This is clearly my weekend to contemplate difficult fictional women. I’m really fond of DC’s Huntress, Helena Bertinelli, mostly because she’s such an underdog.
She has an iffy reputation in DC’s super-hero community. Batman disapproves of her, and many of his colleagues have fallen in line with that assessment. Many fans dislike her, maybe because they agree with Batman or because they preferred the pre-Crisis Earth 2 version. (I liked Helena Wayne a lot, too.)
But whenever a writer or character trots out Batman’s objections to Helena’s methods, I can’t help but consider the source. I’ve never been able to see too much of a qualitative distinction between his methods and hers (especially since War Games), so I’m naturally inclined to side with Huntress, because at least she’s not being a hypocrite.
Huntress, like many, many franchise characters, has gotten some really inconsistent handling during her relatively short career. One of the highlights of Gail Simone’s run on Birds of Prey has been the way she’s incorporated all of Helena’s history into a coherent whole while moving the character forward in interesting, entertaining ways. That has to be a tough trick to pull off, but I’m glad Simone did, because it’s given Huntress a degree of dignity and sympathy without sanding down too many of her sharper edges.
Simone wrote Saturday’s episode of Justice League Unlimited, “Double Date.” She does essentially the same thing, in that she has to take a lesser known DC character, communicate as much as an audience needs to know about Huntress, and tell an engaging story that stands on its own. And she has to do it in 20-odd minutes.
So it makes sense that Simone would pick the aspect of Helena’s character that’s defined her for much of her time as Huntress. Simone tells a story about Huntress as the violent, vengeful, and somewhat misunderstood truant. She picks up on themes that have been explored in the comics – Huntress failing to live up to Justice League standards because of her ruthlessness – while trying to add on as many layers as time allows – calling to mind Greg Rucka’s excellent mini-series, Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood, which introduces Huntress to the Question.
And that’s a perfectly fair approach. There’s a certain amount of distillation needed when turning long-standing comics characters into wide-release animated characters. I think Simone pulled off another tough trick. It’s just unfortunate (for me) that the way Simone did it rubs wrongly against my shameless pro-Huntress partisanship.
On a meta level, it was weird to see Black Canary be so unsympathetic towards Huntress. That doesn’t really have anything to do with the JLU universe; it’s just nerdish disappointment that a dynamic I enjoy from the comics wasn’t translated to Helena’s animated debut. (Okay, maybe it does. In Canary’s other spotlight episode, she did almost the exact same thing: manipulate a male colleague to further a very personal, morally questionable agenda. Way to empathize, cartoon Dinah!)
I’ve always liked comics Dinah, but she was further enshrined as an all-time favorite through her treatment of Helena. Instead of singing the company song (which Oracle was piping into her earpiece), Dinah decided to draw her own conclusions about Helena. She dealt with Helena on her own terms. That simple act of consideration was enough to spark a significant and positive change in Huntress, and it led to what I think is one of the great adventuring partnerships in contemporary comics. (Of course, control freak Oracle had to screw it up, but that’s been fun to watch, too.)
The obvious solution to my personal gripe is for JLU to let Simone write another episode where she picks up on Huntress and Black Canary a bit down the road. Now that Helena has been introduced and given something of a turning point, I would really like to see what her next steps are.
Speaking of next steps, I can’t get too bothered about DC’s announcement of the “one year later” mandate that’s going to tie into their next Crisis. In my experience, a lost year might be the best thing that happened to a lot of their titles, particularly if they pick up with different creative teams.
The exception, though, is Simone’s Birds of Prey. (Okay, and Manhunter is too, but that’s a different post.) One of the things that’s made this comic such a pleasure is the careful, incremental character work Simone has done with her cast. I really don’t want to miss a year of their adventures and interaction, because Simone has created the sense that important, nuanced shifts happen all the time. I’m sure she can pull off the time-jump in an effective way, but I really don’t want to miss 12 months of Helena’s life. She’s one of the few DC characters who actually changes and grows in interesting, significant ways, and it seems like a waste to skip over any of it.