AMAZON ART #15

Here's a particularly fine Alan Davis cover of Black Canary stomping a passel of thugs, from ACTION COMICS #624.

AMAZON ART #10

This 1969 cover to JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #75 is a deliberate misrepresentation of the events inside, where Black Canary accidentally knocks down all the Justice Leaguers with her newly developed "sonic scream," rather than going out of her way to trounce them all.

Nice close-up on the fishnets, though.

YEAR 1947: BLACK CANARY

Back in 1947 no one, even Black Canary's creators, could have anticipated how significant she would become to DC Comics.

As her first appearance above indicates, the Canary originally appeared as a foil to the JSA's daffiest member, genie-wielding Johnny Thunder.  She was a female Robin Hood who sought to steal from wealthy crooks but appeared to possess no self-defense skills, though she's seen once holding a common pistol.  Johnny was gaga over her but might not have been so besotted had he known her series would replace him in FLASH COMICS.

Once Black Canary had her own series, she dropped the Robin Hood schtick and picked up some fancy judo-fighting skills.  All of her FLASH COMICS appearances, credited to Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino, are fast-paced action-thrillers. Many tough judo-girls had appeared in comic books prior to Canary, but she enjoyed a healthier run than the majority of martial-arts superheroines.  Nevertheless, her brief appearances with the Justice Society team during that period probably contributed the most to her longevity.  When Julius Schwartz revived many of the Society's stars during the Silver Age, the Canary was the only Golden Age heroine so revived.  She was teamed with the hero Starman for a couple of adventures in the BRAVE AND THE BOLD comic, almost certainly as a "trial balloon" to determine if either had drawing-power with contemporary fans.  At the time of her revival she was one of a very small number of heroines who depended entirely on physical skill rather than super-powers.

This changed when the Canary was inducted into DC's popular "Justice League" title.  Despite the fact that the JLA included Batman, whose main feature was his merely mortal martial skill, writer Denny O'Neil decided to bestow a super-power on the character: a sonic "canary cry" which could blast enemies hither and yon.  Though the addition may have been a little dubious at the time, it did help the character fit in with the hyper-powered DC universe a bit better.  Most felicitously, the possession of a super-power in no way restricted the Canary's penchant for virtuoso violence.

Due to the many years during which Black Canary served in the Justice League, she became, after the fact, a founding member.  When DC's 1980s CRISIS reboot eliminated Wonder Woman from the history of the JLA, the Canary was retroactively declared to have done all the things Wonder Woman had done in the original stories.  Talk about filling large shoes!

The Canary doesn't seem to have been at her best in a solo feature since the 1940s, but as any DC reader ought to know, she gained an even more auspicious place in the company's history when a 1995 one-shot, BLACK CANARY/ORACLE: BIRDS OF PREY, became the template for a forthcoming series about DC's first all-female (at least most of the time) superhero group, the BIRDS OF PREY.  Various female characters have come and gone from the feature in all of its incarnations (one of which is still currently on stands), but Black Canary and Oracle still comprise the characterizational core of the super-team.

BEST FEMALE/MALE FIGHTS IN COMICS: 31

Looking at the Black Canary of the Golden Age-- the scrappy but lightweight Kanigher/Infantino heroine-- she doesn't seem to have much in common with the current version, endowed with a *gravitas* unimagineable to the earlier bolero-jacketed brawler. Various rearrangements of the DC Universe, particularly relating to the continuity of Wonder Woman, propelled Black Canary back to become "the woman member" of the JSA once WW's history was rebooted, but that alone doesn't explain her taking on greater significance.

The early 70s GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW title by O'Neil and Adams made the character a bit more soulful next to her gimmicky Silver Age incarnation, but she didn't acquire a firm identity, and in JUSTICE LEAGUE was usually just another villain-clobberer. Even getting her own short-lived comic book didn't seem to improve her.

It does seem like BIRDS OF PREY, first written by Chuck Dixon and most outstandingly by Gail Simone, made the big difference. Dixon made her the main buttkicker working under the wide-ranging authority of Oracle, but Simone stressed the mental side of her martial-arts skills. In the scene above, the Canary prepares for a grueling sparring-match with a masterful Asian opponent known as "Rabbit." (The character somehow resists the temptation to dress up like a man-sized rabbit, unlike the lapine opponent referenced in Post 19.) The match marks one of Black Canary's best one-on-one encounters with an opponent of similar skills, but the battle is even more remarkable in that Simone's writing imparts an impressive spiritual side to the heroine's art of buttkicking.

THE FEMININE WILL PART II

Usually, due to the strength disparities between male and female homo sapiens, the catfight is the primary method by which modern entertainment illustrates the feminine will to power. While I've shown several examples on this blog of fantasy-situations in which women triumph over men-- sometimes with erotic overtones, sometimes not so much-- the womano-a-womano battle is one that automatically seems to perk up erotic interest. Male audiences seem to be particularly attuned to the excitatory appeal of the catfight, but there seems to be (from what one can judge on the Internet) a sizeable female audience also interested in the phenomenon from an erotic standpoint. On one messageboard devoted to the subject, a purportedly-female poster even disparaged the tendency of TV shows like XENA to show the heroine defeating men and women alike. Apparently when the poster saw a female heroine kick male butt, this automatically destroyed the poster's ability to credence that a female opponent could give Xena any trouble.

This need for credibility in a female/female fight may account for the widespread appeal of the catfight, at least a little better than Jerry Seinfeld's more famous "maybe they'll kiss" explanation. After all, Jerry, if all you want is a lesbian encounter, why do you need the catfight at all? It's not like lesbo action is hard to find.


I'm led to the conclusion, then, that whereas the fight-fantasy in which a female triumphs over a bigger and stronger-looking male, which I examined here, is one more openly defiant of consensual reality, in that "the normal rules of weight and mass" do not apply. The catfight scenario might then be seen as more prone to stick to said reality, resulting in a fictional world where women can only exercise the "will to power" against other women.

BYSTANDER OR SIDEKICK?

I'm not sure which she is. Since female characters in comics have no agency, the blonde in the picture can't possibly be the star.

Is she an innocent bystander about to get mugged?

Or a sidekick who's going to be skragged to provide the real hero with a motive for vengeance?

I'm thinking it must be the latter. I'm surprised that the cover doesn't feature the male hero about to heroically pounce on the malefactors from above, just to emphasize, you know, that he's the real star, and the blonde's just the sidekick.