The Earth Is Our Mother, We Must Take Care of Her: Black Orchid

Neil Gaiman's three-issue Black Orchid miniseries has been collected more than once, I believe. The 23-issue ongoing series it spawned, however, has never been collected at all. But I was curious, and so as I do, I tracked it down to read it.

Black Orchid is one of those many Vertigo titles that reads as though the writer wants to be Neil Gaiman. Sprawling, full of mythical and mystical side creatures and side stories. But trying to be Gaiman means you can never be Gaiman, because the one thing Gaiman is, is distinctive.

Dick Foreman's best issue is his first, where a reporter tries to track down Black Orchid years after the events of the miniseries. He has a cluster of information, but he's not sure if it really all goes together. Could this prostitute and this superhero and this campaign volunteer all be the same person? The story is told from his perspective, and glimpsing Black Orchid from the outside is intriguing and often horrifying, especially in the story's climax. It's jumpy but never confusing, probably thanks in part to Jill Thompson's expressive artwork. You always know what these people are thinking.

After that, though, it feels like Foreman never quite knows what he wants to do. First Black Orchid travels south with her new human friend, to a refuge in Tennessee. On the way, she fights an alien fungal infection. Not exactly what I thought the remit of this series was but okay. Then she learns of a Greek immigrant's love affair with a dryad. More mythological than I imagined (the myth of the original mini was more vague "Earth mother" stuff) but it's all plants, so that's okay.

But then she goes back to South America and it all goes a bit wonky, what with dream quests and whatnot, the series drifting further and further away from the ecological roots of its premise. I found this stuff so incredibly uninteresting. It's also around this time that Rebecca Guay takes over as penciller. Guay gets better, but her stuff always looks stiff compared to Thompson's.

There's a brief uptick when Black Orchid marries a capitalist overlord, forcing an examination of her morality, but then it's a trip to England in what really feels like a Sandman rip-off, and the worst part of Sandman, Faerie. And then all of a sudden the series is hurtling toward a conclusion it feels like it didn't properly set up. Instead of a vision quest, couldn't we have spent time moving the pieces into position for Black Orchid's "turn"?

I like the idea of the climax, but it feels too sudden, and too obvious. In the early issues, Black Orchid was broadly sympathetic but occasionally dark, but then she all of a sudden becomes manically evil... even though it really seems like she has a point about humanity on the Earth, even moreso in 2019 than 1995.

On the whole, the trajectory of the comic feels like a weird choice. It ought to be about environmentalism and gaiaism. Instead it moves into more Sandman-style magic; there are whole issues, for example, about the little Black Orchid, Suzy, journeying through strange fantasy realms. These realms might fit into The Sandman or Lucifer or The Books of Magic, but they pull the book away from its own unique selling point. The book ought to be about the magic of flowers, of the environment, of our relationship with the Earth, but instead it's about all this other stuff, and I don't know why.