YEAR 1947: DARNA

To be sure, the Mars Ravelo/Nestor Redondo superheroine who originally appeared in a 1947 issue of the Phillippines BULAKLAK MAGAZINE was called "Varga."

Only three years later did Ravelo succeed in relaunching the character under her best-known name, "Darna."  As my only experience of Darna is having seen the 1991 film, I can only generalize that the character's origin seems to have been the same under both names.  A white stone falls to Earth and is swallowed by young "Narda," who finds that she can then transform into a super-strong, near-invulnerable crimefighting warrior-woman.

Though Ravelo encountered considerable resistance to his character's publication-- he claimed to have conceived it in late 1939, just before World War II-- Darna has gone on to be something of a perennial figure in Filipino popular entertainment.  Though some might assume that Darna was a copy of Wonder Woman, the character doesn't seem to have any of the Amazon's abstruse qualities.  If anything, her transformation scene seems strongly indebted to the Golden Age Captain Marvel, who appeared in early 1940.  Wikipedia observes that had Darna been published when Ravelo claims that he conceived her, she would have preceded Wonder Woman by one-and-a-half years-- though one may assume that such a Darna would have started out almost purely in the tradition of Siegel and Shuster's SUPERMAN.

YEAR 1947: THE THORN

The Thorn, unlike many of the super-villains of late 1940s DC, was not revived in the Silver Age, but had to wait until the Bronze Age.  Even then, she was revived not so much to give her time in the super-villain spotlight, but to retcon her as the mother of two new superheroes.

Created by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Joe Kubert in FLASH COMICS #89, the Thorn is distinguished for being one of the few "Jekyll-Hyde" villains during this period.  In her first appearance, the green-clad villainess showed up to challenge the Flash on his own turf.  Thorn carried a small arsenal of thorns that could explode or prick flesh, and she apparently made use of the latter whenever she whirled in place like a dervish, making it impossible for the Flash to lay hands on her. No sooner does the Thorn escape the hero than he meets a woman named Rose, who claims to be the villainess' beneficent blonde sister, hunting Thorn in order to forestall her evil career.  Rose relates to Flash a complicated tale as to how she and her sister came to have opposing natures, thanks to the assignments given them by their botanical mentor Dr. Hollis.

Though the story telegraphs the expectation that the two entities are one, even before the Big Reveal, but I find it fascinating that Rose's phony stoty situates Hollis as a rather arbitrary father-figure who allots a pleasant task to one sister, and a grueling, unpleasant one to the other-- though significantly, the evil version of Rose says that she doesn't "mind the hurt." Presumably the second and last Golden Age story-- which I have not read-- reveals the real sequence of events, but the phantom of an arbitrary father-figure is significant nonetheless.

The entire first story appears here on Pappy's Golden Age Blogzine.  In 1970, Robert Kanigher would recycle two aspects of this villain-- her schizophrenic double identity and her weaponized thorns-- into his heroic "Thorn" character, Rose Forrest.

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.