who’s that girl?

It’s the mysterious floral avenger, Black Orchid! First introduced in Adventure Comics #428 (July-August, 1973), the Black Orchid combined a standard set of superpowers (flight, super-strength, imperviousness to bullets) with a heavy aura of mystery. No secret identity or origin for the character was given in her three issue Adventure run or in her brief stint as a back-up feature in Phantom Stranger, and nearly all of the stories made use that mysteriousness to set up plot points revolving around wrong assumptions about her true identity. “Wait, if you’re not the Black Orchid, then --- Hey, why are my beautiful assistant’s/henchwoman’s/arm candy’s clothes doing lying on the ground?” (Insert Lou Costello-esque comic sputtering here.)

The stories themselves are rather pedestrian fare revolving around genre-requisite action sequences and confusing bait-and-switch reveals masquerading as legitimate mystery stories. They remind me quite a bit of old Golden Age masked adventurer stories, trading clarity and logic for the sake of brevity-mandated breakneck pacing, and elements repeated from tale to tale with hardly any nods to the accumulated sense of mythos known as “continuity.” (The last few installments of the Phantom Stranger back-up stories did try to aim for a more typical for the era superhero genre feel with multi-part stories and subplots, but nothing that could be confused with the fruits of Englehart’s or Thomas’s pens.)

The art for Black Orchid was handled by the likes of Tony DeZuniga and Nestor Redondo, pencillers not typically associated with superhero fare. As a result, the spandex action sequences are somewhat awkward and subdued, to the extent where it’s next to impossible to find a clean, straightforward fight panel featuring the main character. (The murky color printing process of the era and the ravages of time on newsprint didn’t help, either.) The lion’s share of the page space is taken up with soap operatic ruminations of the villains and victims over Black Orchid’s identity and intentions, which often makes the reader feel if he or she is reading an abortive superhero-inspired arc from a Gold Key comic book adaptation of Dark Shadows (which I mean in the best possible way, honest).

After the end of the Phantom Stranger run, Black Orchid dropped entirely off the radar, except as an example of fanboy Gnosticism where knowledge of the obscure equals power over the less enlightened. She popped up in the 1985 Blue Devil “Summer Fun” annual, where absurd speculations about her origin served as a running (or perhaps, “stumbling”) gag, and artist Paris Cullins rendered her cowl in a most peculiar and suggestive way. With the renewed interest in fallow DC properties following Crisis on Infinite Earths, it was only a matter of time before someone pulled Black Orchid out of limbo and back into the public spotlight, and she did a brief stint in John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad before Neil Gaiman reworked the concept into a weak derivative of Swamp Thing, killing off and replacing the original character in the process.

It may have landed Black Orchid her own Vertigo series for a couple years, but effectively killed my interest in the character. As an ultra-obscure lower tier character swaddled in mystery, I found Black Orchid to be an fascinating curiosity; resolving the mystery in favor of a ho-hum pastiche of pretentious edginess effectively killed what made the character unique in the first place.

Here's a fragrant bouquet of tracks in honor of Black Orchid. It's a hand-picked selection featuring some cool vintage exotica, melodic indie pop, and intriguing postpunk.

Martin Denny – Black Orchid (from A Taste of Honey, 1962)

The Orchids – Defy the Law (from the Underneath The Window, Underneath The Sink single, 1988)

Blue Orchids – Low Profile (from The Greatest Hit, 1982)