Written by John Ridley
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli and Andrea Cucchi
Published by DC Comics
Sometimes a work of art, even one that’s planned far in advance, rhymes with the time in which it appears. It speaks to the moment, rises to meet it, reinterpret it, wrestle with it. Sometimes it can question it and even provide some answers.
The Other History of the DC Universe #3 does what the previous issues of this DC Black Label series has already done so well – to reframe and re-tell stories of DC characters from those often-sidelined, underserved characters of color.
But while the previous books focused on Black characters – Black Lightning, Malcolm Duncan and Bumblebee – John Ridley’s meditations take him to the Japanese character Katana.
At the time of this publication’s release, we’re amid a growing national conversation about the increase in attacks and harassment of Asians and Asian-Americans in this country.
It’s the low-boil xenophobia that picks up speed and grows into something large, obscene and horrific.
There’s Trump and the political right’s use of racialized names for the coronavirus, adding to idea of Asians and Asian things as foreign invaders here to infect us, outsiders never to be trusted.
And then a man who killed eight people, including six Asian women, in a mass shooting across Atlanta-area massage spas in mid-March.
The reports of abuse and attack increase, and the righteous fury is rising to push back at that hate. A fury to be visible, to be heard, to be heeded once and for all as themselves. Not as a model minority, not as the underclass to which far more of them belong, not as the sex workers and submissive go-alongers the dominant culture would say they are.
All of those things sit on my mind reading this issue, written in Katana’s voice, as a story of an outsider who becomes an Outsider.
Hell, it’s the first time I’ve read Katana from her own POV. She had a short-lived solo title years ago, and I missed it.
How do you reclaim the “ninja babe” Asian assassin with the magic sword that imprisons the souls of its victims? The story of Tatsu Yamashiro serves up a nesting doll of stereotypes and tropes around women, Asians, and Asian women that are a hallmark of a character created by a pair of white American men in 1983.
However, any longtime comics reader with a brain can argue that such a ragout of stereotypes and tropes also are the totemic things that so many superhero comics are built on to begin with. On its face, such an argument is not wrong. It just hits differently when a race, a culture, a nation never cared to see you as fully human, or as human as they are.
Ridley writes with anthemic power, as Tatsu tells her story as one of birth and rebirth. But not the phoenix rising from ashes, or with diva-goddess energy. For her, it’s blood and guts, and the disregarded toil of women in a patriarchal world.
“The birthing process is a painful and bloody event. It is endured by women, but presided over by men. My birth, my metaphorical birth, was both excruciating and gory. And it was men who had dominion over it.”
The story takes us through the beats of Katana’s origin story, to her alliance with Batman, to working with the Outsiders and beyond, each step a different kind of birth.
Ridley masterfully guides us through the life of a woman who came to see Tatsu as a dead life, wiped away by family tragedy and social neglect. In his telling, Katana’s existence as a vengeful assassin forged in pain made it inevitable that she would cross paths with Batman.
Like the Dark Knight, Katana operates on fear and terror.
Like Batman, Katana lets the superstitious and cowardly fears of criminals create a myth around her. This Katana doesn’t know martial arts, and the Soultaker sword is just hardened steel, nothing more. Ridley strips those things away to bring the ninja babe back to reality, to a more full-blooded humanity.
Guiseppe Camucoli and Andrea Cucchi, as usual, do well re-creating iconic covers and panels from DC history. So many of the original images are burned into my DC fan memory that I could recognize them without even consciously thinking that I have seen them before. But the art style, which resembles Bill Sienkiewicz at times, forgoes much of the slickness in comic art and adds a touch of grit and realism.
It’s what we need in a story that blends comic-book history with real-world events.
The title page states that this memoir covers the years 1983 to 1996. Katana reflects a time period that includes the murder of Vincent Chin, as well as the killings of Latasha Harlins and Eddie Lee that resulted from the interlocking and complex tensions with Black Americans within this white supremacist system before and during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
It’s what we need in this retelling of the infamous Judas Contract story, in which Katana calls Deathstroke by what he did to Terra — a grown man who raped and sexual manipulated an underage girl as a pawn in his war against the Teen Titans. It’s a storyline that DC still wrestles with because it remains so irredeemable, yet DC won’t let it disappear from continuity and memory.
Ridley attempts to recontextualize Terra and Deathstroke amid what we now call rape culture through Katana’s reframing of her story – and, later, Halo’s. It creates something more interesting yet still frustrating that these are the stories of female characters that we get so many of.
Katana undergoes more births in this story, and her motherly relationship with Halo – a light energy being that reanimated a dead woman – are among the most heartwarming parts of the book.
The parallels drawn with Batman work structurally as well. Katana casts Batman as the disturbed and brutal man whose heart and humanity still flickers enough to keep him from not killing, stands next to the disturbed and brutal woman who has killed dozens and learns to find just enough humanity again.
Sadly, this surrogate mother’s second chance also ends in blood, as Halo’s old life returned and led to a bloody end. In this way, Katana mirrors Batman again, and the death of Jason Todd, the second Robin.
But Katana has another chance to be born again. A battle with Lady Shiva, a T-1000 of Asian female assassins hired by Katana’s old boss, runs Katana through with the Soultaker sword.
In a stunning sequence, Katana realizes that her life as a swordswoman was surface text to the truth that she has rebuilt herself into a fighter. Katana gives birth again – this time, to herself, in blood and guts.
I put my hands on the hilt of my sword – my sword – and, measure by measure, I drew my sword from my body. I spilled flesh and blood. I screamed with agony. But I did not die. I would not die.
In her lifetime, Lady Shiva had seen many things. But she had never seen the likes of me. She has given me her worst, and I had literally taken it. I couldn’t beat Lady Shiva in a fight, so she did not respect me. But Lady Shiva could not kill me, so she feared me. I treasured fear above all else.
Do we call this stereotype, or iconic? Another trope of female pain and struggle recast as triumph, or is it Bruce Wayne in Batman: Year One, bleeding out in his father’s study as a wayward bat crashes through the windowpane?
Katana heals and goes on to end her story of trauma and vengeance. She finds a new path.
Maybe not a hero, and definitely not an assassin, but fighting alongside heroes, fighting for anyone who needs a hero. Embracing the Outsider adversity as the strength it made her.
Amid current events, Katana issues a rallying cry to others like her. To those whose fierce independence pushes them above the bigotry to “fight for something that is beyond the given.”
Read this one a few more times and say it louder for the people in the back.
