Lady Blackhawk in Guy Gardner: Warrior

In the 2000s, the original Lady Blackhawk, Zinda Blake, was a recurring character in Birds of Prey,* which I've already read. What I hadn't read, though, was the storyline where she was transported through time from her native era to the present day, and so I wanted to read that as part of my project to read Blackhawk comics. 

Thus, I read every issue of Guy Gardner: Warrior in which she appeared, checking the Grand Comics Database and League of Comic Geeks to determine which issues those were. (You can see the full list of them at the bottom of this post.) During this time, the Green Lantern Corps was all dead or something (I know I read about this when I read Emerald Fallout as part of Darkstars, but I don't remember the details), and Guy had discovered that he was actually half-alien, getting powers from his Vuldarian DNA rather than a power ring. (Did he still have these powers when the GLC reformed during Geoff Johns's run? Were they retconned away? Or just forgotten?)

from Guy Gardner: Warrior #24

I didn't except her to play a big role... but I did expect her to play more of a role than this! Zinda first appears in issue #24, the Zero Hour tie-in; in this one, Guy keeps jumping through time in pursuit of Extant, along with Supergirl, Batgirl, and Steel. In one time period, they encounter Lady Blackhawk; she comes along on their next couple hops through time, and that's it.

She doesn't appear again for five issues, until #29. In this one, Guy is opening Warriors, his superhero-themed bar (or bar for just superheroes? it wasn't very clear to me), and Zinda pops up. She says that after the events of issue #24, she found herself standing outside the bar and just came in. And that's it, that's all the explanation there is! She and Wildcat (who also seems to work at Warriors; in terms of his chronology, this would be after his Showcase '94 story, before Batman/Wildcat) recognize each other, but there was no previous story where the two interacted as far as I know, because during the time Lady Blackhawk was a main character in Blackhawk (c. 1959-68, see items #4-6 in the list below), Wildcat and the rest of the JSA were in comics limbo (or on Earth-Two).

from Guy Gardner: Warrior #43

From then on, Zinda is essentially just in crowd scenes of the employees at Warriors. She doesn't really do anything characterful or interesting; the bolshy, swaggering woman of Gail Simone's Birds of Prey does not yet exist. On two separate occasions, she flies other characters somewhere in a helicopter, and that's it; on the left you can see basically the only significant line of dialogue she gets between issues #36 and 43.

Continuity-wise, her appearance is a bit of a throwback, because there was no Zinda Blake in the post-Crisis Blackhawks... though I guess as the Rick Burchett Blackhawk ongoing only made it up to 1950 (aside from the 1963-68 span briefly covered in Blackhawk Special #1, see item #11), we could imagine that Zinda did participate in the post-Crisis Blackhawks from 1956 to 1968 as what would have been the second Lady Blackhawk, following Natalie Reed. Or maybe Zero Hour changed the history of the Blackhawks back to something more closely resembling its pre-Crisis version. I guess I will see what various Blackhawk stories do going forward. (I do know that Blackhawk's post-Crisis name of "Janos Prohaska" sticks.)

You might wonder if removing Lady Blackhawk from time would have repercussions for those older stories, but I believe Zinda's last appearance was in issue #243, from November 1968 (see item #6), so as long as Zinda was plucked out of time between 1968 and the present day, there wouldn't be any issues.

So, overall, Guy Gardner: Warrior was not worth reading for Lady Blackhawk; I didn't experience anything I hadn't experienced by reading summaries on Cosmic Teams. But sometimes I read tangential comics as part of my reading projects and end up enjoying them on their own merits. Was that the case with Guy Gardner: Warrior?

Lots of things in this comic make no sense, but foremost among them is how many women want to sleep with Guy.
from Guy Gardner: Warrior #38

Not at all. In fact, this is probably one of the worst superhero comics I've ever read. Beau Smith continually introduces new ideas without having followed up on previous ones (there's an issue that ends with Guy's mother moving in as the cliffhanger; she literally never appears in the series again). The villains and the art are the 1990s "extreme" Image aesthetic at its worst, even in the hands of artists that would go good work elsewhere, like Phil Jimenez and Howard Porter. Most issues are boring at best, actively stupid at worst. I'm all for a good gender-swap story, but the one here is awful. Lots of gender violence throughout the series, including the gratuitous fridging of Arisia in the penultimate issue (I guess this must have been undone later, though).

The only benefit to reading this comic is that it gave me an excuse to read a bunch of entries in Guy Gardner Colon Warrior, one of the Internet's greatest blogs, which unfortunately reached its natural end point when they ran out of issues to take the piss out of. Amazing stuff. 

Zinda "Lady Blackhawk" Blake appeared in issues #24, 29, 36, and 38-43 of Guy Gardner: Warrior (Sept. 1994–June 1996) and issue #1 of Guy Gardner: Warrior Annual (1995). The stories were written by Beau Smith (#24, 29, 36, 38-43; Annual #1) with Flint Henry (Annual #1); pencilled by Mitch Byrd (#24), Phil Jimenez (#24, 29), Howard Porter (#24), Mike Parobeck (#24, 41), Flint Henry (Annual #1), Marc Campos (#36, 38-39, 41-42), Tom Grindberg (#38), Aaron Lopresti (#40), and Brad Gorby (#43); laid out by Jackson Guice (#24); inked/finished by John Stokes (#29), Dan Davis (#24, 29, 36, 38-43), Flint Henry (Annual #1), Rod Ramos (Annual #1), Bob Dvorak (Annual #1), Phil Jimenez (Annual #1), and Nick Napolitano (#39); colored by Stuart Chaifetz (#24), Gene D'Angelo (#29), Scott Baumann (Annual #1), and Lee Loughridge (#36, 38-43); lettered by Albert De Guzman; and edited by Eddie Berganza.

This is the twelfth in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers JLA: Year One. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
8. Blackhawk (1982) 
9. Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 / DC Comics Presents #69 (1982-84) 
• Pre-Crisis Continuity 
10. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron (1987-89)
11. Blackhawk vol. 3 (1989-92) 

* She first joined the team in Between Dark & Dawn (2004), and was featured in several subsequent volumes including Blood and Circuits (2006-07), Club Kids (2007-08), Metropolis or Dust (2008), End Run (2010-11), and The Death of Oracle (2011).

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XI: JLA: Strength in Numbers

Since Neil Gaiman took over The Sandman, the character has been pretty well confined to the Vertigo portion of the DC universe. But from time to time, he manages to break out and interact with the rest of the DCU. The JLA and JSA stories here have aspects other than the Sandman ones, but I'm going to ignore all of them, since someday I'll reread these tales in their proper contexts:

Comic trade paperback, 223 pages
Published 1998 (contents: 1998)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2011

JLA: Strength in Numbers

Writers: Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Christopher Priest
Pencillers: Howard Porter, Arnie Jorgensen, Yanick Paquette
Inkers: John Dell, David Meikis, Mark Pennington, Walden Wong, Doug Hazlewood, Mark Lipka
Colorists: Pat Garrahy, James Sinclair
Letterers: Ken Lopez, Janice Chiang, Kurt Hathaway

Grant Morrison's "Return of the Conqueror" marks one of the first-- if not the first-- appearances of the new Dream, the former Daniel Hall, outside Gaiman's own Sandman series. Dream makes contact with the Justice League when the Star Conqueror hijacks the Dreaming, putting almost the Earth's entire population to sleep in preparation for an attack. Dream actually isn't very fussed by the whole thing; at the end of the story, we learn that he's primarily acting to return a favor, since early in The Sandman, the Justice League helped his predessor locate one of his artifacts of power.

Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Green Lantern travel into the Dreaming to stop the Star Conqueror, where only one dreamer remembers the superheroes that exist in the "real" world. The Dreaming lets Morrison explore themes he would later return to in All-Star Superman, volume 2: the notion that in a world where Superman didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. And just like in All-Star, the world without Superman is the false one, the world with him is real, but I think this notion worked better in All-Star. The Dreaming is a seemingly more appropriate venue for this premise than a simulation in Superman's Fortress of Solitude, for what are superheroes but dreams given human form? But the nature of "Return of the Conqueror" means that the superhero-less world is destroyed when Superman and company save the day (a little too easily given the scale of the threat), whereas our own world continues to persist. We can imagine that we reside in the Superman-less world of All-Star, that one level up in reality, Superman is real, whereas "Return of the Conqueror" precludes us from imagining that we could wake up some day and be in the world where Superman exists.

There are some nice moments, though: I loved the conversation between the Green Lantern and Dream, and the true nature of Michael Haney was good, too. On the other hand, Morrison's Dreaming is much more muted and prosaic than Gaiman's, but I suppose that's the nature of the corner of the Dreaming we're in. "Return of the Conqueror" feels conceptually flawed in the end: while superheroes seemed to fit into Gaiman's world just fine, Gaiman's character is too big to fit into the world of the superheroes without losing what makes it special.