Despite being more popular than ever, the ladies of the Gotham City Sirens have struggled to keep an ongoing team title going in the modern era. It’s always fun to have Harley, Ivy, and Catwoman team up and take down the seedier citizens of Gotham in their own way, so why is DC still dangling the prospect of a new Sirens ongoing in front of us? After last year’s Summer series Unfit for Orbit, I was expecting something with Gotham’s leading ladies, and now we have a new Black Label series from writer Tini Howard and artist Babs Tarr to fill the void. While it’s not in continuity, Sirens: Love Hurts a great showcase for what that team could do on a regular ongoing series with the three ladies.
After meeting up with Black Canary for an impromptu brunch, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, and Catwoman hit up a mob hideout for their latest heist. It’s a standard breaking and entering, until they come across the body of young woman with stab markings. As Canary confronts them for leaving her high and dry with the brunch bill, the ladies decide to start investigating the crime in their own ways. The Sirens use their criminal underground connections to get more information on the young girl, while Canary teams with her new fiancé Oliver Queen (aka Green Arrow) to try and go about it in the more “upfront vigilante” style. Yet despite their best efforts, fate keeps causing their pathways to cross, and they begrudgingly accept that the best way to get justice for the victim and stop the killer before his next attack is to team up. With their only lead being the recently released Julian Day, aka The Calendar Man, they start their search, but all may not be as it seems with the holiday themed killer.
One of the big reasons why people love the Gotham City Sirens is because of the interplay between the three leads, and Tini Howard’s script has that in full here. From the opening page the banter between Harley, Ivy, and Catwoman is fast, light, and extremely entertaining, cluing us into the fact that in this story, the Sirens have been friends for a long time and have a lot of history behind them. Having Dinah Lance be our “in” to the friend group is a lot of fun, as her overwhelmed nature at being tossed into this group of borderline criminals matches our own feelings of being tossed into yet another Black Label series with its own continuity. The relationships between the three Sirens and between Selina and Dinah also adds a fun layer to the investigation, allowing Selina to really toe the line between hero and villain quite literally as she attempts to bring Dinah into the friend group, albeit with both having their own motivations for doing so.
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Babs Tarr’s art has always been extremely dynamic and one of my personal favorites, so seeing her get to put her own spin on some Gotham icons is a real treat. The ladies here are strong, confident, and extremely badass, and Tarr makes that shine through her depictions of them. Whether they are investigating a crime scene or just hanging out on a rooftop bar for brunch,Tarr’s sense of fashion is perfectly suited for this type of book, and she brings a lot of fresh and exciting looks for the Sirens in this issue, both in costume and out. I won’t be surprised if we end up seeing a lot of new cosplayers donning some of these looks at the next major convention.
One thing that should be mentioned about Sirens: Love Hurts is that as a Black Label book, this is a little more adult-skewing than the other titles starring these characters. But like the other books in the Black Label line, that’s used in a way to ground the story and show the Sirens as real characters interacting like friends do in real life. That groundedness adds to the mystery as well, which, while still being introduced, is definitely taking more of backseat in this issue to allow for the main characters to get to know one another. But when the characters are portrayed this well, what’s not to like? Sirens: Love Hurts is the perfect Valentine to fans of these characters, and a promising start to a new story with them.
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