At least Katana is getting her own book!

That's a little something, huh?  We can't have our favorite DC martial artist, but we can have our second, third or perhaps fourth favorite, right?

I wrote about this on my other blog back during the summer when everyone expected Katana to spin off solo-style in September.  It was a little speculative at the time, but here we are a few months later and it's official and what little I know of it so far has me interested.

Ann Nocenti as writer, Alex Sanchez on art.  I really don't know much at all about Sanchez.  Maybe I've seen his art and I've forgotten it, maybe I've never seen it, maybe he just hasn't rung my bell yet.

I'm vaguely familiar with and have always gotten a positive vibe from Nocenti because she was editing and writing back when I was going through my "golden age" of comic book readership.  At Marvel, Nocenti edited New Mutants (one of my all-time fave series), had a run on Daredevil and dropped a large number of single issue stories into their other titles and annuals.  While her work at DC doesn't seem as extensive, she's got a lot of outside-of-comics credits that I'm only just now discovering in the wake of this announcement:  film writing, travel writing, co-directing a documentary, teaching film.  Her take on Katana seems to involve some Akira Kurosawa (as I asked for in my little blog post) and Sam Peckinpah, which has me very intrigued.  I've read Kurosawa's Something Like and Autobiography and the Donald Richie book A Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema so I get what Nocenti's saying about Kurosawa's films "[sharing] the spirit of American Westerns."  If anyone happened to write a Cass Cain series ever again, I'd hope for some similar influences rather than going to the Joss Whedon well and dipping out cutesy-pie stuff.  Applying them to a character I like and who has hands down the best costume in the entire DC universe?

Well, that convinces me to buy the first two or three issues at least.  The only thing she could have done that would have excited me more would have been to toss in some Takeshi Kitano or Kinji Fukasaku for good measure.

Or casually mention Cass as a guest star.