Zinda Blake
1917 - Zinda Blake is born in England.
1919 - 2-year-old Zinda's father returns from the war & becomes an aircraft mechanic.
1923 - 6-year-old Zinda starts helping her dad in his hanger.
1932 - 15-year-old Zinda first learns to fly.
1939 - 22-year-old Zinda escapes England, wanting to fight. She becomes a fan of the Blackhawks.
1940 - 23-year-old Zinda hustles her way onto Blackhawk island as a mechanic & quickly becomes their main engineer. She becomes Lady Blackhawk.
1947 - 30-year-old Zinda is infected with Delores Winters's Bio-Plague.
Lady Blackhawk's role in the timeline is a strange one. The Blackhawks are now established as a Golden Age, wartime team, but at the time Zinda was introduced the Blackhawks were actually meant to be a contemporary story set at the beginning of the Silver Age in the late fifties and early sixties. Beyond that, the personality we all associate with Zinda was actually established in a DIFFERENT contemporary story, now the early 2000s. What we're left with is a classic Golden Age character who technically never appeared in the Golden Age.
Zinda's Comic StoryZinda Blake's first appearance was in Blackhawk #133 in 1959, well into the run of the series. While the Blackhawks are trying to find their kidnapped member Olaf, Zinda suddenly appears, revealing that she's been training to be a Blackhawk for years. She's rejected by Janos, since the Blackhawks bylaws forbid women from joining, and goes on to basically prove that she's just as capable as any of them, but the story ends with the Blackhawks basically saying 'Nice work! Maybe we'll consider taking a vote to maybe consider you maybe eventually!' By her next appearance, we discover that she's working as a secretary, stepping up only because all the other Blackhawks have been kidnapped, and successfully saving all of them, again being rewarded with the possibility that MAYBE they'll consider letting her join. She made appearances for several years, occasionally getting an offer to date one of them. Comics in the '60s, ladies & gentlemen.
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The Blackhawks essentially faded in popularity during the Silver Age, and this allowed their Golden Age adventures to be re-imagined in a variety of stories. Zinda's role was essentially re-imagined, suggesting that she was a full member of the Blackhawks. In the 1994 timeline scrambling crossover Zero Hour, Zinda found herself in modern time, and made a few small appearances in Guy Gardner: Warrior working the bar of his establishment, and in a couple of issues of Suicide Squad flying their plane.
In 2004, Gail Simone's run on Birds of Prey depicted the Birds moving their operation to a stealth jet, and introduced their new pilot. Zinda was now characterized as a hard-drinking, no-nonsense sky-jockey, and soon became one of the core members of the Birds of Prey for the remainder of the series. So... including Zinda as a member of the wartime Blackhawks is a no-brainer... but how necessary is it for us to include her modern adventures along with the Birds of Prey? Her personality is a fun one, but really... her only actual role on the team is to operate as a pilot, a job that almost any of them could do pretty easily. No matter how good a job Gail Simone did of working Zinda into the team dynamic, I'd say it's pretty obvious the main reason she was added was because the book was being drawn by Ed 'Cheesecake' Benes, and her costume is miniskirt-based. The character of Zinda as she was depicted in the Birds of Prey was fantastic, but we ultimately agreed that she's actually best served by just having that personality from the beginning, and making her that awesome while actually flying with the Blackhawks. |