This book is bad. Seriously, you should all thank me for reading it so you don’t have to.
How bad is it?
Well, this issue steals its premise from one of the most celebrated Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes of all time, Hush. Hush was amazing because of the way the characters were able to communicate silently. In television, a medium that typically includes sound, the effect was sometimes creepy, sometimes touching and often hysterical. In a comic book, it just means the horrible dialogue appears in thought captions instead.
How bad is the internal monologue? Check out the opening spread from Black Canary:
On the next page is the single word “Silence” Ooooo. So, the leader of the JLA is afraid of the sounds of silence. Don’t take her to a Simon and Garfunkle concert!
In the Buffy episode, people were weirded out by the fact no one could make any noise vocally. People started buying dry erase boards so they could communicate. They were freaked out, but they went about their daily lives. In this book, people start acting like it’s the end of the world. Riots break out immediately. And when Black Canary saves a girl from a street gang (she stops the last one by throwing a knife in his leg, btw) the girl asks why she let them live.
Because if someone turns off the sound for five minutes, everyone’s going to go all Lord of the Flies all the sudden.
By page 6, we are treated to the team of Green Arrow and Cupid. (Seriously, why don’t they just rename the book? Get Dinah the hell out of this book, please!)
Cupid’s idea of heroics is to put a family out of their misery rather than letting them burn to death. Ollie stops her and rescues the family rather easily. Which leads to this marvelous exchange:
I don’t know, Ollie. Maybe you could lock the psycho up before she actually executes someone! Just a thought!
Dinah visits some scientists who give her a way to track the source of the problem through, you know, science. Or comic book science at least. Of course, Black Canary doesn’t knock on the office door. No, she breaks in their window and shrugs for no apparent reason.
Because the window was dirty and you didn’t want to clean it?
Through a flash-back, we learn that Dinah was not good in science (presumably because she’s a girl, right?) And that this whole thing is her fault. But we already more or less knew that from the first issue of Kreisberg’s run. Now we just find out this isn’t the first time she’s blown out someone’s ear drums.
Silly, girl. Always blowing out people’s eardrums, knifing thugs and being saved by Green Arrow.
Oh, and we also find out where BC got her ideas about how to enter a room:
I guess Wildcat didn’t get the memo about the JSA’s mission to make better heroes, huh.
Hopefully by reading this comic, I saved someone else from having to waste $3.
You’re welcome.
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Loved the breaking windows bit. It reminded me of that “Simpsons” character,
“Chief Break Everything”
Modeled off the chief in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” he broke a window to get in, and broke a different window to exit.
Funny stuff.
I demand you comment on my Top Ten Marvel covers! You asked for it!
Oh, and nice job on the scans. It classes up the place.
From what little I’ve bothered to read of GA/BC, it seems like both writers were terrible, but Kreisberg actually seems to hate Dinah specifically, while Winick just doesn’t write women terribly well.
You know what, DC. Hire me to write this damn book. I’ll do it for free. I won’t be good, but I’ll be better than this.
Also, just as a note, Dinah being bad at science, while probably not actually a throwback to this because I doubt Kreisberg ever read anything about Dinah before picking up this book, heralds back to her Birds of Prey days, if not earlier. She was famously bad with technology.
Moscow Rule #9: Technology will always let you down in the end.
(that’s a Middleman reference, and if you’ve never seen The Middleman, here…
http://tv.blinkx.com/show/the-middleman/vMLNGZ9KZ-YJ602J#s1e1
… I’ve now repaid the favor you did by purchasing this book so I don’t have to.)
I forgot about Dinah being bad a science in BoP. I was caught up in a rant!
(Thanks for the Middleman info. That sounds really cool. Now I have to track it down!)
Most of Winick’s run was dumb. Some of it was dumb fun, but most of it was just dumb. Kreisberg really makes all the characters look bad. But especially Black Canary. It’s a sin to see what he is being allowed to do to her.
At this point, I don’t care who writes the book as long as they yank Kreisberg off of it. “Random guy on the street” should be able to do a better job.
Yeah this issue was kinda rubbish. I’d like to know why Wildcat was stalking teenage Dinah and jumped through a window.
The art is nice in this book, but that’s about all I can say for it.
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