Red Canary
15 years ago - Sin is born in Okinawa. Her mother runs away from her husband to a homeless shelter, where they are both taken by the Golden Dragon, and brought to a training camp in Myanmar
11 years ago - 6-year-old Sin starts taking on the work duties of her ailing mother. She is selected to be the subject of their training.
6 years ago - 9-year-old Sin's mother dies in the work camp.
3 years ago - 12-year-old Sin is pit against a group of Monkey Fist fighters to test her skill.
1 year ago - 14-year-old Sin is the Golden Dragon representative in the Monkey Fist Tournament. She bonds with Dinah Lance, who commits to winning the tournament to free her. She returns to New York with Dinah, training with her and starting school there.
now - 15-year-old Sin creates her own Red Canary persona to fight crime. At first when Dinah Lance finds out she tries to stop her, but later admits she did the same thing at her age and is worried about her just like her mother was. They start to listen to music together, and Sin discovers an interest in dance.
We don't do this a lot, but we do occasionally create these hybrids that are taking elements of two different traditional characters and put them together into one idea. I don't think we've ever done it in a way that needed much explanation, it should always feel really obvious that this is the way it SHOULD have been all along.
Our take on Red Canary is a particularly poignant example of this, because when she appeared, the fact that they hadn't done this with her character felt completely nonsensical. This is less one of the times where we think long and hard about something and eventually work out a way that it should work... This is us just being shocked that that didn't already do it.
Our take on Red Canary is a particularly poignant example of this, because when she appeared, the fact that they hadn't done this with her character felt completely nonsensical. This is less one of the times where we think long and hard about something and eventually work out a way that it should work... This is us just being shocked that that didn't already do it.
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Sin's Comic HistoryWe first met Sin in Gail Simone's Birds of Prey # 92, in the first story after their one year later time jump. We see that Dinah and Lady Shiva have traded places, with Shiva joining the Birds of Prey while Dinah is taken to a hidden village to undergo the same trials Shiva once did. While there, she's subjected to the brutal training of a character called mother, but she also meets a young girl named Sin.
Sin, we learn, is being trained to become the new Lady Shiva, should something ever happen to Sandra Wu. They bond really quickly, with Sin starting to refer to her as sister. Soon Dinah overcomes the training of Mother, but when she leaves (fighting her way out), she brings Sin with her. Dinah was now kind of a parent, and really put a stronger priority on taking care of Sin than the Justice League or even the Birds themselves. This was a volatile time for DC as it was rapidly approaching the new 52 continuity reboot, but through all of it, Dinah was steadfastly devoted to her new little sister. Sin didn't appear again until much later, in Kelly Thompson's 2023 Birds of Prey run, where she was now being depicted as 16 years old. |
Red Canary's Comic HistorySpeaking of very recent comics, Red Canary was a brand new character introduced in the pages of one DC's many many many MANY many big continuity reboots in the past decade. This one was Dark Crisis from 2022, in which a major plot point was the 'death' of the Justice League, including Black Canary. In her absence a new hero stepped up, just appearing here and there. In some of the expanded one-shots we get to know her as simply a young woman named Sienna who was a huge fan of Dinah, who had seen her in concert and decided to step up when she disappeared, creating her own legacy costume and just arriving fully formed.
Practically all of Red Canary's appearances are in crossover series (which seem to happen right on the heels of each other at this point), meaning she's largely just appearing in group shots. She does also have some appearances in the 2024 Joshua Williamson Green Arrow series, although that book seemed to care more about just depicting every character that was Green Arrow adjacent rather than telling stories with them. |
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Our Red Canary StoryNot having read Dark Crisis, we mostly saw Red Canary for the first time in Williamson's Green Arrow series, which actively put a lot of energy into reuniting all of the Green Arrow family of characters. This was a young, possibly teenage, woman of Asian descent picking up Black Canary's legacy. There was a really obvious assumption to be made there... that this was Sin, picking up her obvious role as Dinah's little sister and as a martial arts prodigy. This was a great design, and frankly a fantastic direction to take her character.
Of course... it's not Sin. It's not even Lian, as we briefly guessed. it's an entirely new character, with practically no origin at all. Don't get me wrong, I do like the characterization as depicted in canon, she's cool... but how could this not be Sin? So that's really all we're doing here. We're making Red Canary the character she obviously should have been from the beginning. This means she needs to be a little older when they meet, but frankly I think that just makes their bond feel more authentic. |
Red Canary's FutureThis reimagined version of Sin is a very new addition to out timeline, she only met Dinah a year ago, but that's actually a very fun place for her to be. The bond between the two women feels really organic, and having them come together during the Monkey Fist Tournament feels like a cool result to come from that story. I also really like what this does for Sin's martial prowess; she's good enough to have earned an invite to the tournament, which feels like a much better metric for her ability, which Red Canary really doesn't have otherwise.
The real question here is what comes next? She's only 15, but of course there are plenty of characters in DC that started at that age, so that feels perfectly organic. Usually, most characters her age will become Teen Titans, but she's actually considerably younger than most of the current Titans, and also OLDER than the group of characters that are about to become the next generation of Titans with Damian Wayne. Believe it or not, as I'm writing this she's actually the only current 15-year-old in the project. If anything, I feel like the most likely group for her to join, somewhere down the road, would actually be the Justice Society? In all honesty, though, I feel like all of that is probably quite a ways down the road if it happens at all. For now I think she's going to be at her absolute best having her own adventures donning her costume and going out to be a hero no matter what anyone tells her. Just like Dinah did. |
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