Writer: Neil Gaiman
Artist: Dave McKean
Collects: Black Orchid issues 1-3
Published by Vertigo
Beauty, like vanity is fleeting. That is, in a nutshell, the
message of this story. It isn’t a story as much as it’s the feel of a story. It
was something fresh and new at the time it was released, and I daresay, almost
twenty five years later, it still holds up perfectly well – if you see it for
what it is. And what was it? Black Orchid was a little known character from
DC’s stable of supernatural heroes whom I couldn’t be bothered to look up, not
because I had doubts regarding the quality of the classic material (and in
these days of new 52s and AvXs, I find myself visiting a lot of classic
material), it was just so that I always had things to read that I knew to be
reliably…good. Also, this was Neil Gaiman’s first outing across the waters,
just as it was Dave McKean’s.
Just when she is at the cusp of a revelation regarding
underworld proceedings in an ongoing investigation, Black Orchid is discovered.
So as not to fall victim to the familiar trope of villains boasting their
schemes giving the ‘hero’ time to ‘loosen their bonds’ or somesuch, the head
goon immediately shoots her in the head. Black Orchid survives, just to face a
fire which eventually kills her. Or it would have, had she been really alive….because,
to purists, there is a notable difference between the words grown, bred, and
alive. If there is, I don’t know what it is.
