Comical Books: Neil Gaiman's "Black Orchid"

I'm a bad Neil Gaiman fan.

I like everything he's done EXCEPT Sandman and American Gods. And those are the two that you're supposed to like no matter who you are. Even non-fans of Neil Himself usually respect those two.

But I can't do it. They're layered and clever, yes. But they're also rambling nonsense chock full of random, inane characters. Some people like it. I do not. It's almost like different people enjoy different things for different reasons.

Gaiman wrote a lot of comics and books and short stories and I have an affinity for nearly all of them that don't bear the title Sandman or American Gods. Your mileage may vary with each, but they all have memorable and resonant scenes and lines.

Which brings us to Black Orchid, one of his earliest comics.

This is pre-Sandman stuff here. You can feel his exuberance as he plays with structure and words and gets his visual story flowing in ways that comics just never attempted before.

You've never heard of Black Orchid? Me neither. But with Gaiman at the wheel, it doesn't matter. His DC comics have a way of throwing old obscure characters and even popular characters like Batman into his stories and making it feel natural and effortless. It never feels like a stunt, it's more like a special effect when comic celebrities make cameos in his work. Oddly, it would work just as fine without a comic superstar appearance.

It also has this scene, which was jaw-droppingly revolutionary when it was published in 1990:

(Deconstructive ironic humor, as well as blowing a main character's brains out in the first few pages, is pretty much mandatory in contemporary comics.)

I didn't understand what was going on through most of this thing. But that's okay. You can enjoy a story even if it doesn't always make sense.

Other fun note- it ominously repeats the phrase "Winter is coming" at the beginning and end. Six years before Game of Thrones was published. I don't think Gaiman's upset at Martin, though.

And Dave McKean's art is always great to look at. (McKean is known for Arkham Asylum, the Sandman covers. etc.) You can stare at almost any individual panel from the work and marvel and wonder at how long it took him to create. The level of photorealistic detail is superb. No computer-generated artwork here!

So if you like odd, unpredictable comics, this one and Gaiman's other early works (Violent Cases, Mr. Punch, etc) are well worth a look.

I realize I'm probably wrong when I say this, but they're all more interesting than Sandman, which had its moments but was a real drag to read all the way through. If Sandman had been a single-volume work like most of Gaiman's other comics, I'd probably like it a lot more.

-Phony McFakename

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