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.

Black Orchid: Origin Issues

Over seven years ago now, I read Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid miniseries, which reinvented the character of the Black Orchid for 1980s. As often happens when I read updates of DC characters, it made me want to read the original version, and I eventually acquired all the major pre-Crisis appearances of the Black Orchid, mostly in Adventure Comics and The Phantom Stranger. (Adventure Comics vol. 1 #428 might be the most expensive single issue I have ever purchased.)

As originally conceived by writer Sheldon Mayer and artist Tony de Zuñiga, the Black Orchid has an interesting, unusual conceit. Her first three stories in Adventure Comics follow similar formats: someone is plotting something dastardly, but he gets warned off by the mysterious superhero Black Orchid who has the powers of flight, superstrength, and invulnerability. He realizes Black Orchid must a woman privy to his plans, and acts on his suspicions, but it turns out she was a woman he overlooked because she disguised herself as someone close to him. Rinse, repeat. The reader never learns Black Orchid's civilian identity; the viewpoint character is always the criminal.

Pair this with the lush artwork of de Zuñiga, and you have something special. (I always liked his work on DC's horror comics from around this same time period.) My favorite of the original three stories was the last one, "The Anger of the Black Orchid" in Adventure #430, where she takes on a skeevy nightclub owner running an extortion racket-- dark city streets, beautiful women, and unscrupulous men make the perfect venue for the Black Orchid's retribution. Like a lot of DC features of the time, it's pretty clear that these stories do not take place in the "DC universe"; people are amazed at the Black Orchid's powers, saying it's like something out of comic books. This definitely isn't a world where the Justice League is buzzing around!

After her brief run of fourteen-page lead features in Adventure (July/Aug.-Nov./Dec. 1973), the Black Orchid was transferred to Phantom Stranger vol. 2, where her eight-page back-up feature appeared eight times across issues #31 to #41 (June/July 1974–Feb./Mar. 1976). Some are written by Mayer, but the rest are by Michael Fleisher (with Russell Carley on "script continuity"); de Zuñiga draws the first one, with Nestor Redondo and Fred Carrillo doing the rest. These stories, even the ones Mayer or de Zuñiga worked on, show a lack of understanding of the Black Orchid character. Suddenly she's a well-known public figure that criminals impersonate convincingly in two different stories; suddenly she has the power to hack computers with X-rays and to assemble androids to help in her counter-crime plots.

The very first one, "Island of Fear!", was decent, though it suffered for its shorter length, but all the ones after that I found disappointing or misjudged. The Black Orchid ends up folded into the DC universe as well. No DC characters appear, but they are acknowledged; in #41, for example, Black Orchid jokes about showing off her super-strength because it will attract the Justice League's attention.

That was it for the character as a regular feature until Neil Gaiman; Phantom Stranger was cancelled with #41. I enjoyed the run in the way I enjoy a lot of the more standalone DC stuff from the 1970s; I don't think reading a ton of it one go would hold up, and I'm not sure a series about a character we're always on the outside of would be sustainable in the long run. But reading it in small amounts is an enjoyable dose of something different from the normal superheroics, especially at the hand of master illustrators like de Zuñiga and Redondo.

The character did have two significant pre-Crisis guest appearances, which I also tracked down, in The Super Friends #31 (Apr. 1980) and Blue Devil Annual #1 (1985). There wasn't much continuity within the original set of Black Orchid stories, so I was pretty surprised when her appearance in Super Friends turned out to be a direct sequel to her final storyline in Phantom Stranger #38-41; the same villain comes back for another crack at Black Orchid, but inadvertently attracts the attention of the entire Justice League. It seems strange for a cartoon tie-in series aimed at kids to draw so directly on a story that appeared four years prior, but it is by continuity nut E. Nelson Bridwell, so there you go. It floats but discards the idea that the Black Orchid is a Kryptonian, and I thought her flying into space with Superman was going a bit too far with what the original run had implied about her superpowers.

On the other hand, I did enjoy the Blue Devil Annual story a lot; I really should read that series someday (I have previously only read its crossover with The Omega Men). Her role is small, but fun, in a story of several DC mystic characters teaming up to fight Felix Faust. Both Madame Xanadu and the Phantom Stranger promise they have given the real origin of the Black Orchid, one ripping off Daredevil ("struck across the face with a tumbling bouquet of orchids [...] [that] had been saturated with fallout from a bomb test") and the other Spider-Man ("a bouquet of orchids was accidentally irradiated! [...] Paula stumbled-- and accidentally pricked her fingers on the thorns of those selfsame stems!"*). It pokes fun at every character concerned, which I gather was the modus operandi of Blue Devil in general.

Gaiman and McKean, of course, used their series to kill off the Black Orchid, give her an origin, and resurrect her in a new body; she was said to be a plant-human hybrid, and after their story, there was an ongoing series about the more obviously plant-like new incarnation's adventures. I liked Gaiman and McKean's story on its own merits, but I'm wondering if I would have found it as satisfying if I had read the original adventures of the character first. Her charm is her femme fataleesque mystery, I think, and making her a bizarre sci-fi creation kind of takes away from that. I'm glad I tracked these stories down to find out how she originally was, even if there weren't any real answers to be found.

* I instantly objected that orchids don't have thorns... and one panel later, so does Madame Xanadu.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part II: Black Orchid

Having taken my brief sojourn outside of the DCU with Y: The Last Man, I'm back inside it with the first set of what were very many spin-offs of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Well, sort of. Most of these stories predated Gaiman's work on The Sandman, and though there are some overlaps, they're very different. Given what the man became famous for, it's striking how integrated these works are in the DCU, even if sometimes obscure parts of it. They feature appearances by Superman, Lex Luthor, Batman, the Green Lantern, Poison Ivy, Firestorm the Nuclear Man, and more:

Comic trade paperback, 155 pages
Published 1991 (contents: 1989)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2011

Black Orchid

Written by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Dave McKean

Lettered by Todd Klein

I don't know who Mikal Gilmore is, but he wrote the introduction this collected edition of Black Orchid. Gilmore seems very impressed with all the "unanticipated" things that the book does-- so impressed, in fact, that he tells you what they all are before you get to read them yourself. Which is why I don't feel bad about discussing them, but it's not like you were going to read the book anyway. I don't even think Neil Gaiman fans read Black Orchid, even if my front cover does try to grab the dozens of people who watched MirrorMask. (Seriously, I forgot that film even existed until I saw it mentioned here.)

Gilmore cites Black Orchid as "one of those books that has helped break modern comics history in two and signalled the rise of a new courage and a new spirit of aspiration within the medium," placing it alongside Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore's Miracleman, and Alan Moore's Watchmen. Frankly, I never thought I'd see The Dark Knight Returns described as having "a new spirit of aspiration," but I think there's a reason we don't remember Black Orchid alongside the potent critique of fantasized superhero and state violence that is Watchmen. Gilmore says it's one of the only comic books that critiques violence without being forced to resort to violence anyway, like Watchmen is... but that's not true. Or rather, it's a very defanged critique.

One of the primary villains is Carl Thorne, a disgraced LexCorp employee who Luthor has dumped off the docks. But the Black Orchid saves him, saying "too many have died today." But she doesn't do anything with him, leaving the man free to go on to murder people up as he pleases. Huzzah for pacifism? And then, at the end, Lex Luthor dispatches a squad of bad guys to capture the Black Orchid so he can science her up or whatever. Black Orchid doesn't battle this squad... but she doesn't have to, since most of them are conveniently killed by Thorne, and they conveniently kill him. Sure, she lets the last three go and they let her go, but it's hardly a damning indictment of comics violence.

I don't think it has to be, though. In Black Orchid, Gaiman and McKean take an obscure DC character, providing her with a fascinating and strange origin story and killing her off. The Black Orchid we follow is not the original, but another plant-creature grown from the same source, with fragmentary versions of her memories-- plus there's another one, a little girl version of the same. We discover the Black Orchid's origin at the same time that she discovers it herself, but here I think is where Gaiman really shines. The Black Orchid learns her origin story... but that doesn't actually tell her anything. I mean, we all know where we come from, but none of us know who we are either, right? So the Black Orchid (I wish I could call her by her name, but she's a plant-lady-- she doesn't have one) makes her way through Metropolis, Gotham City, the Louisiana swamps, and the Amazon rainforest, trying to find someone who will tell her what she needs to know. But there's no one, and so she (and her miniature clone-self) have to find their own way in the world.

Of course, the own way turns out to be hanging out in the rainforest talking about how great plants are, but I suppose you can't have everything.

The book's plot is disjointed, but it should be, and though Gaiman's villains are a little too thuggish to be interesting (and even his Luthor isn't great), the rest of the characters-- all the Black Orchids, Phillip Sylvain (her sort-of-creator), Poison Ivy, Batman, the Mad Hatter-- feel real. Thankfully, since the story isn't going to get you to the end. And then there's Dave McKean's jarring, gorgeous, disconcerting, brutal, realistic art, a perfect match for Gaiman's similarly so writing. He either manipulates photos or traces them, I don't know, but he's an artist who really makes that work as a technique.

Black Orchid is an interesting and intriguing read, all the more so because it is not an origin story where someone ends up deciding to fight injustice at the end. Once the story's over, the Black Orchid still doesn't know what to do with herself other than that she misses people-- so she returns to civilization. I like that it's open-ended, because it works well with what Gaiman's been doing. The Black Orchid doesn't know what she's up to any more than the rest of us. Apparently, this miniseries spawned an ongoing (not by Gaiman) about the Black Orchid, but I can't see what it would actually be about that wouldn't be hugely disappointing.