Laurel Drake

63 years ago - Laurel Drake is born in Manhattan, the daughter of a police detective & a burlesque dancer.

54 years ago - 9-year-old Laurel's mother is shot stopping a mugging. Because her parents are unmarried, her father is initially denied custody. He wins his appeal, but is denied promotion to lieutenant as a result.

50 years ago - 13-year-old Laurel tells her father that she wants to be a cop, to help catch people like the ones who killed her mom. He begins teaching her, making sure she can outfight anyone.

45 years ago - 18-year-old Laurel attends Borough of Manhattan College, studying criminal justice.

43 years ago - 20-year-old Laurel earns an associates degree in criminal justice and applies to the police academy, but is rejected despite excellent scores.

42 years ago - 21-year-old Laurel's father is killed in the line of duty. She finds evidence that he was killed by corrupt cops, but no one will listen to her. She becomes Black Canary, tracking her father’s killers herself. She finds an ally in officer Larry Lance, and when they successfully find their quarry and expose a ring of police corruption, they become partners. She purchases her flower shop as a front.

41 years ago - 22-year-old Laurel encourages Larry Lance to return to working as a studio musician. He becomes a better detective because of it.

40 years ago - 23-year-old Laurel infiltrates a hidden S.H.A.D.E. lab experimenting on several unwitting pregnant women's fetuses, shutting it down. The head scientist, Doctor Benjamin Love, escapes without being associated with the experiment.

39 years ago - 24-year-old Laurel & Larry Lance are married.

38 years ago - 25-year-old Laurel helps found the All-Star Squadron to stop Vandal Savage from taking over all the world's communications. She regularly partners with Ted Grant.

36 years ago - 27-year-old Laurel & Larry Lance have their daughter Dinah Lance. She takes a leave of absence from the All-Star Squadron to care for her, returning within the year.

34 years ago - 29-year-old Laurel fights Rose Canton, stopping her from assassinating a wealthy business magnate, but she escapes police custody and kills her target, disappearing before Laurel can find her.

30 years ago - 33-year-old Laurel starts to bring Dinah Lance with her to the All-Star Squadron Perisphere. Ted Grant starts teaching her to fight. Dinah insists that she's also going to be a hero someday

28 years ago - 35-year-old Laurel & Ted Grant are injured while fighting William Asmodeus Zard. When Larry Lance is promoted to Lieutenant, they decide for her to retire as Black Canary. She starts to focus on teaching Dinah Lance martial arts.

26 years ago - 37-year-old Laurel & Ted Grant are attacked by the Monkey Fist Cult.

24 years ago - 39-year-old Laurel & Dinah Lance travel to Japan with Ted Grant to meet O-Sensei, where Dinah spends several months training under Richard Dragon & Ben Turner.

22 years ago - 41-year-old Laurel's husband Larry Lance is killed in the line of duty. She attempts to continue as if everything is normal, but she stops teaching Dinah Lance martial arts, forbidding her from ever taking up the mantle of Black Canary.

20 years ago - 43-year-old Laurel & Ted Grant both accompany Dinah Lance on her first tour as her managers.

18 years ago - 45-year-old Laurel permits Dinah Lance to go on her second tour alone.

17 years ago - 46-year-old Laurel visits Dinah Lance on tour, and sees her becoming Black Canary to fight the sonic-powered terrorist Discord as he tries to take her concert hostage. Realizing that she is destined to be a hero no matter what, Laurel finally gives Dinah her blessing.

10 years ago - 53-year-old Laurel visits Star City when Dinah Lance moves there, and meets Oliver Queen, remarking on how much he reminds her of Larry Lance.

9 years ago - 54-year-old Laurel declines a request from Ted Grant to join the new Justice Society.

7 years ago - 56-year-old Laurel dies suddenly of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer.

The Original Black Canary, called Dinah Drake in the comics, has an absolutely fascinating history. She was invented to essentially push other characters, and in the process managed to continually take over more and more space. Her original features, superhero teams in multiple eras from multiple earths... Dinah just continued to grow in popularity and never really stopped. She's expanded to become one of the most important legacies in DC practically without anyone intending to do so.

Obviously the modern Black Canary is one of the biggest characters in their entire catalog, but for her to be in the world you really have to get the original right, and exploring her history and her impact on comics is really fun. Most of what we changed was more to build on what was already there than to alter anything, so we really hope you enjoy this one!

Dinah Drake's Comic History

Dinah Drake, the original Black Canary, debuted in Flash Comics #86 in 1947, in a Johnny Thunder feature meant to shake up the character by adding a femme fatale. At first she seemed like a thief that Johnny was falling for (The Thunderbolt even cautioned him against falling in love with a villainess), but as she appeared in more features it became clear that she was secretly fighting a war on crime. What's more, she was considerably better at it than Johnny, who was really a comedy character. Within a few issues the feature became a double bill, and in less than a year, Dinah was not only on the cover of Flash Comics, but in her own solo feature replacing Johnny. Similarly, she showed up for the first time in All-Star Comics #38 within a year of her debut, and within two issues had fully taken Johnny's place in the Justice Society, making her the first post-war addition to the team.

This was all done pretty deliberately; Robert Kanigher was writing Johnny Thunder and really didn't care for him, so he had Carmine Infantino create his 'fantasy of a good-looking girl'. Everyone loved the design, fast-tracking her to her larger role in DC History.

This continued in the pages of Justice League of America, as the Justice Society would continually team-up with the League, crossing over from Earth 2 to Earth 1. This happened for the first time in 1963, and by 1969, in issue #74, Dinah's husband Larry sacrificed himself to save her. Heartbroken, Dinah chose to leave her Earth behind, moving to Earth 1 and becoming a member of the Justice League. This makes her the very first character to serve on BOTH teams.

Dinah remained a steadfast member of the League, eventually having her romance with Green Arrow, long into the 80s. In 1983 (when DC was already deep into the planning for the Crisis of Infinite Earths), a new wrinkle was introduced. It turns out, sometime in the past Dinah and Larry had a daughter (also called Dinah) who was cursed by the Wizard. So she was placed in suspended animation in the extradimensional space of Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt. Years later, when transitioning between Earths, Dinah was brought to her daughter, and their consciousness were exchanged, effectively making it so that the Dinah who had been on the League the whole time was actually the daughter?

I've just reread this comic three times in a row and I honestly have no idea what exactly happened, but we were only a few years out from the Crisis anyway, when all this multiple Earth hoopla would be binned in favor of one timeline, and this retcon would get retconned.

Coming out of the Crisis, we first saw Black Canary in the pages of Detective Comics, where they quickly sort a very messy backstory into something much simpler. This new origin was expanded and thoroughly explained in Secret Origin # 50, showing how our modern Dinah was the daughter of the original, having grown up surrounded by members of the Justice Society as her beloved 'uncles'. The original Black Canary, Dinah Drake, was now retired. The story in Secret Origins used her death as a framing device, showing her daughter at her side in the hospital reminiscing about her mother's career. This means that a LOT of the content once attributed to the elder Dinah is now entirely the younger Dinah's story; for example her entire membership in the Justice League, and her relationship with a younger Oliver Queen.

This doesn't mean that the elder Dinah doesn't have some fun roles to play, however. Comics are constantly using this mother/daughter relationship in fun or complex ways. Arguably, Watchmen really mined a version of this for as much drama as they could squeeze out of it, but there's also lots of playful interaction to be found in flashback in stories like JLA: Year One. This 1998 series also suggested that Dinah had a brief affair with Ted Knight while still married to Larry... I think you have more leeway to impose intrigue like this when you're writing these characters as retired heroes looking back on their lives and mistakes, but I really don't know if I like the idea of introducing infidelity to this particular relationship.

Our Laurel Drake Story

Our initial goal is of course to set up the modern Black Canary, but there is a ton of fun to be had with the original. First of all, we did a little name gymnastics, giving original Dinah the name Laurel, which is canonically the younger Dinah's middle name. It just makes it easier to tell them apart.

We are pretty much just using the post-crisis story for Laurel verbatim; we're moving her to our All-Star Squadron so that she's able to have a modern-day child, and in doing so found that we could create this fantastic relationship between her and Wildcat, who of course is another mentor for her daughter. As we built up Dinah's timeline, we just found again and again ways to make both characters stories denser and richer by playing with the relationship between mother and daughter. When we created a teenage career as a rockstar for Dinah, we got to make Laurel one of her managers, creating a story that feels like a Disney XD series.

We did choose to include her unexpected death, because it's so crucial to Dinah's story, bur we really feel like this take on Laurel has become a fantastic story in it's own right and a real building block to DC as a whole.

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