BoP

[mamadeb]

I have to treat it like Smallville, and just accept that these people with familiar names are *not* the ones I know. It's especially egregious for Dinah Lance, whom I think of as Black Canary II, a very tough woman in at least her thirties, trained in all martial arts and having a sonic scream that is a weapon all itself. However, I like this Dinah, with her psychic powers and her real strength and sense of purpose, so it's okay.

Barbara is fine. They kept everything important, except for the teaching thing, which Barbara has never done, and they haven't spoken about her father yet. These are both minor, and Barbara *feels* like Barbara to me. They even kept her clocktower, which is cool.

Helena. *Sigh*. This is the hardest part. I think of Dinah as totally original, and Barbara is Barbara. Helena, though. That she's Bruce and Selina's daughter is actually fine, because the original Huntress *was* the daughter of Bruce and Selina Wayne on an alternate Earth called Earth II. That she wears that costume is less so, and where are her crossbows? A Huntress needs crossbows, darn it!

Seriously, though, the part that bothers me is that she's a metahuman. Neither the original Huntress (who was made to never have existed during the Crisis that destroyed all the alternate Earths) or the current one, a mob daughter/schoolteacher named Helena Bertinelli, are metahumans. So far as I know, Black Canary is the only metahero in the Batbooks, and she only got her Scream back last summer. Until that point, she was like the rest of them - training and toys. And she still prefers to use the training and toys to her voice.

I think of that as one of the major strengths of the bat books - that this crew of basically normal humans does the job. Heck, Nightwing takes care of his own city with no help at all. Making Helena meta kinda defeats that.

However, I like the interactions to a degree, and I'm intrigued by the plot, and I like Helena as herself, so We Shall See.