really all that attractive.  It's not often, but it is noticeable in a handful of panels.  Black Canary should be powerful and beautiful, but Quinones--unlike most people in comics over the years--sacrifices the latter for the former a couple times in this book.

One other interesting note I found while reading the book.  A lot of Justice League members pop up in small roles throughout the story.  Superman.  Wonder Woman.  Green Arrow.  Green Lantern.  Martian Manhunter.  Elongated Man.  Plastic Man.

Know who isn't on that list?  Batman.  Other than a toy in the background of one panel, Batman does not appear in this story, and that's pretty surprising given Paul Dini's history with the character.

I have given up on DC's mainstream comics from the New 52, and the Injustice: Gods Among Us tie-in comic became equally depressing, despite how well Black Canary was treated in the book.  The fact is, DC isn't offering a lot that appeals to me right now, but the books that do interest me are out-of-continuity stories like the digital first Batman '66, Adventures of Superman, the upcoming Sensation Comics starring Wonder Woman, and this original graphic novel.  DC needs to publish more books like Bloodspell.

Black Canary & Zatanna: Bloodspell Part 2

Click here to review Part 1.

The Black Canary and Zatanna original graphic novel, Bloodspell, opened with a prologue showing the ladies' first meeting as precocious and strong-willed young women.  We then jumped forward a few years to a second prologue showing Black Canary disrupting a casino heist by a thief named Tina Spettro.  Prior to the heist, Tina forced Dinah and the other women in her gang to pledge a loyalty oath that included drawing blood from their fingers and reciting an ominous-sounding Latin spell.  Black Canary chased Tina across Las Vegas; the pursuit ended with the thief dying in a fiery head-on collision.

Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell is written by Paul Dini, who earned a lifetime supply of geek-adoration from his days on Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited.  Art for the book is provided by Joe Quinones, who did a masterful job on the Green Lantern feature of Wednesday's Comics.

The story picks up in present day with Dinah and Oliver Queen in bed after making loud, passionate love.  Whatever kind of move Ollie uses results in a climactic (heh-heh) "canary cry" of ecstasy that shatters a flower vase in another room.

Dinah and Ollie's relationship has always been highly sexualized, but I don't recall ever getting a masturbation joke as overt as this one.  Dini may have cut his teeth writing cartoons, and Quinones' art feels like a cousin of Bruce Timm's DCAU house style, but the tone of this book doesn't feel like it's for young kids.

Anyway, Dinah recognizes the name of a suicide victim.  Meghan Taylor was one of the girls in Tina Spettro's gang who called Black Canary for help.  Immediately after the story breaks on TV, Dinah gets a phone call from Betty Jo, yet another one of Spettro's accomplices.  Dinah gets dressed while Betty Jo explains that Meghan left a suicide note apologizing for her betrayal in Las Vegas a year ago.  Then, abruptly, Betty Jo's tone of voice changes and she tells Dinah she intends to throw herself off the harbor ferry.

Black Canary jumps on her motorcycle and roars down the highway.  She ramps the bike up and over the side of the bridge, coming down on the ferry and skidding to a halt against the fender of a parked car.

Black Canary finds Betty Jo leaning out over the railing.  She warns the girl what will happen if she goes over the side, a prospect that seems to excite Betty Jo for a moment.  Then, all of a sudden, Betty Jo seems to snap out of it and wonder where she even is.  She's so distracted that she loses her grip on the railing and falls, and Black Canary watches the girl get dragged beneath the boat.

Dinah noticed the change in Betty Jo's character on the phone and in the moment before she died.  And she's afraid that the late Tina Spettro is responsible somehow.

Later that night, Black Canary picks up Ollie, who has now donned his Green Arrow costume and rides on the back of her motorcycle.  She makes fun of him for getting rid of his old Arrowmobile because Batman gave him a hard time about it.

They ride out to a mobile home community to find Lauren, another member of the Spettro gang.  Lauren isn't answering her phone or knocks at the door.  Green Arrow notices a power strip leading from the house to the swimming pool, and when they investigate, they find the pool filled with electrical appliances... and Lauren's lifeless body.

One other thing Ollie notices: a bizarre tattoo on Lauren's arm.  Black Canary doesn't recognize the tattoo, but she knows someone who might.

We catch up with Zatanna in the present day summoning... monkeys?  Yep, monkeys.  For kids!

Dinah recalls Zatanna's first day aboard the Justice League Satellite ten years ago and how green Zatanna acted at the time.  From describing the League's teleportation effect as "tingly" to making a nerd-fool of herself in front of Martian Manhunter, the auspices of Zatanna's debut with the Justice League aren't terribly impressive.

And that's when bells and sirens go off.  The dastardly villain known as The Key is lose in the satellite and looking to spring other super villains from the satellite's prison.  Black Canary and Zatanna are the prison's last line of defense, something Z doesn't feel quite ready to handle.

When Elongated Man gets knocked out, the Key confronts the ladies, mocking Zatanna's attire and their attempts to stop him.

Having magically stolen The Key's keys, Zatanna doffs her cap and takes a bow.  At which point, all of the keys fall out of her top hat and clatter on the floor.  But while The Key scrambles to pick them up, Green Lantern catches up and knocks him out with a power-ring punch.

I haven't talked a whole lot about Quinones' art and I will definitely delve into it in greater detail tomorrow, but I do want to touch upon one of the things I really enjoy about his work.  Bloodspell takes place over five different eras, and Quinones delineates each time period expertly by changing up the ladies' costumes and hairstyles.

Zatanna's hair gets longer as she ages while Black Canary's hair seems longest during this satellite era.  It seems just shoulder-length during the main, contemporary part of the tale.  I think she looks a little like Elizabeth Shue in some of these scenes; not sure why.

Anyway... Dinah comes out of her reminiscence as Zatanna concludes her performance for the kids.  She can tell that something is bothering Dinah, so they do what women do to feel better.  They go shopping.

Paul Dini treats us to a rather obviously expected joke as the ladies restock on fishnet stockings, but Joe Quinones really sells it with the storefront design that feels like a Victoria's Secret sister store called Seams & Dreams.  It gives an extra umph to the fishnet gag that works wonders... but then the women are harassed by some mallrats who holler at them.

This is the obvious fishnet scene and it's pretty uncreative, even as Zatanna magically--and temporarily--transforms the men into goldfish for the pool.  I wasn't as enthusiastic about this scene, nor why Zatanna bothered with the guys at all instead of ignoring them.  But Dini and Quinones follow it up with another scene of fan-service as Dinah and Z visit a toy store with a window display of Justice League merchandize.

Yeah, that's toys for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the satellite, Doctor Fate, Plastic Man, Green Arrow, Black Canary, and... Miss Martian?  Okay.  But the real treat are the vehicles and playsets that Quinones adds to the display.  Along with the classic Batmobile are straight-up cameos by the Super Powers line such as the Supermobile, the Lex-Soar 7, Hall of Justice and Tower of Darkness.  Awesome!

After teasing each other about their merchandizing choices, Dinah and Z head to a T.G.I. Friday's-style restaurant where the wait staff are covered in flair.  Dinah shows off some of the worthless trinkets and charms that Lauren had when she died, and a photo of the tattoo on her arm.

While Black Canary looks amused by the result of Zatanna's time freeze spell, the Mistress of Magic is dead serious.  She tells Dinah that she didn't pledge a loyalty oath; Tina Spettro tricked her and the other girls into a bloodspell.  The fact that Dinah was undercover using a different name may give her some leeway in the spell's hold, but Zatanna doesn't know enough about the basic mechanics of this type of magic.

She calls on her greatest resource, summoning the ghost of her father, Giovanni Zatara, for guidance.

Zatara tells Dinah that the more lives Tina's spirit claims, the more powerful she'll grow until she's capable of possessing Black Canary.

Zatara and Zatanna agree that to break the bloodspell, Tina Spettro's spirit needs to be contained or destroyed and that means capturing her, which means catching her in the act of possessing or trying to kill another one of the girls in her gang.

After Zatara bids them luck and vanishes, Dinah and Zatanna agree to head out to Las Vegas to put an end to Tina's bloody trail of vengeance.

Continued in Part 3.

Black Canary & Zatanna: Bloodspell Part 1

Know what sucks?  Knee surgery.  Know what else?  Back spasms.

The best remedy (other than Percocet and muscle relaxers) is good comics, and last month I got a very good comic.

If you search for Black Canary on Amazon or InStockTrades, you used to only find the Archive collection of her Golden Age stories from Flash Comics and a handful of trades collecting some less than awesome Green Arrow books from the time when she co-headlined the title.  Her original miniseries and the year-long ongoing that followed it in the 1990s have yet to be collected.  The Tony Bedard-written mini from 2007 that led to her eventual marriage to Oliver Queen was collected, but Green Arrow's name got top billing on the trade (and honestly, I can't fault that since that miniseries was as much about him as it was her).  Black Canary wouldn't take up much space at the local comic store's trades and hardcovers shelves.  But now, at least, she gets an original graphic novel to pad the shelf.  True, she shares the title yet again, but this time she gets top billing.

That book?  That balm for a post-operative leg and a bad back?

Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell written by Paul Dini with art by Joe Quinones.

The book impressed me before I even got to the story.  DC didn't go cheap on this book.  The fact that they published it as a hardcover is one thing, but beneath the dust jacket, the front cover is embossed with a raised fishnet pattern around the title.

Rounding out Quinones' art are Dave McCaig and Sal Cipriano on colors and letters respectively.  The title page credits Zatanna's creators, Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson, but not Black Canary's.  I'm not sure why, exactly, as she originally debuted in a Hawkman comic in 1964 so there oughtn't be any copyright or publication dispute.

Anyway, onto the story...

We open up fifteen years ago in the Himalayas with a young, short-haired Zatanna Zatara comparing her coming of age ritual to that of so-called normal kids.  Zatanna is ferried up Mount Everest in a carriage borne by figures in orange cloaks.  These are members of the Homo Magi, the innate magic-users of the DC Universe, and they count Zatanna's parents among them.

Zatanna utters the backwards spell, "Esir," and begins to rise up toward the summit of the mountain while musing about how different her childhood would be if she were, say, at a ballet recital.  Zatara and his wife bask in what I assume is pride--that's something parents feel, right?  Meanwhile, despite some hiccups, Young Zatanna levitates all the way up to the summit of Mount Everest.

If the magic and the heights hadn't unnerved her enough, she discovers she's not the first teenage girl to reach the mountain top that day.

Zatanna asks how this other girl got up there, to which Dinah replies simply that she climbed.  Dinah then mocks Zatanna's explanation of her magic.  When Zatanna defends the legitimate mental and physical exertion her spells require, Dinah hits her in the head with a snowball.

In retaliation, Z casts a spell that flips Dinah upside down and drops her on her butt.  And then they're friends, 'cuz that's how teenage girls do.

Dinah rolls over the subject of her parents and starts climbing back down the mountain, offering Zatanna use of her camp and teasingly warning her about yetis and snow leopards.

Alone, Zatanna begins to use her magic to descend back toward her parents.  But her brief encounter with the precocious Dinah has changed her.  Or perhaps challenged her is the more appropriate term.  Zatanna shucks her magic spells and decides to climb down the mountain using Dinah's ropes and rigging.  Doing it the hard way.

This prologue is as much as we get of Black Canary's backstory before the main story kicks off.  Paul Dini establishes that Dinah has been feisty and combative from the get-go.  There's obviously baggage between Dinah and her parents, but no mention of a previous Blonde Bombshell, so it's unclear whether this Dinah is the classic Dinah Drake or her daughter, Dinah Laurel Lance.  I'm inclined to believe the latter, but Dini never introduces the legacy hero concept, and I think that's a good idea.  This graphic novel could be some young (or old) reader's first exposure to Black Canary; why overwhelm him or her with the senseless and complex backstory that is Dinah's history?  All we need to know is that she's scrappy and she's willful.

Jump forward in time to last year in Las Vegas:

A thief named Tina Spettro leads a gang of five other women into the sewers beneath a new casino called Xanadu.  Before the job she pricks all of their fingers and makes them recite a loyalty oath in blood.  One of the girls in her gang isn't wild about this part of the plan, but goes along with it at Tina's insistence/threat.

While Xanadu's owner, a rich gangster named Dale Hollister addresses the crowd during the casino's grand opening, Tina Spettro moves herself into position...

Which includes tipping off casino security about the five ladies about to blow their way into the casino's vault from the sewer.  Tina doesn't care about the women in her gang; they were always sacrificial misdirection for the guards while she planned to steal some valuable Asian treasures on the main floor.  Tina's narration reveals her past connection to Hollister; this heist is less about the profit and more about hurting her ex-lover.

What Tina didn't count on, though, was being "triple-crossed" by a member of her own gang.  "Joy" shows up in the treasure room and removes a ginger-haired wig, revealing she was Black Canary in disguise (Note: Dinah, in this tale, is a natural blonde).  The real Joy, and the other members of the gang, predicted Tina's ambush and called in some help.

Tina recognizes Black Canary from the Justice League, but figures she's no Wonder Woman and takes her chance fighting her way out.

It's almost impossible to look at this page of fight choreography and not think Quinones was paying homage to this page from Adventure Comics #418 by Alex Toth.

Tina throws a knife that Black Canary dodges.  Knowing she can't win the fight, Tina makes use of her getaway plan: a jetpack stored in the ventilation system.

Tina detonates a set of explosive on Xanadu's roof, giving her an exit to the Las Vegas night.  She flies past hotels and casinos, trying to shake Black Canary off her back.  Canary, meanwhile, is trying to get them to the ground without so much velocity that it kills them both.

There's a fun little Easter Egg in this scene as Tina's jetpack carries them past Prosciutto's Casino, and there's a big neon clown lit up outside.  In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Be A Clown" the Joker tells a hostage that he learned a trick from his mentor, the Great Prosciutto ("Now there was a ham! Hah!").

As Black Canary struggles to gain control of the jetpack, Tina Spettro makes it more and more obvious how perfectly fine she is with the prospect of dying.

At last Tina knocks Black Canary off her back.  As Dinah plummets to the street, Tina swears that she'll have revenge on Canary and the other treacherous women from her gang.  She recites the loyalty oath in Latin... and then crashes into the wall of a hotel, dying in a fiery explosion.

Black Canary, on the other hand, drops into the hotel's swimming pool and manages to survive the fall.  A little banged up but otherwise okay, she climbs out of the pool, towels herself off and takes somebody's margarita.  All in a day's work.

The next part of the story brings us to today, but I'll save that for tomorrow's installment.  This is a 90-something page story, so I'm breaking my review into three parts.  As such, I can't review much of the story since it's not complete at this point and it wasn't divided into chapters like a serialized story.

I will say that Paul Dini knows these character front ways and back.  He wrote Zatanna for a year in her own series, and before that he wrote both of these women marvelously in various incarnations of the DC Animated Universe.  The tone he sets is playful but too cartoonish.  There is a seriousness to the subject manner, but a loftiness, too, that feels not part of any particular era.  This isn't the modern New 52 but it's not the Bronze Age either.  This is the nostalgic era that never really existed but that comics fans look back on as the halcyon days of comics.

It's interesting that the best stories published by DC in the last year or so have been out-of-continuity tales like the digital first Batman '66, Legends of the Dark Knight, and Adventures of Superman, and now Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell.  It certainly says something about how DC is managing its universe, but the fact is they are still putting out material that would appeal to fans who can no longer distinguish between the mainstream books and their dystopian video game tie-ins.

Continued in Part 2

Black Canary Talk on Her/His Dork World

Some time ago, I appeared on the April 17th episode of "Her Dork World, His Dork World", a live radio show on the VOC Nation Radio Network.  Show hosts Dean Compton and Emily Scott invited me on to take part in a discussion of Black Canary, her place as a superhero icon in comics, and her role in the gender dynamics of popular fiction.

Although the interview was conducted and broadcast live to Thursdays ago, you can listen to an archived recording of the whole show at PodOmatic right here, or download the podcast on iTunes by searching VOC Nation and the April 19th update of "Her Dork World, His Dork World."

The interview and thus my part of the episode begins at roughly the 15-minute mark, but I encourage everyone to listen to the whole episode because Dean and Emily have a nice discussion about female-driven stories and movies in the first segment, and they namedrop Paul Dini, the writer of the upcoming graphic novel Black Canary/Zatanna: Bloodspell.

I had a great time appearing on the show and talking Black Canary with two passionate and involved fans.  Dean and Emily were wonderful, professional, and respectful hosts and they've made me a fan of not just Black Canary, but "Her/His Dork World".  Check it out and enjoy the show!

Previews Interviews Paul Dini About BLOODSPELL

Last month, Previews World ran an interview with writer Paul Dini on his upcoming graphic novel, Black Canary & Zatanna: Bloodspell.  With the holidays and other posts occupying my time, this one kind of slipped through the cracks.  But since I'm reviewing comics for the next couple days, I wanted to push this one out and share it with anyone who missed the story.

My favorite part of the Q&A is when Dini describes the versions of Black Canary and Zatanna as outside the current New 52 continuity.

PREVIEWSworld: Your book features Black Canary and Zatana in their more traditional costumes. Is this because the book was conceived and started production too far in advance of the New 52 overhaul?  Or were you "in" on the changes to come, and decided to plow ahead anyway with original costumes as you wanted to keep the book old school?

Paul Dini: At the time I conceived the story, the New 52 DC Universe was years away.  But the story never changed even as the Universe did.  It was always intended to be a stand-alone, a story that takes place in no particular DC continuity, but is familiar to all readers of DC comics over the years.  If bits of Black Canary and Zatanna's relationship as depicted in Bloodspell later find their way into ongoing continuity, then I'll know that readers and creators have found something interesting in their relationship, and I think that's a good thing.

You can read the full interview here at Previews.

And don't forget to buy Bloodspell on May 21st!