Black Canary

36 years ago - Dinah Lance is born in Manhattan, the daughter of Larry Lance & Laurel Drake, who takes leave of absence from the All-Star Squadron.

32 years ago - 4-year-old Dinah begins to learn to play piano from her father, Larry Lance.

30 years ago - 6-year-old Dinah begins regularly spending time in the All-Star Squadron Perisphere. Ted Grant starts teaching her to fight. She insists that she's also going to be a hero someday.

28 years ago - 8-year-old Dinah's mother Laurel Drake retires as Black Canary when she is injured while fighting William Asmodeus Zard. She starts to focus on teaching Dinah martial arts.

24 years ago - 12-year-old Dinah is brought by Ted Grant to meet O-Sensei. Her mother Laurel Drake travels with them. She spends several months training under Richard Dragon & Ben Turner.

22 years ago - 14-year-old Dinah's father Larry Lance is killed in the line of duty. Her mother Laurel Drake forbids her from taking up the mantle of Black Canary. Dinah focuses her energy on her music, secretly continuing her training with Ted Grant.

20 years ago - 16-year-old Dinah releases her first album, a post-punk rock project with the band Ashes on Sunday. She goes on tour, her mother Laurel Drake and Ted Grant both accompanying her as her managers. She begins to don her own costume, secretly setting out as the new Black Canary with Ted’s help.

19 years ago - 17-year-old Dinah stops Stephen Sharpe from assassinating the daughter of a senator at an Ashes on Sunday concert.

18 years ago - 18-year-old Dinah finishes her tour. Rather than return home she travels again to O-Sensei's dojo, continuing her training with Richard Dragon & Ben Turner. When she returns she releases a second album, beginning another tour to continue secretly using her training as Black Canary.

17 years ago - 19-year-old Dinah goes up against the sonic-powered terrorist Discord who tries to take her concert hostage while Laurel Drake is visiting her on tour. She manifests her canary cry for the first time, the result of a minor mutation from her mother’s superhero career that would have gone undetected if she wasn’t an expert in vocal control. Realizing that she is destined to be a hero no matter what, Laurel finally gives Dinah her blessing.

16 years ago - 20-year-old Dinah joins several other heroes in Happy Harbor, Maine, defeating a Starro invasion. She joins them as a founding member of the Justice League.

15 years ago - 21-year-old Dinah is contacted by King Faraday, and agrees to take freelance work for the DEO, stopping Nathan Prince from assassinating a state senator. She saves the Justice League from Professor Ivo & Amazo.

14 years ago - 22-year-old Dinah undertakes a mission for the DEO, working alongside her mentors Richard Dragon & Ben Turner, as well as Sandra Wu. They infiltrate Kobra, uncovering much of their operational data. She and Sanda are antagonistic at first, but develop a healthy respect for each other. She first meets new Justice League member Oliver Queen, who is obviously smitten with her.

13 years ago - 23-year-old Dinah first meets Oliver Queen's new ward & sidekick, Roy Harper. Seeing how much he longs for the approval of a mentor, she starts to work in Star City more often, her relationship with Oliver becoming more serious.

12 years ago - 24-year-old Dinah is attacked by the Monkey Fist Cult.

11 years ago - 25-year-old Dinah, while working with the DEO, first encounters the Golden Dragon, a human smuggling organization that trains its victims to become assassins. Working to take them down, She confronts Sandra Wu, fighting her so that she doesn’t kill the advanced assassin students. Sandra relents, acknowledging Dinah as a potential equal.

10 years ago - 26-year-old Dinah assists Oliver Queen & Roy Harper in shutting down the criminal syndicates of Danny Brickwell, bringing the crime boss to justice. She moves in with Oliver. Laurel Drake visits and remarks on how much Oliver reminds her of Larry Lance.

9 years ago - 27-year-old Dinah is present when the Justice League votes on what to do with Arthur Light after he attacks Sue Dibny on the satellite, and votes not to alter Light's mind. She recognizes her old teacher, Ben Turner, when the League of Assassins sends him to test Oliver Queen. She proves to be the bigger threat, but Turner is able to overcome his brainwashing to misdirect the League away from her. She begins tracking the League while Oliver leaves Star City to uncover corruption in Queen Consolidated with Hal Jordan, leaving Roy Harper to protect the city, unaware that William Tockman is poised to take over all organized crime in the city.

8 years ago - 28-year-old Dinah, Ted Grant & Richard Dragon free Ben Turner from the control of the League of Assassins. She accepts an invitation to join the new Justice League. Returning to Star City, she discovers that Oliver Queen has kicked Roy Harper out of his home due to his drug addiction. She ends her relationship with Ollie, moving into her own loft where she takes Roy in, supporting him to get the help he needs. She goes behind Ollie’s back to accept an offer from William Tockman on the location of dangerous vigilante Eric Needham, brings him in, and stops the killing spree of Liam Hawkleigh.

7 years ago - 29-year-old Dinah's mother Laurel Drake dies suddenly of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer. She quits the Justice League, and moves into her mother’s flower shop in Manhattan, recording & releasing a new album. Roy Harper takes over her commission with the DEO, going undercover as a member of the Ravens.

6 years ago - 30-year-old Dinah rushes to make sure Roy Harper is alright after the Qurac bombing, helping him process his guilt and promising to help him in any way she can. When Ted Grant is severely injured participating in illegal fighting tournaments Dinah investigates, discovering the mind control tech used by underground promoter Veronica Sinclair. She enters the tournament, losing herself to her anger and need for revenge, until Sandra Wu defeats her and shuts down the tournament for her.

5 years ago - 31-year-old Dinah works with Roy Harper's Teen Titans, helping train them in hand-to-hand combat. When she learns that Jade Nguyen is withholding Roy's daughter Lian Harper from him she hunts her down herself, nearly beating her before she is poisoned and left near-catatonic. She is found by the Titans and saved by Pieter Cross. Once Jade is caught by the titans, she gets to meet Lian.

4 years ago - 32-year-old Dinah's flower shop is destroyed by William Tockman in retaliation for the effectiveness of the new Green Arrow, Connor Hawke. She works with him to find the bomber. She is contacted by Barbara Gordon, agreeing to become her operative, starting the Birds of Prey.

3 years ago - 33-year-old Dinah has to track Barbara Gordon, finding her clocktower, to stop Lady Elaine Marsh-Morton from killing her, marking the first time they'd met in person. Helena Bertinelli starts working with the Birds of Prey despite some tension as she’s slept with both of their exes.

2 years ago - 34-year-old Dinah helps build an entirely new Justice League after the death of Ted Kord, serving as their new chairperson. Tracking a series of missing persons, Dinah uncovers a new version of Veronica Sinclair's underground fighting tournament. Refusing to compete, she shuts it down by freeing the mind controlled fighters with Barbara Gordon's help.

1 year ago - 35-year-old Dinah receives an invitation to the Monkey Fist Tournament. Following the human trafficking organization the Golden Dragon, she enters the tournament to further her investigation along with Ted Grant & Connor Hawke. She meets Sin the Golden Dragon fighter, and commits to winning the tournament to free her. She beats Slade Wilson. stopping his tear through the tournament. Her final battle is with Sandra Wu, who ultimately ‘loses’ so she can pursue her own agenda. Dinah frees the prisoners of the Golden Dragon, taking in Sin herself to live with her and attend school in New York.

now - 36-year-old Dinah discovers that Sin has created a Red Canary persona, going out to fight crime the same way she did at the same age. Trying to reconcile her desire to keep Sin safe while also allowing her the freedom to make her own choices, she introduces her to music, starting to work on new songs. When Oliver Queen creates new harm reduction facilities for drug users around Star City, publicly talking about his own failure to provide care for someone he loved, she makes sure to talk to Roy Harper before returning to Star City and asking Ollie on a date.

Black Canary is definitely one of the most prolific characters in all of DC. She was either actively or retroactively involved in virtually every era of DC's continuity and a surprising majority of its most important teams. She's established as one of their tentpole characters, almost specifically BECAUSE she wasn't trying to drive whole sections of plot. She was built as a supporting character, and managed to stay that way for a very long time, constantly outshining the characters she was meant to support.

Eventually we got a modern, leading character version of Black Canary, and wouldn't you know it, she continued to be just as cool as ever, like she was just waiting for comics to catch up with her. This is one of those timelines that is really just about trying to put a spotlight on all the great content we have for the character. She's something special, and I hope you like what we did!

Black Canary's Comic History

It's actually kind of hard to nail down a first appearance of the modern Black Canary, Dinah Lance, because she was created in the midst of a pretty huge retcon that was almost immediately walked back. Black Canary, the character, of course first appeared back in 1947 as a supporting character for Johnny Thunder, but within a year had fully taken over the feature, as well as taken Johnny's role in the Justice Society. In the 60's she would appear in crossovers between the Society and the new Justice League, but would eventually cross Earths to become a permanent member of the Justice League where she would start her long-standing romance with Green Arrow, who was notably younger than her.

This stood for decades, until in 1983 a new twist was introduced; We discover that when Dinah crossed Earths she also had her consciousness swapped with the body of her daughter, who had been placed in suspended animation as a baby but who had grown to adulthood, and then had the memory of doing so wiped. This was done to explain the fact that she wasn't aging as fast as the other Earth 2 characters over in the pages of All-Star Squadron, with only the small downside that it is completely insane.

A few years later, the Crisis of Infinite Earths sorted this out; the modern Black Canary was now the daughter of the original, having grown up while her mom was in the Justice Society. This means that now, retroactively, Black Canary's entire membership with the Justice League, as well as her romance with Green Arrow, now belonged to the modern, younger character. This is a long-winded way to say that the first appearance of Dinah Lance, TECHNICALLY, is Justice League #75, her first appearance after crossing between Earths.

All that said, It really is in the aftermath of the Crisis of Infinite Earths that we really meet Dinah Lance, even though she'd been around for some time. While she made appearances in Detective Comics, her story was really being told over in Mike Grell's Green Arrow. This is a great series and Dinah had some really fantastic moments, but she very clearly wasn't the main character. What's more, many of the more problematic developments in Oliver & Dinah's relationship started here, where It was sometimes clear that Grell didn't always want his hero to be in a relationship.

In the meantime, Dinah was also a part of the new Giffen & DeMatteis Justice League. She was given a new, incredibly '80s costume, and certainly got her screen time, but ultimately the series was being written for laughs. Dinah wasn't unfunny, but she wasn't really driving the plot.

To be clear, this wasn't a down era for Black Canary, She had a number of very good miniseries of her own, and DC absolutely seemed to understand that she was a very cool character, and they needed to get her right. While DC as a whole was shaking itself out after the crisis and finding it's legs, there was just a very real, pervasive sense that this was a major character that had undergone a REAL upheaval and was just primed for someone to grab her and run with her.

We got exactly that in 1996. After the death of Oliver Queen, Dinah first appeared with Oracle in her ear in a story called 'Birds of a Feather' in Showcase, teaming up with Lois Lane. Later that same year we got the one-shot Birds of Prey: Black Canary/Oracle by Chuck Dixon. This was followed up with their ongoing series, Birds of Prey, which makes up some of the best work of Chuck Dixon's extensive era writing the Bat Family. Within a few years Gail Simone took over the series, made it her own, and gave us literally some of the best traditional superhero comic stories of the 2000s.

This is really where Dinah finally comes into her own as a complete character. I don't want to undersell how much Mike Grell Green Arrow series did to create the groundwork for who she was going to be, this new daughter of the original character who was suddenly the hero of all those classic Justice League stories. The character created there was still present and recognizable, but given such a huge stage she just instantly developed so much more complexity. She was an adventure hero in the purest, most distilled sense of the concept. She had complex motivations and personal challenges that all made sense given the life she lead. Her relationship with Barbara, her partner and eventual best friend, developed into one of the best interpersonal relationships in comics. This was also a post-Ollie Dinah. When he inevitably returned from the dead their relationship suddenly carried a previously-absent complexity, because Dinah had become a far more complex character than she had been. We can dig deeper into what was happening there later.

After a real whiff of an attempt to create a New 52 Black Canary (just a poor interpretation of her mom), we've seen several new permutations on the character in the following years. There were new wrinkles like a career as a rock star, or leading a new ultra-powered version of the Birds of Prey. Dinah is a character that doesn't always get to play on the main stage, but every time she gets the limelight she's invariably one of the best characters they have to play with.

Our Black Canary Story

Building up at timeline for Dinah is one of the most fun tasks we've tackled in a while. There were so many ways we could explore her story, and so many relationships for us to spotlight. Her relationship with her mother is so deliberately complex, with Dinah striving to follow in her footsteps, and then stymied by her mother's desire to keep her safe. Her love affair with Oliver is built on their mutual need to be forces of good, only for it to need to stop while Ollie learns some lessons about how to do that. There's the defining friendship with Barbara; which needs to remain at the core of the Birds of Prey no matter what.

Those are the big obvious ones, but there are so many more to focus on. Her uncle and mentor Ted Grant is a constant through her entire career, eventually growing to the point where he's more of HER sidekick. The role she played in helping Roy Harper overcome his hardships is, I think, widely underemphasized, so much so that I think it's far more accurate to say he's a Black Canary supporting character than a Green Arrow one. Her rivalry with Lady Shiva should feel resonant and constant as the two come to understand themselves better through their interactions with each other. All of this in a career that grows from story to story layered on top of each other with enough space to feel earned. A big dense narrative built around a great, dynamic character.

Dinah Lance & Oliver Queen

For a long time, if you asked someone to name one detail about Black Canary, the most likely answer would be her romance with Green Arrow. It largely defined her for most of her tenure with the Justice League. The retcon changing her so that she was the second Black Canary, daughter of the first, meant that there was an unavoidable change in the Dinah/Oliver dynamic, in that their relative ages reversed. Instead of an older woman and a younger man, it was now a younger woman with an older man, with all the weird cultural bias stuff that comes with it.

I have to confess that I was carrying around a weird bias about these two for a long time. My comic reading really started in the 90s, where almost all depictions of Green Arrow were either reflections of or in dialog with the Mike Grell Green Arrow series. For everything cool that series did for these characters, it really introduced some problematic elements to their relationship. Dinah often felt sidelined or left out, and Oliver often seemed to skirt right along the edge of infidelity. This was how I understood Green Arrow to operate and didn't consider it a mischaracterization to be fixed. In my mind, Dinah was better off without him.

That's wrong, though. It's important that we make sure Green Arrow is a character that Dinah WOULD be attracted to, and that this pairing ultimately DOES work. Ollie is a flawed character, make no mistake, but we should see him grown and improve over the years, and more importantly so should Dinah.

Black Canary, Rockstar

It's now classic to see Black Canary playing her harmonica while on Justice League monitor duty, but in the past decade or so we've started to see the emergence of the idea that Dinah is a full-on musician, from the Birds of Prey movie where she was a lounge singer, to the 2015 series were she actually became the lead singer for the band Ashes on Sunday, which even led to the release of a pair of very good EPs. This is such an intriguing idea; a superhero rockstar feels like such fertile territory, and Dinah is such an interesting character to imagine in this role, so we really wanted to take a stab at making this part of her story from the beginning.

To make this feel like its really coming from her, we built in the idea that her dad, in addition to being a cop, was a lifelong musician. The same way she follows in her mom's footsteps as a superhero, she follows in her dads on stage. There's a period in her teens when her mother was forbidding her to become Black Canary and she was doing it anyway. We decided to make this happen while she is a touring teenage rockstar, with both her Mom and Uncle Ted as her managers. This immediately infuses that whole era with a distinct Hanna Montana / Jem & The Holograms energy that is new to Black Canary's story but immediately feels correct for Dinah's pre-Justice League years. There's even wigs involved. Of course, music remains a big part of her life even years later, giving her something to return to when she needs to return to herself.

Black Canary's Costume

I find myself repeating a lot of the same ideas every time I write about costumes for some of these classic female characters, about how costumes can be sexy without being exploitive, and that sometimes it's even possible for sexuality to be empowering. I'd say it's mostly to do with intention; that when a competent artist sets out to draw a character that is both sexy and empowered, I think we can all pretty much recognize when they pull it off.

I bring this up now because, even though Black Canary has been a lady in fishnets practically for her entire career going all the way back to 1947, I think she's ALWAYS been intentionally depicted as empowered. There are images of her that are more deliberately sexualized than others, but generally I think there's been a recognizable undercurrent of strength and confidence that permeates her character, and that's very cool.

As far as Dinah's actual costume, I think she very likely starts out more or less in exactly her mothers' classic costume, sans mask, and also probably starts out wearing a blonde wig just like her, but over time I think certain elements just naturally evolve. The emphasis on her gloves and boots as she becomes a better and better fighter, The zipper down the front of her costume instead of the corset. Her just going blonde full-time. The introduction of the bird logo on both her suit and the back of her jacket. She just seems like someone whose look would continually become more and more her own as she grows. One thing that doesn't change, however, is the fishnets. That's like Superman's cape at this point.

Black Canary's Future

As we leave our timeline Black Canary had just done so many cool things. She just helped found a brand new version of the Justice League and is serving as their chairperson, and by any possible metric is absolutely killing it. She's doing so while also remaining a full member of the Birds of Prey. The comics used Dinah's stint as the Justice League chairperson as the reason she stepped away from the Birds but if anything we imagine that would make them work even closer.

There is of course our Monkey Fist Tournament, a story we just love, where Dinah joined a small cadre of the worlds best martial artists on the remote island of the Monkey Fist Cult. There are a number of plots playing out there but for Dinah the focus was on saving the kids being held there by the Golden Dragon, most notably Sin. To that end Dinah goes on to actually win the whole tournament, all so she can save Sin and bring her home to New York.

That's probably the biggest change; Dinah has recently become the surrogate big sister and parent to a young teenager. All of a sudden she finds herself in the same shoes her mother once wore, torn between what's best for her charge while also wanting to keep her safe. It's absolutely the perfect place for her story to go next. So many of Dinah's contemporaries are starting to reach the ends of their careers, thinking about passing on their legacies, but she was always the youngest of that generation. She's absolutely in her prime, and will very likely continue to both mentor the heroes of today and tomorrow, and lead them by her own kick-ass example.

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