Black Orchid (original 1991; edition 1991)

PRETTY. And well-told, and feminist in the truest sense of the word. Comparisons to Watchmen write themselves, so I won't go there, just comment that this is a much gentler deconstruction of the superhero genre. Lots of fun DC cameos in Dave McKean's gorgeous, photorealistic style too. ( )

Neil Gaiman's writing and Dave McKean's artwork combine to create a haunting, and darkly magical take on the superhero genre.

The Black Orchid is a masked crime fighter who is killed by the bad guys at the start of the comic, but she is also a violet-skinned plant/human hybrid, a clone of Suzy Linden, the childhood friend of scientist Philip Sylvian. When the Black Orchid who dedicated her life to fighting crime is murdered, another Black Orchid awakens in Doctor Sylvian's greenhouse laboratory, with only vague impressions of her memories. As her story is revealed it is a sad one - the Suzy Linden she was cloned from had an abusive father, then an abusive husband.

The new Black Orchid's search for an identity leads her to the depths of Gotham City's Arkham Insane Asylum, to the Swamp Thing's realms and to the Brazilian rainforest. Lex Luthor wants her captured and dissected, and her abusive ex-husband, newly released from prison, wants to kill her and erase the last traces of the Suzy he murdered years earlier.

McKean's artwork is truly spellbinding, with lush breath-taking paintings and striking colours. Gaiman's writing is melancholic and subdued, and imbues the DC universe and its inhabitants with a solemn mythic gravity. ( )

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.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Spin-Offs: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

One of the few Gaiman/McKean works that I haven't read; I was eager to read this graphic novel. It was a pretty good read. It is an unusual comic book and deals with some more serious issues than the basic good vs. evil.

This comic takes place in Gotham City and in the first few scenes we get to watch as the super-hero Black Orchid is captured and killed. The rest of the story follows her flower sisters as they deal with the fall-out from Black Orchid's action and try to find a place for themselves in the world.

It is an interesting story in that the main character for the most part is a passive flower-lady that is trying to gain back her memories and figure out how to protect her flower sisters.

There are cameo appearances by Batman, Poison Ivy, Lex Luther, and others. We get to visit Arkham Asylum and spend time with the dirty underground of Gotham.

The majority of the comic deals with the idea of violence and what happens when you make a choice either to be peaceful or take violent action. It also shows that sometimes making the right choice doesn't always mean things will turn out the right way.

An interesting graphic novel and somewhat thought provoking. I can see why they said this graphic novel helped break the way for more non-traditional graphic novels. The artwork by McKean is the usual mixture of beautiful, creepy, and slightly disturbing...it goes very well with the story.

There are only a couple things that weren't ideal. One was that the character's aren't as engaging as I am used to for Gaiman and (since this was released in the 80's) the other is that the graphics are pretty dated...there are a lot of 80's hairstyles walking through this graphic novel and at times that made me laugh. ( )

Gaiman turns Black Orchid into nearly a female version of Swamp Thing, though McKean's artwork is fantastic. ( )