The Four Color Media Monitor

It's a good I didn't have anything to say about the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special when it was first in discussion, but that's probably because of Judd Winick's being a writer there. Now, Newsarama once again acted as a platform for his sleaziness, and this overrated, grating writer mouths off with more than a bit of controversy-baiting:

NRAMA: Speaking of fun, and speaking of it coming to a screeching halt – that last scene. That was something that a lot of people were picking up on even before the issue. Was Ollie’s death in the mix from the start?

JW: Yeah – but actually, it was supposed to be Black Canary, but we changed our minds. How do you like them apples?

Not written by him, that's for sure. He then ostensibly defends himself by saying:

JW: Yeah. We all came to the same conclusion around the same time, that it was going to be her, but it just became such a more interesting dynamic when it was Ollie who got it in the end. Ollie killing Black Canary and then hunting for the truth – there was something about it that didn’t feel right to me, and when Dan and Mike and I were talking, we came to the conclusion that we wanted Black Canary to carry the story forward from there. Dinah losing Ollie felt like a different kind of terrible than Ollie losing Dinah.

And I kind of wanted to start the book from Black Canary’s perspective, and this was the best way to do it. It wasn’t a small decision – it was just “are we going to get their by land or by sea?” Different things, but we decided to go by sea, instead of by land.

Uh oh, that could be a mistake, because in the sea, you can sink! Is that supposed to be an attempt to insult all those reading that crummy interview? Unfortunately, I think so. But let's leave that for now. What I want to know is, if they didn't intend for Ollie and Dinah to marry, why did they even go so far as to put out that special called Black Canary Wedding Planner? All this does now is render that pointless, which seems to be quite a trend now with some special issues.

Even if Ollie isn't dead, I'm certainly not going to be reading the upcoming Green Arrow/Black Canary series, which may feature Connor Hawke instead, as Winick is one terrible writer, and his dialect in this interview is irritatingly sleazy too. This reeks of bait-and-switch. If Ollie is dead though, then they've done something almost similar to how Hector Hall and his wife Lyta were killed off (or just tossed into limbo) just six years after he was brought back in JSA, instead of taking the golden opportunity to develop their relationship anew as a couple. That's another example of how comics are not as realistic as some might want to claim.

Worst, after getting some decent character development in Birds of Prey for several years now, it seems that now, Dinah's development may be destined to backtrack badly. And I get the feeling that in the end, there may not be a wedding.

I don't like what's been done in this botched wedding at all. It's just an example of how there's little to no real happy stories being written today.

Update: what's this I see here? If Dwayne McDuffie is writing a JLofA issue (13) that's pretty much a continuation of the above story, I get the feeling that he's not getting as free a reign on the story as some might think.

Labels: crossoverloading, dc comics, women of dc