This review contains spoilers.
When this is over, I’m going to ruin you.
In this issue, Black Canary takes on Bo Maeve in a super-powered battle of the bands.
The issue begins with Black Canary talking to random people in a limo. She references that she just lost two people that she deeply cares about and threatens the boss of the random people.
This is a major problem for me in comics. Many writers feel the need to start in a vague opening to try to suck the reader in and then then spend the rest of the issue catching up to the opening. It’s pretty irritating and unnecessary. It doesn’t pull me in; I just feel like I’ve missed an issue. Starting the issue with the battle of the bands would have worked just fine.
The comic then flashes back to where we left off in the previous issue. Bo’s band has taken the stage and she has displayed that Bo has acquired a Canary cry. Dinah tries to get everyone to leave but Ditto insists that the band plays. Thus, the battle of the bands begins.
This is another issue that hurts this whole series. Comic books are a visual medium with no source of audio. When music is played, it feels pointless. We cannot get any sort of idea of what the bands sound like or how they are compared to each other. Imagine watching The Ramones play with the sound muted; it kind of takes the point away. At least in the Spider-Gwen comic, there is a song on the official Marvel YouTube channel that is meant to be the Mary Janes’ big hit that I can hear in my head instead of just looking at pictures of people playing instruments.
Thankfully, the music doesn’t last long before a more fierce battle begins. It turns out that Bo’s entire band has super powers and they start to attack Dinah. She is able to disperse of them but the whole thing reminds me of the battle between Kiss and Robo-Kiss in Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. That is both wonderful and weird at the same time.
Finally, Bo demands that the Black Canary band start to play again. Bo and Dinah send out their Canary cries and the combined frequencies make Ditto and Kurt Lance disappear. Then, the random people from the opening show up and claim that they are from A&B records and that they have answers. The issue ends with Dinah arriving at the label and discovering that the boss of the random people is an aged Kurt and that Ditto is also present.
Verdict
This issue is actually fairly dull. The battle isn’t interesting because we can’t hear the music and we know nothing about Bo’s band members. I could be wrong but I don’t think the story has spent any time on them so Dinah is just fighting random thugs with super powers. It looks great thanks to Wu’s artwork but it’s not engaging. And since it takes up most of the issue, the comic is fairly boring. The twist at the end is interesting but it doesn’t really save the issue.
