For a comic book about the costume-wearing vigilante daughter of a costume-wearing vigilante and a costume-wearing cat burglar, the silliest thing about The Huntress: Darknight Daughter, is writer Paul Levitz's (modern) introduction, in which he sort of apologizes for the contents. “Please remember” he wrote them when he was only twenty. It's an inauspicious start to the collection and both unnecessary and, well, wrong. Levitz's has nothing to be ashamed of. Darknight Daughter is a very good collection, with a lot of great stuff in it.
My history with these stories goes back to the mid-1980s, when I discovered DC's Who's Who, a directory of DC Comics' characters, and learned all about characters I'd never known existed. Like Batman and Catwoman's daughter, the Huntress. Some time later, I discovered Huntress back-up stories, which Darknight Daughter collects, ran in Wonder Woman in the early 1980s. I never got around to getting said issues, just because they were kind of pricey. So I was excited when DC announced this collection.
I've read some other Levitz stuff--mostly from this period, though the Legion of Super-Heroes story came a little later--and I found it to be competent, engaging superhero stuff. Darknight Daughter has some shaky exposition, nothing to trip up the tongue, and some of the dialogue's a little weak, but again, never enough to give pause. Darknight Daughter's an interesting collection because, even though these stories ran--interrupted--for a few years, there's a definite narrative arc going on. There are probably three stories in the collection, one short, two lengthy. As for his costumed superhero, Levitz is somewhat unsure of his protagonist in her interactions with the bad guys (some of them, not all of them), but she's a fantastic character. Like Levitz's Justice Society of the same period, the feminism is from a definite, but well-intentioned male perspective. Contrasted with DC Comics's current rampant misogyny, it's astounding. Also briefly diverting (the content draws one quickly from these observations) is the liberalism, contrasted with the present (unspoken, but lurking) neo-con inclination of the publisher. Back on the subject of the Huntress character, Levitz presents a complex woman, struggling to find her place in the world--not just as a superhero, but as a lawyer, a girlfriend, and a daughter. Darknight Daughter works itself to a conclusion of sorts, nicely and totally coincidentally, since it was cancelled and I really wish it hadn't been.
There are a number of great relationships in Darknight Daughter, the best being between the Huntress and Power Girl. In the modern era, probably from 1989 on, Power Girl has been a beacon of mainstream comic books' objectification of women. But in these stories, she and the Huntress are friends who care about each other and their interactions are great to read. There's a somewhat standard romance running through the stories--it's still nice, but it's standard man-is-frightened-by-powerful-woman--so the second-best relationship has got to be Huntress and grown-up Robin. Levitz really presents a good, complicated, human relationship with it.
Levitz's other notable achievement is working so much content into these eight page stories. As much happens in each of them as happens in an entire “decompressed” comic book today. Levitz is well-known for his outlining and plot-structuring and it works.
Darknight Daughter's only significant disadvantage is the art. Joe Stanton pencilled all the stories, but he worked with a number of inkers. Some of them do okay--the art's not fantastic, but there's nothing noticeably wrong with it--and some of them do not. At the very end, for the final two stories, Jerry Ordway does the inks and it's a beautifully illustrated comic book.
As with Levitz's Justice Society, Darknight Daughter is a comic book excited to be a comic book, excited with the colors and flash and occasional silliness and not worried about pretense. However, it's a much better work, just because of Levitz's excellent characterization of the protagonist and his attention to the supporting cast. Darknight Detective is an antidote to the negativity of the modern DC comic books, which posit make-believe people as real and are empty of real emotion. Levitz's fine work fully accepts its condition as make-believe and has full of real human emotion. (Even if “darknight” isn't a real word... sorry, it was driving me nuts).
