Returning to the legacy of Alan Moore, the early segues and black humour owe much to THE KILLING JOKE. That was within the first six pages, and it was quite the arresting development. But you know what I am going to do? I'm going to kill you. I'm not going to set up some kind of complicated laser beam death-trap, then leave you alone to escape. So you know what I'm not going to do? I'm not going to lock up in the basement before interrogating you. 'I've seen, y'know, the movies, James Bond, all that. It's just going to do things differently. It's a far more ethereal read than most DC Universe books - it's far more of a child of Alan Moore's SWAMP THING - but a DC Universe book it most certainly is. What one forgets is the Vertigo line originally had far stronger ties to the DC universe and its superhero community what one may also have forgotten is that this was created long before the Vertigo line even existed. Now, several of those names may sound surprisingly familiar for a Neil Gaiman book. 'Most of the things that 'everyone knows' are wrong.

Her only brief ally is a man in a mask who hides in the shadows of Gotham, and he says: Jason Woodrue, Pamela Isley and Alec Holland.

The only clues lie in a dead man's past, in his contemporaries at college: Dr. She doesn't know who she is, what she is, or what she should do now. So who is this new Susan of radiant purple, grown in a greenhouse, and cast adrift in a world she's had no time to comprehend? She has no idea. She was the Black Orchid, named after a flower that doesn't exist and she is quite, quite dead. They caught her, they shot her, they set her on fire and then bombed the inferno for good measure. An effective, solitary agent, undercover and on the brink of exposing a criminal organisation and the mastermind behind it. Or he thought he had he's in for a bit of a surprise.įor then there was the other Susan. Her name was Susan Linden and he killed her for it. There is a wreck of man out there called Carl a drunken, washed up, one-time player full of hot-air and an acrid obsession with the ex-wife who had the audacity to leave him for another, less violent man, and then testify against him.

So many songs evoke a past much missed, misremembered or barely recalled at all. This is a book of impressions: of memories, shadows and echoes.

Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman