Review: DC Power: A Celebration hardcover (DC Comics)

DC Power: A Celebration is a fine first start for what should be a tradition of annual Black History Month specials. Similar to DC Comics' first DC Pride cultural anthology, the stories here feel a bit tentative to me, but knowing how DC Pride has blossomed since the first book, I can only expect that DC Power will do the same.

Meanwhile, some nice spotlights, some welcome creative teams, some attractive art, even fodder for future stories. Again, it’s a fine start.

[Review contains spoilers]

Clearly I have a “type” when it comes to art, because for me two of the best-drawn stories in the book are by Natacha Bustos on Green Lantern John Stewart and Valentine de Landro on Cyborg, both in the kind of fine-lined, semi-realistic style that I associate (just based on what I encountered first) with Michael Lark.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Brandon Thomas' Lantern story, about John repressing memories of bullying, still feels to me like seeing angst in John that, in my favorite depictions, isn’t true to the character. But, I dig Bustos on John and Teen Lantern Keli Quintela, and I’m all the more eager for her work on the Fire & Ice miniseries. Morgan Hampton’s Cyborg short, lead-in to Cyborg: Homecoming, tries to give origin to the “Booyah!” catchphrase having migrated to the comics — which, if it takes that much hand-wringing, just probably wasn’t a good idea — but I do adore de Landro’s hipster-casual redesign of Superman villain Livewire.

Another welcome entry is the Nubia/Bumblebee team-up by Stephanie Williams and Alitha Martinez, part of the team on the Nubia and the Amazons and Nubia: Queen of the Amazons miniseries. Original writer/original artist on a short story for a character whom they did miniseries previously always seems a lovely “get” to me, and makes worthwhile a story that’s otherwise not very remarkable. Here we approach some of DC Power’s difficulties, in a pairing of Nubia and Karen Beecher-Duncan that doesn’t make much sense besides the needs of the story, and against a villain in a set-up for a predictable punchline (Monsieur Mallah forgot to get symphony tickets).

DC Power has similar difficulties to DC Pride, but perhaps in an opposite way. (Obviously experiences of race and gender need not be directly equivalent, though I examine them here in terms of specific “cultural anthologies” DC Comics released for each.) The early DC Pride stories especially tended to explore or explain a gender or sexual identity, often crowding out any real semblance of a story. Here, in contrast, about half of the stories — Nubia/Bumblebee, John Stewart, Vixen/Batwing, Cyborg — really had no connection to the experience of being Black other than to star African American heroes. There’s no question that Black heroes and a Black History Month anthology are both notable, but I felt a bit let down by stories that could have as easily appeared in any generic DC collection.

To that end, I appreciated Evan Narcisse’s Amazing Man story, which has Will Everett triumphing over a bad guy but acknowledges the real challenges of an African American community fighting Detroit’s so-called “urban renewal” in the 1950s. For my tastes, I prefer that over Lamont Magee’s rather labored metaphor for discrimination in his Black Lightning story, couched in humans vs. metahumans (though I could sure hear Cress Williams in the former TV writer’s Jefferson Pierce!).

Probably the closest DC Power came to what I hoped for was Dorado Quick and Jordan Clark’s Kid Flash/Aquaman Jackson Hyde, in which Kid Flash discusses the burden of taking on “mantles that weren’t ours, backing up heroes we don’t look like.” Here (somewhat mildly, and nowhere else), DC Power gets to the experience of being a Black hero in the DC Universe, and I don’t think I’m mistaken to want more of that. I’m reminded of John Ridley’s The Other History of the DC Universe, which notes that Mal Duncan integrated the Teen Titans but then could never quite gain traction with the core team. Compared to the story of Nubia and Karen Duncan buying party dresses, on one hand it’s probably progress that every Black hero in this book need not solely be a vehicle to address “Black issues,” but on the other hand, there’s a lot this book could wrestle with but chooses not to.

(Shout out to Quick and Clark, too, for a clever attempt at a continuity patch for Jackson’s different depictions when he served with Kid Flash on the Teen Titans and then afterward.)

Speaking of Ridley, he pens the introduction here (which illuminates a surprising change to I Am Batman’s Jace Fox late in that series), though nothing else other than the reprint of a Batman Jace Fox story from Batman Black & White. This, plus a variant cover image of Batwing and Batman Jace together (siblings, though they don’t know it), reminds me how much I enjoyed I Am Batman and what a shame it is Luke and Jace Fox never reconciled nor learned each other’s superheroic identities; that is, we’ve never had that Batwing/Batman team-up the cover imagines. I see a lot of good stuff coming in DC Power 2024, though not that; hopefully a future DC Power (or elsewhere!) might give Ridley the opportunity to tie up I Am Batman’s loose threads.

Again, DC Power: A Celebration is an altogether satisfactory debut. I’d like to see the authors feel more emboldened to meta-interpret the experiences of African American heroes within the DCU, but hopefully that will come with time.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25