Uhh, Pretty Bird??

Lord knows Frank Miller has clearly decided to go in a pretty far out direct with the DC Universe cast with ALL STAR BATMAN & ROBIN THE BOY WONDER. Then they released a preview this week to a variant cover for issue #3:



Hmmm...

Black Canary is one of DC Comics' most longstanding female heroes. In the JLA, she's second only to Wonder Woman. While she's always been portrayed as a hottie of stratospheric proportions, I can't help but speculate that Miller is going to paint Black Canary in a most unflattering light (words like "ridiculous" and "embarrassing" also come to mind). He hasn't exactly made out Batman to be the picture of nobility now, has he? I consider myself to be one of the more openminded comic book readers out there (I'm amazed almost daily how prudish and conservative a large contigency of the readership is these days -- the creators can always be expected to be liberal in general, while their faithful readers oftentimes act the opposite), but I can't see any good coming from this other than Miller continuing to put a SIN CITY-style imprint on this maddeningly popular retelling of the Batman and Robin legend.

Though I have the feeling that I would've been a lot less leery of this had the overall art execution been better. I love a lot of Frank Miller's art, but his attempts at the mainstream superhero characters he made infamous over 20 years ago have been hit or miss at best since DK2. Adam Hughes, Terry Dodson, Frank Cho, or even Kevin Maguire could've made this same Miller illustration truly something that would've split the Internet in half.

Now THIS is a Black Canary I can appreciate (thanks to Brian Bolland).