Sweet Sweet Cetacean Lovin'

She was big, black, and beautiful: Orca the Whalewoman.

Whoosh! Now there's the antidote a brother needs to the gumbified spaghetti-girls of the DCU (no names, please!).

Poor Orca. So unloved, so unappreciated, both on Earth-1 and Earth-Prime.

Orca was kind and generous, creating and maintaining local soup kitchens in downtrodden Gotham neighborhoods. Orca was intelligent and educated, with a Ph.D. in Marine Biology and the science to casually convert herself into a whalewoman -- and back -- in her leisure hours. Orca was beautiful, with Rubenesque charms that even steely Batman could scarely resist:

There's just that much more to grab on to and love, huh, Bruce? After years of dating anorexic starlets, skinny photojournalists, and underfed event planners, Bruce can't wait to wrap his loving arms around a woman of substance, dorsal fin notwithstanding.






My goodness, Bruce! "Calling Dr. Light! You're wanted for a consultation!" Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at Batman's attraction to the unusual; one can only overhear so many JLA satellite conversations about sweet sweet octopus love without becoming curious about the charms of the sea.

Now, Orca did have her problems. She suffered from one of comics' most dire conditions, Eponymous Destiny. I mean, if you live in the DCU and your name is "Balin" and you're foolish enough to become a Marine Biologist specializing in cetology anyway -- well, you're asking for it. Treatment by writer Larry Hama resulted in complications: Combat Bloviation, the inability to stop talking at length about your motivations while fighting. When it developed into full-blown Combat Dialecticism, infecting Batman with extended audience-free debates about justice, society, and class conflict during table-breaking fight scenes like the ones above, triage was required.

To save Batman, both Orca and her creator Larry Hama were purged through Hypertime Therapy. In fact, if you look closely on page 146 of Crisis on Infinite Earths, you can see Larry in a crowd scene, about to be wiped out by a wall of anti-matter. Sad, really, but necessary.

Bring Orca back; Aquaman needs a crack at her!