lauradoesnothing 's review for:

Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman
3.0
dark mysterious sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
Dave McKean's art is GORGEOUS, no question, and even on his least good day, Neil Gaiman is still Neil Gaiman. But... this was just sort of depressing for me. There are four versions of Susan / Black Orchid with page space:
  • OG Susan gets beaten and raped by her dad, then beaten and killed by her husband, then has her DNA harvested by her childhood friend.
  • The crimefighter Black Orchid has a whole three pages where we get to see her in action and-- hahaha I'm kidding, she gets caught infiltrating a criminal organisation, tied to a chair, shot, burned and exploded... which, yes, I'm aware this is the inciting incident of the story, but because we don't get to see her do anything effectively heroic, and because most readers will be lacking in any prior context for her, it looks like she's just a really shit wannabe.
  • The main character version of Black Orchid just gets shunted from event to event, getting spoonfed the next plot point by the nearest available man (Phil Sylvian,
    Batman, Swamp Thing
    ) - even her adopting young Suzy and taking on the role of mother was done because Suzy straight-up asked her to.
  • Suzy is the best of the four because at least she is interested in butterflies and turtles, which - and I am not exaggerating even a little bit - is more personality than any of the others have.

I get wanting to challenge the genre conventions, and this was released in 1988 when this was all still very clever and avant garde, but beginning with the villain saying "I've read comic books... I'm not going to put you in a death trap, I'm just going to kill you" made me cringe. And the ending, where Black Orchid
tells the men with guns not to do violence please and they comply because - direct quote from the dialogue - she's "so beautiful... so perfect"
was... kind of pathetic, actually. If Poison Ivy had done it, we would at least nod sagely at her use of applied pheromones, but Black Orchid has no such powers, so it just reads as if, after an entire book of bad man hurting pretty ladies, the bad men
decide not to do that and go home instead
. Inexplicable.

I feel like my 3-star reviews always read like hatchet jobs, but that's just because I can separate the craftsmanship from the end result: in this case, a dull, depressing story told by two masters of storytelling.
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