Talk:Black Orchid (character)

Femme fatale?

What is your reason for including this category? CovenantD 03:37, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Feminism portal/List of feminist comic books/Category: Feminist comics

I'm not hugely familiar with Black Orchid, but there's nothing in the content of the article that suggests she's a feminist character or that any of the books she appears in had feminist themes, yet it's been placed in the above feminist sections of Wikipedia. If anybody has access to books where she appears or articles about her that help shed some light, would you mind editing the article in such a way that makes it clear why she's considered a feminist character? ErdrickLoto (talk) 05:02, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

I haven't read them for a while, and don't remember any overtly feminist themes. On the other hand, she was a strong female lead (especially under Neil Gaiman), and in the comic field that's usually enough to earn a feminist label. Argento Surfer (talk) 12:27, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

In checking the List of feminist comic books and Category:Feminist comics, having a strong female lead doesn't seem to be the criteria. Manhunter, Spider-Girl, Stumptown, and Witchblade are all absent, to name just a few off the top of my head. To be clear, I'm not saying that I think Black Orchid should be removed from those lists and categories, it'd just be nice to see the rationale given in the article itself (even if the sole rationale actually is "there aren't many strong female leads in comics"). ErdrickLoto (talk) 00:17, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

A couple years later, and still no answer to this?

The Gaiman/McKean miniseries focuses on a female character's search for identity. Does that make it a feminist story? Gaiman himself isn't sure. In fact, he contrasted with an explicitly feminist idea that he'd come up with and rejected. (In that story, the source of Black Orchid's power would have been the fact that men in stories have varied and complex identities, but women are all generic background characters defined in terms of one of the men, so she can easily replace any of them without anyone noticing.)

But, whether or not it counts as feminist, it is important in the history of feminism in comics. At the time it came out, the publishers were cutting back on female-led stories entirely because nobody knew how to sell them. In fact, it was nearly delayed or canceled for that reason. Its unexpected success is a big part of what convinced people—in particular, editor Karen Berger—that they could reverse that trend. Berger went on to be responsible for greenlighting many more female-led stories, hiring many female artists, and creating the Vertigo imprint that (among many other things) allowed many different writers to explore more overtly feminist themes.

Without Orchid, something like Vertigo might have happened anyway. After all, DC needed some way to give Moore, Morrison, Milligan, Ellis, and the other crazy new boys an outlet for their weirder stuff in exchange for writing Batman stories. But (especially considering that those same writers' outlet back home had been 2000 AD), it might well not have been the same Vertigo that gave us things like Gaiman's Death, or any of Rachel Pollack's work.

All that being said, the "list of feminist comic books" page doesn't seem to include any of those later stories at all, except for Death, so… Maybe there aren't any good sources to support that Vertigo and Berger had any impact? In fact, the list looks pretty useless; maybe it would be better to just scrap it than to support why Black Orchid should be on it. --157.131.201.206 (talk) 04:51, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I've removed the links/categories, but this is the encyclopedia anyone can edit. That means you can make the changes you want to see instead of asking for it on the talk page. Argento Surfer (talk) 21:05, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Sure, but I think the right thing to do is to just scrap both the list article and the category. And not because of what I explained above (which is basically original research), but because there doesn't seem to be any solid criterion for either, they don't match each other, and nobody's even tried to source anything. But I'm pretty sure that deleting a category requires going through a whole complex process, not just being bold, and I don't have much interest in learning that process. --157.131.201.206 (talk) 08:57, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

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