Annie WuRecensioni
Autore di Hawkeye, Vol. 3: L.A. Woman
Recensioni
HAWKEYE VOL. 3: L.A. WOMAN (Hawkeye, 3) di Matt Fraction
Kate's internal dialogue is as fun as when she's interacting with the villains and her new friends. I didn't like the art as much in this one, though.
Looking forward to the next.
This volume was super interesting to me because I'd never read it before, but had been reading the new Hawkeye run where Kate sets up as a PI in California. So it was neat to see where her PI roots came from.
I was a bit skeptical at first but after a few issues, really got into the evolving storyline and Kate's attempts at being on her own. Because despite how awesome she is, she is still a privileged rich girl and while she can shoot a bow and arrow, had never had to learn how to shop for groceries on a budget. And I really liked seeing that part of her. I'm loving that Fraction's writing shows the human, fallible side of these characters.
I stopped reading and exclaimed something vile when I got to the scene when Barton said something about wearing shirts like that makes him look like the guy who winds up dead, later. I didn't realize the comics people were planning that little bit of chicanery that far back before Age of Ultron. Or was it an accident that just got played up for the movie? Who the hell knows. It works. I wanna bitch-slap someone. Call me Kate.
I'm liking the build up, the laid-back feel, the deprecating humor, and pizza dog.
This is all growing into something really delightful and I'm liking it a ton more than Sex Criminals. You've got a winner here, Fraction!
[I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.]
New Killer Star just isn't as good as Kicking and Screaming. Part of this is that it's kind of a hodgepodge: one four-issue story arc, one side story of the band visiting Gotham Academy, one flashback story (set before Kicking and Screaming), and one part of a story about Dinah being (re)united with Batgirl and Huntress to (re)form the Birds of Prey.
And part of that is that none of these components are particularly satisfying. The main four-part story is about Dinah being kidnapped by a ninja clan or something who want to know the martial art secret previously known only to Dinah's mother. There's a lot of backstory invoked here, some of it new (I don't think the New 52 Birds of Prey ever said a thing about Dinah's parents) and some of it old, but all of it isn't very illuminating to the Dinah of the present. I want to read about the band having wacky martial arts adventures on the road! But mostly the band is separated from Dinah during this adventure, and the story feels like it's ignoring the premise of the book more than it's using it.
The art, too, is disappointing. Sandy Jarrell isn't a bad artist, and neither is Moritat, but neither of their work compares to that of Annie Wu, the primary artist on volume 1 of Black Canary, who only draws two issues here-- they just lack the dynamism, fun, and sexiness that Wu brings. I know Wu did some well-received Kate Bishop Hawkeye comics for Marvel, but I don't know what else. She's clearly an up-and-coming dynamo (or ought to be), so I'll have to keep on top of her work.
The side stories are okay. I feel like the Gotham Academy one stops abruptly in a weird way; I look forward to reading Gotham Academy in full some day and getting a feel for this in context. (Black Canary's manager Heathcliff was a Gotham Academy student, and his girlfriend a member of the Gotham Academy cast.) The flashback issue is a solid but unremarkable story; I did love how the attendees of the Gotham deubtante's birthday party the band is hired to play at include obvious supervillains like Hugo Strange, but the band isn't allowed to be rude to them. An old comrade of Dinah's from Team 7 shows up, too. It turns out he's 100% a retcon, never actually appeared in Team 7, but that book's characters were so forgettable I didn't even suspect!
Finally, there's the first issue of the new Batgirl and the Birds of Prey series. I feel like DC is learning the wrong lessons from the way the New 52 was received, which is probably because the fans don't understand their own opinions. The problem (as I've said before) isn't that the backstories/premises of DC characters were rewritten, it's that they were rewritten badly. The New 52 incarnations of Dinah and the Birds of Prey were more boring than the post-Crisis one. So now DC is "fixing" that by reuniting Dinah, Barbara, and Helena. The problem I have with this is that the New 52 was finally managing to accumulate an interesting history of its own!
These Black Canary comics are great in conception if not always in execution, and the Fletcher/Stewart/Tarr Batgirl of Burnside books were clearly building up a female super-team that would have been the basis for a new Birds of Prey book, with Batgirl, Spoiler, and Bluebird as field agents (plus sometimes Black Canary), and Frankie as their Operator. But that history, which grew up organically, is just being tossed aside in favor of nostalgically bringing back a team from fifteen years ago... even though in the new continuity, Helena is a government agent and not a vigilante, and has no association with Dinah and Babs. It's just weird and sort of frustrating that once DC gets a viable premise for a new Black Canary book and a new Birds of Prey one, they clumsily toss it all aside in favor of nostalgia. The idea that Barbara actually was Oracle at some point in this new history, something someone never mentioned in the 52 issues of Batgirl or 34 issues of Birds of Prey is particularly retrograde. Yes, I think it was a mistake to toss away Oracle, but bringing her back in a weird way that makes the New 52's complicated history even more complicated isn't the answer.
Um, so as to the actual issue, it's fine. Mostly set-up. I guess I'll see what is done with it when I pick up the trade from the library someday in the far future. It's just a real shame that a premise with as much potential as Dinah-Drake-leads-a-rock-band-that-fights-crime-with-martial-arts is tossed away after just two thin volumes.
Green Arrow and Black Canary: « Previous in sequence
I've been a fan of Black Canary since I first encountered Dinah in Green Arrow comics and fell in love. I followed her from there into Birds of Prey, which continued to develop her and her history-- but I felt she was immensely poorly served by the "New 52" reboot, which replaced her long history with a dull one. But from the moment I saw a cover of her New 52 solo series, I was excited. This looked like the Black Canary I knew, in that her visuals had returned to their fishnets-and-leather-jacket roots, but it also looked different, in that Dinah was now the punk-styled leader of an alternative band, spinning out of events in writer Brenden Fletcher's excellent Batgirl series.
In Kicking and Screaming, Fletcher and artist Annie Wu create one of those perfect comics books, one that is wholly itself. It's hard to put into words how much I liked this, especially the first few issues, because there's nothing for me to compare it to-- this is the lone exemplar of the superhero-and-rock-band comic book. Panel after panel provides delights. Wu's Dinah is sexy and stylish without being objectified, and completely kick-ass. Usually too kick-ass, as the concerts of Black Canary (here the name of the band; Dinah is just "Dinah" or sometimes "D.D.") often end in violence when Dinah has to fight off government agents and/or protestors. Like I said, I've loved Dinah ever since I first encountered her, but this is the most I've loved her; she's everything I want my female superhero characters to be, violent and attractive and in charge.
Wu's art is amazing, and Lee Loughridge-- always the best colorist in the business-- adds so much to the book's aesthetic too. A couple issues are also drawn by Y: The Last Man's Pia Guerra, who is an excellent artist but maybe not as "punk" as this book requires; her linework is a little too straightforward, while Wu's is dynamic and energetic.
The book's plot is kind of weird, but honestly it's one of those books where I don't care, because it's all about hanging a wacky music-based adventure off it. It's filled with great stuff: Dinah's bandmates include characters named Byron and Heathcliff who actually do look like contemporary kids, one of Black Canary's enemies is the band's disgruntled former singer who now has superpowers, the issues are interpresed with excerpts from a self-produced Burnside music zine, and there's an issue where three "enemy" bands turn up to challenge Black Canary to battle for no readily apparent reason.
I was surprised that this book actually drew on continuity established by the New 52 Birds of Prey and Team 7: Dinah's ex-husband Kurt Lance turns up, as does Amanda Waller, and the book picks up on their situations as of Soul Crisis. Even more surprisingly, the book does more emotionally with Dinah's raised-in-a-dojo backstory than Birds of Prey itself did. There were also some appreciated tie-ins to the Burnside-era Batgirl comics, including an appearance by Operator.
It's not a flawless book (I found the last couple issues, resolving the big ongoing storyline, not entirely satisfying), but it is a unique one, in a way that few DC superhero comics are, but all ought to be. I loved this book despite its flaws, and I'm really looking forward to reading volume 2.
Green Arrow and Black Canary: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »
I haven't read others in this series, but it's quite engaging, with lots of silhouette artwork by Annie Wu.
But….. Unfortunately, that was not to be.
We pick up with our poor Dinah Lance being held captive in a strange prison-like setting. Her bandmates don’t know where she is, and the fate of the band hangs in the balance. It was a little hard seeing the group separated, as I feel like they only make each other stronger. I was also a bit frustrated that we kind of found ourselves in a situation that I wasn’t totally on board with, as Dinah being held in a strange prison by strange demon cultists perhaps because of who her mother was seems so old hat to me. I appreciated seeing a bit of the mother/daughter drama and baggage regarding Dinah, but it kind of felt like it came out of nowhere, as I don’t THINK that there was all that much in “Kicking and Screaming” (I could be wrong, I just don’t remember any)? By the time Dinah and her bandmates were reunited for a final showdown with the demon cult, we get taken into a completely DIFFERENT direction with a speculative arc that takes Black Canary into a potential future-scape of her life. And when the story does eventually get wrapped up, we still have a couple of side stories that have nothing to do with the original story arc, some of which aren’t even “Black Canary” titles. It felt like a bit of a mess, to be honest, which was such a disappointment because I so enjoyed “Kicking and Screaming”. I’ve looked around and it looks like one of the problems is that the DC “Rebirth” event happened, in which the titles in DC were rebooted yet again. So of course this was going to interrupt this fairly new series. The wrap up came fast and it was hard to swallow.
But there were things that I did like in “New Killer Star”. We got a fun side story in the “Gotham Academy” storyline involving the band’s tour manager Heathcliff, who was a former student at that boarding school. So we did get to see the band in action in that story, as well as my favorites from “Gotham Academy” like Maps and Olive. It turns out that he and Pomeline may have had a thing!!! I’m super down for all that, so that was a fun little crossover story. There is a stand alone story with just the Band that doesn’t involve aliens or demon cults, which gave me the girl power camaraderie that I felt the actual arc didn’t have. We also got a nice little insight into the new “Birds of Prey” arc, which brings Batgirl and Black Canary together again, as well as bringing back Huntress to round out the group. I highly enjoy “Birds of Prey”, and while it was a bit disappointing to see that yes, indeed, Oracle is a thing of the distant past, it was also good to see her recognized not just as something negative. But my praise for these things ultimately goes to show that the actual final arc for Dinah in her main comic series was a bit too weak to stand on it’s own two feet.
So while the stand alone stories were good fun and everything I was looking for, the actual finale to the “Black Canary New 52” arc fell kind of flat. And it worries me that some of the “New 52” series I’ve been following will end just as abruptly. All that said, I will look back fondly on “Black Canary” and her band as a whole, because when it was strong it was super fun. It will be interesting to see where “Rebirth” takes all of these characters. But for now I bid adieu to my girl Dinah, and hope that when we meet again she’ll be everything she was in this.
Like “The Batgirl of Burnside”, “Black Canary” is trying to give a hipper, edgier feel to one of DC’s heroines. I wouldn’t say most popular, as I would guess that many people don’t necessarily think of her like they think of Batgirl, but Black Canary actually makes sense to be given this kind of makeover. One, she isn’t as popular or well known as, say, Wonder Woman or Batgirl, so this will give her lots of room to grow and be redefined without bringing up inevitable gripings from the fans. Two, Dinah’s origin story has always been a little muddled and crazy, so a new and out there storyline is going to be old hat for her. I loved the idea of making her the lead singer of a band, even if it does seem like it wasn’t as much by the band’s choice as one would think. I also liked the bandmates themselves, as they are all pretty unique and intrepid (and diverse!) characters. Lord Byron the drummer is a hard as nails but incredibly empathetic blend of glam rock and Grace Jones, while Paloma Terrific the keyboardist is a bit more cynical and wary of Dinah. Given that the band is getting into pretty hardcore scuffles ever since Dinah joined, well, who can really blame her? All of these women combine to make a group of uneasy allies, though their common ground is a mysterious little girl named Ditto, the band’s guitarist who doesn’t speak. They all feel protective of this strange child (who gave me serious Eleven of “Stranger Things” fame vibes, albeit unintentional on the creators parts), and when it becomes clear that multiple groups want to get their hands on her, the band unites as one to keep her safe. I loved all of these kick ass women for their strengths and weaknesses alike.
Even one of the main antagonists is given her own thorough and complicated storyline. Bo Maeve, the former lead singer of the band (until she was replaced by Dinah) is out to settle the score with her former bandmates. Bo is portrayed as vain and volatile, who doesn’t take rejection well (she set things literally ablaze when the band kicked her out), and she sees Dinah as her nemesis, striving to rise to her level. But even this nutbag has her moments where I felt empathy for her. And she too cares very deeply about Ditto, even if she never wanted to, so seeing a villain given these complicated emotions is something that I like to see in a comic, especially one geared towards teenager girls and young women. I think that a lot of people could see a bit of themselves in all of these women, Bo included. The other antagonists are a bit more veiled as of now, though Amanda Waller, everyone’s favorite True Neutral character in the DC Universe, has made her presence known, so you know there’s going to be some crazy nonsense going on beyond the aliens we saw this time around. Given that the theme this time was music as power and music as weaponry, I have high hopes that we’ll get more of these theoretical and super neat storylines.
I also LOVE the artwork in this comic. It makes use of vibrant colors and very stark lines, playing special attention to the music scenes. The concerts look like they’re screaming in technicolor, with blues, pinks, reds, and yellows. The art also feels a bit messier but in the best way possible. It’s edgier and sharper, and it just adds to the punk rock feel of the band and the atmosphere. Annie Wu and Pia Guerra (of “Y: The Last Man” fame) did the artwork, and their collaboration mixes together perfectly for the music scenes and the narrative. I hope that the comics continue with this schematic because I’m LIVING for it.
I’m totally digging “Black Canary” as of now!!! I have hopes that it will keep my interest up and that Dinah Lance gets the proper recognition that she has always deserved. And, uh, hey, maybe Oliver Queen could show up at some point? Please? PLEASE??????
1 
thelibraryladies | 4 altre recensioni | Nov 3, 2016 |
thelibraryladies | 4 altre recensioni | Nov 3, 2016 | But she also finds herself trying to protect a young person who doesn't talk named Ditto.
We also meet Kurt Lance, Dinah's 'ex' husband (there's drama there). And Amanda Waller gets herself involved too. And then there's the mysterious Ninja in White with Blonde hair which was very cool.
As was Burnside Tofu. An all around fun TPB (Although I have to admit that I had to switch gears out of the Arrow Universe to understand what was happening in a totally different Black Canary's life).
I got this galley through Netgalley on behalf of DC Entertainment.
Matt Fraction’s “Hawkeye, Vol. 3: L.A. Woman” is a collection of issues #14, 16, 18 and 20 of Hawkeye comic book series plus the first issue of Annual. Hawkeye’s talented but spoiled teenage protégé Kate Bishop got tired of Clint Barton’s, that is Hawkeye’s, drama so she left for Los Angeles and took with her Lucky the Pizza Dog. But on the West Coast things are not perfect either. Kate gets dead broke and tries to make ends meet working as a private investigator. On top of that, she is being pursued by Madame Masque who wants to revenge some old grievances…
THUMBS UP:
1) As entertaining and absorbing as ever.
Although an entire volume focuses on Kate’s adventures, I loved it as much as “Hawkeye, Vol. 1: My Life as a Weapon” and even more than “Hawkeye, Vol. 2: Little Hits.” Just like the previous volumes, “Hawkeye, Vol. 3” is surprisingly realistic, action-packed, well-thought-out, entertaining and absorbing.
2) Youthful and upbeat.
Even though I liked “Hawkeye, Vol. 2” a lot, I found it rather depressing and hoped for the brighter tomorrow in the third volume. My prayers have been answered. Hallelujah! “Hawkeye, Vol. 3” is like a breath of fresh air. Although Kate, just like Clint, gets banged up, often finds herself in trouble and makes terrible decisions, she, UNLIKE Clint, is bursting with youthful energy and optimism.
3) Kate is AWESOME.
Since the previous two volumes focused on the other Hawkeye, Clint Barton, I never really understood Kate’s character, but now I do and I absolutely love her. Kate is overconfident, ambitious, often naive and childishly silly, but she is also smart, funny, good-natured, optimistic and really good-looking. She is indeed a female version of Clint Barton, just much younger and more cheerful.
4) Wu’s artwork is SO Kate.
Wu’s illustrations are at least as good as Aja’s, and her portrayal of Kate is simply perfect: Wu brings out Kate’s character better than any of the previous artists managed to do.
COULD BE BETTER:
1) Pulido’s illustrations.
Although I’ve read plenty of praise for Javier Pulido’s illustrations in the Annual issue #1, I personally didn’t like it at all. The storyline is great, but the artwork is just so childish, simplistic and cartoon-like, and half of the characters are drawn as silhouettes. Ew!
VERDICT: 4.5 out of 5
Matt Fraction did it again: “Hawkeye, Vol. 3: L.A. Woman” is as realistic, action-packed, well-thought-out, entertaining and absorbing as the previous two volumes. Plus, this time it is all about Kate Bishop, so the vibe is youthful and optimistic. I finally really get Kate and she is actually quite awesome! And although this volume is not illustrated by Aja, Wu’s artwork is a masterpiece on its own.
1 AgneJakubauskaite | 15 altre recensioni | Mar 10, 2015 |
AgneJakubauskaite | 15 altre recensioni | Mar 10, 2015 | Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.