A Christmas gift from Chuck Dixon

[bluefall]

This is apparently just Birds of Prey week all around, guys. Check out what Dixon posted to his blog yesterday: inked pages from an unpublished BoP story where Babs dreams about fighting Nazis while her girlfriend macks on her boyfriend.




Here's Dinah, a fighter pilot whose callsign is Black Canary.



And here we meet her nemesis, a Nazi in a facemask - any ideas on who this might represent, guys? I can't think of an early Birds villain (or hell, a recent one for that matter) who this image evokes. Lady Vic maybe?



Can't forget her lover back home, our dear Babs.



(Seriously Dixon. If you don't want us to think they're utterly stupid for each other, stop writing them that way.)

Of course after that, we need our requisite vehement protests of heterosexuality, so we get this weird flirtation between Dinah and Ted.





Meanwhile Babs has been recruited by the government to... do some code cracking or data analysis maybe.



Which of course gets her worried about her boo in the field.



I love the little details there like Canary's Nazi kill-count and the design on the mailbox.

Anyway there's a bunch more pics at Dixon's blog, which you should go check out. I can't believe how much I want to see the script.

(Also, credit where credit is due, thebigapricot totally found this first.)

Comments

[thebigapricot]

THEY"RE FRIENDS! JUST FRIENDS!

Ha Ha, glad you saw it. Oh, Chuck.

[bluefall]

Sure, that's totally how I look at and touch my friends when they're bedridden. Completely platonic.

Man I appreciate Gail's deliberate subtext, honestly I do, but there's something so... I don't know, cutely endearing about Dixon's total, accidental, oblivious, ridiculously blatant love story that really gets me.

[jarodrussell]

I think it's because he treats them like buddies not lovers. I'm not a big M/M slasher, but my favorite slash pairing of all time is John Sheppard and Rodney McKay (McShep) from Stargate: Atlantis. It seems so plausible, despite some of the writing staff saying they aren't even best friends, because they're both such broken characters, don't seem to form fast friendships with others, but when they're together, they're inseparable.

At the time, they were both in bad places, but when they were together, they were unstoppable, and because of that, their relationship is beautiful. In a very practical sense, they blurred the lines between being two people and because a single entity. Babs was the head, Dinah was the hands. That's the kind of thing that transcends a word like "love," a word that gets thrown around way too easily.

Dixon may never have realized the emotional, or sexual, repercussions of that when it came to the Babs/Dinah partnership, but I don't think there's any other way to explain it.

(Hell, now that I think about it, I'd accept that as a reason Barbara...and only Barbara, not Wendy...stopped looking for a way to walk: Dinah became her fully functional body in a kind of cybernetic-emotional-symbiosis. Unfortunately, that only works so long as they're co-dependent buddies, and when you start throwing Huntress and Green Arrow in the mix, the ill logic breaks down.)

[bradhanon]

I've been saying for years that nobody writes subtext like people who don't believe in subtext. Because they don't know how to look for it or correct for it.

[perletwo]

....and suddenly, we're in an old Pat Benatar video....

[nezchan]

"This video contains content from EMI, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

Dang, I get so sick of that crap.

[xammax]

I swear 1812 II will be over this crap.

[ulf_boehnke]

You are not the only one by far.

Every time I go through my old favs there is another one of those. Bah.

[proteus_lives]

Benatar rules.

FOREVER.

[shadowpsykie]

is Pat Benatar lesbian? i;m only asking because alot of her songs seem very coded. Shadows of the Night, We Belong, Promises in the dark... or am i reading FAR too much into it?

[perletwo]

A lesbian icon maybe; but from what I understand, she married one of her bandmates at the height of her fame, stayed married and raised a few kids together. Not that that precludes a sideline, but it does seem like it'd take up an awful lot of her time....

[kenn_el]

Pat married her guitarist waaaay back when. One of the longest lasting marriages in rock and roll. Very nice couple as well. Meeting them was terrific!

[retro_nouveau]

A peek at a new corner of the multiverse. Totally canon now!

Could not love the art more. It's retro, it's noir. Babs and the Red Baroness have that adorable overbite. Ted is ... uh, yeah. Well, I like freckles, so he's got that going for him, anyway. At least he's invented the Batmissile, yay!

Second to last panel: Gee, Dinah sure is swell to give me this picture!
Last panel: (Dinah's listening to yelling over the radio) #%@#, TED! Keep in formation, dammit! XD

[bluefall]

I'm a little shaky on the cheekbones, Dinah's especially, but I suppose they work for the style. She's definitely got a "glamorous dame" thing going, which is Dinah all over, fighter jockey or no.

[jarodrussell]

So...I guess, at this point, seeing as how she's using the same wheelchair in 2001 as her dream self is in 1943...I don't even know how to make a joke about this. I'm just going to go have myself a little cry.

[philippos42]

Femslashy alt-u Steve Canyonish war comix!?

[thehefner]

Y'know, it's really sad that none (or at the most very little) of Chuck Dixon's Birds of Prey is available in TPB. I've enjoyed Gail's run, but I honestly think I preferred Chuck's, and he was the guy who originated the title in the first place.

[bluefall]

Yeah, I think there's two trades plus one Nightwing crossover traded under Dick's name, which is a real crime. There's a lot of history and a lot of good story there. I'd rather have a trade of Dixon BoP than any trade once Dinah left the team, for sure.

Plus one of the major draws of Birds was that it was one of the few comics with actual character development. Hard to see that when you can only find stories from one end of the arc.

[thehefner]

Really, from the looks of it, one could be forgiven for thinking that Birds of Prey has always ever been a creation of Gail's. Dixon wasn't a perfect writer, but he did an awful lot of great stuff, most of which seems to be increasingly ignored and forgotten.

[bluefall]

Well, I don't know. How many writers can say they left a legacy like Tim and Steph? I admit Red Robin may be near unrecognizable as the crazy-haired Wizards-and-Warriors-playing dork in a green shirt who we once knew, but still, characters who can carry titles under the Batgirl and Robin mantles aren't liable to ever fade into obscurity.

Though story-wise it's true that whole era has sort of been shuffled under the rug. When was the last time you saw anyone mention No Man's Land in a comic, or acknowledge that there was ever a group called Young Justice?

[darkknightjrk]

"When was the last time you saw anyone mention No Man's Land in a comic"

Batman & Robin, for one. Granted, it was to do a soft retcon, saying that only a specific wing of Wayne Manor was destroyed so that the ancient catacombs under the manor would remain for the mystery story, but they still mentioned it. There was also the recent Batman Beyond mini-series, where the "new Hush's" plan was to create a repeat of the Earthquake to destroy Gotham.

[darkknightjrk]

Yeah, when I first got in I did think it was Gail's creation. >_>

[schmevil]

There are aspects of Dixon's run that I prefer to Gail's, for sure.

[proteus_lives]

She's got enough room in her heart (and bed) for Dinah and Ted!

[bluefall]

I just don't get the hypotenuse shipping there. When in all of DC canon did Ted ever show any interest in Dinah, or Dinah in Ted? Have they even spent more than five minutes in the same room? Apart from the JLI I can't think when they've particularly interacted, and she was barely there in that series even for the few issues where she was present. There is no reason for that idea to ever even begin to occur to Babs, too many snugglers before bed or not.

Therefore I can only interpret this as a flat out fantasy of "person I'm hot for + person I'm hot for = scorching" and a total further validation of the baldfaced Babs/Dinah romance inherent in all things Birds.

(though when did Ted turn into such a goon? He looks like the MAD Magazine kid here, which... well, to each her own but I'm surprised she finds that sexy.)

[sallymustard]

Is it just me, or are Nazis popping up a lot lately?

[bluefall]

I don't think Nazis ever really stop popping up in comics, to be honest.

[darkknightjrk]

Yeah--isn't it the old saying that the reasons why Nazis are still used in stories is so that they can be killed indiscriminately and the audience won't feel too bad for them?

[psychopathicus_rex]

I believe her adversary is supposed to be Lashina, of the Female Furies.
Also, I know this is a fantasy and all, so it doesn't have to conform to reality, but... there WEREN'T any female US fighter pilots in WW2, were there? I know there were Russian ones, but...

[bluefall]

there WEREN'T any female US fighter pilots in WW2, were there?

In our world, no.

In their world, yes.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Well, Zinda, yes, but that's the Blackhawks; I meant regular fighter pilots.

[shadowpsykie]

fighter pilots no, as far as i know, but there were Pilots, the most flew amo, and supplies, don;t know if they dropped bombs, but they at least supplied them.

[lieut_kettch]

I know this is Dixon-err BoP, but what would make this perfect would be Dinah's squadron getting into a furball with the female Nazi ace's and getting the worst of it, only to hear a loud "HAAAWKAAAAH!" over her radio, with Zinda in her Blackhawk Squadron XF5F Skyrocket swooping in from above.

Even better-- despite winning, both Dinah and Zinda are low on fuel and have to ditch over Fascist Italy, where Babs puts them in contact with Partisan commander Helena Bertinelli to help smuggle them out of Axis territory.

[darkknightjrk]

...Man, I REALLY hope Gail's looking at this and having ideas form in her head. She'd just need to figure out something with Hawk and Dove and she could create something similar to the wild west issue of S6 a few months back. :D

[endis_ni]

Babs would have been splendid at Bletchley Park.