Title Black Orchid Author Neil Gaiman Illustrator Dave McKean Publisher Vertigo - 2012 First Printing DC Comics -1989 Category Graphic Novels Main Characters Susan Linden Main Elements Superheroes

This is the gardne, still and green

There is a humming somewhere

Someone was burning

Someone is gone.

In an anonymous corporate boardroom, a super-hero is shot through the head. Her body is consummed by flames and her killer walks free.

So begins Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid, one of comics most remarkable transformative creations. Simultaneously a deconstruction and a resurrection of an entire genre, this tale of the uncanny lives of Susan Linden embodies the new maturity in graphic storytelling that revolutionized the medium at the turn of the millenium.

Gaiman and McKean's pivotal miniseries is collected here in its entirety together with an insightful introduction from essayist Mikal Gilmore and a special section featuring never-before-seen sketches and preliminary texts from Gaiman.

This is a beautiful comic book, the artwork is gorgeous. The combo of Gaiman and McKean can definitely do some magic, and this was the right superhero to do that magic with. I've read a lot of modern graphic novels and comics so I'm used to beautiful and different storytelling styles, but this must have been pretty groundbreaking when it first came out.

First of all, the superhero dies in the first few pages. That already turned the norm on its head. And the rest of the story wasn't about crime fighting, in fact Black Orchid doesn't really do all that much other than try to figure out who she is, the bad guys do a good enough job of taking each other out. But figuring out who she is made for such a more interesting tale than if she were just doing of "Wham!" or "Bang!" beating up of bad guys.

There are cameos from other superheroes, and I loved how the other plant-based D.C. characters were woven into the storyline. As Gaiman did with The Sandman, he re-envisioned an existing superhero and turned her into a fantasy character in her own right, no longer just a human with superpowers but something else entirely. Anyone who enjoys fantasy and a good story would enjoy this, you don't have to be into men in tights *cough*.

But honestly, even if you don't care about the subject content, even if you don't want to read a "comic" book, borrow it from your local libary and just absorb the artwork. Its beautiful, magical, mystical, dreamlike and yet not stylized, detailed realism...I don't have the right words to describe it. Its short so it doesn't develop the whole mythology that The Sandman does, which can delve into all the world's mythologies between Heaven and Hell (both included), but it was only limited by that.