Flash Comics #86 – Comics Archeology

Flash Comics #86 (1947)
by Robert Kanigher & Carmine Infantino
cover by Lee Elias

We are close to the end of the Golden Age, when readers would understandably have thought that the reason this comic would be remembered would be because it has the Flash fighting a T-Rex.

But the main attraction is actually the Johnny Thunder story, in what is perhaps the last occasion ever when anybody cares about a Johnny Thunder story.

Full disclosure, I’m reviewing this one from the version reprinted in Adventure Comics #416.
The original did not have the credits, and I could not find scans of decent quality.

You might remember that Johnny Thunder, at least in his Golden Age incarnation, is an idiot. So Black Canary has no trouble whatsoever manipulating him.

She definitely doesn’t worry much about her secret identity, allowing him to look at her without the mask.
Then again, I’m not so sure Johnny concentrates all that much on her face.

I wonder if the Justice Society keeps Johnny around just to avoid having him commit all the crimes.

Once she gets back her mask, Black Canary disappears… and Johnny learns she’s no ordinary thief: she only steals from criminals.

Despite having a near-omnipotent genie at his command, Johnny ends up taking care of the criminals by bumbling around.

Her next target is boss Socks Slade, the winner of the 1947 Worst Mob Nickname Award.

Johnny and his Thunderbolt show up to save Black Canary, even though it doesn’t look like she needs it.

And that’s the extent of the Black Canary action.

And we close with Thunderbolt breaking the fourth wall to make fun of the trend of heroes fallin in love with the bad girl.

Historical significance: 1/10
While Black Canary herself will be VERY important, her very first story leaves almost no mark.

Silver Age-ness: 3/10
Johnny fighting through the Three Stooge-Fu is more Golden than Silver Age.

Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
It has several things against it. It’s just SIX pages long, Johnny has barely any personality, Black Canary barely appears, and the action is nearly non-existent. Conceivably you COULD do the base plot today, but you’d have to add everything else.

How close is this to the modern character? 2/10
Aside from the look, which has remained nearly unchanged (although the mask comes and goes), not much has remained. Even her “bad girl” aspect is dropped rapidly.

You have to love that Kanigher’s direction for her look was literally “just maker her hot”.

When Kanigher gave me the script, I said, ‘How do you want me to draw her?’ He said, ‘What’s your fantasy of a good-looking girl? That’s what I want.’ Isn’t that a great line? So that’s what I did. I made her strong in character and sexy in form. The funny part is that years later, while in Korea on a National Cartoonists trip, I met a dancer who was the exact image of the Black Canary. And I went out with her for three years.
CARMINE INFANTINO

They liked enough to immediately have her featured in the following month, once again in a team-up with Johnny Thunder.

She’s in both Flash Comics #87 and #88, and OF COURSE she gets tied up in both.

After skipping Flash Comics #89, she’s once again the co-protagonist in #90 and #91.

By Flash Comics #92 (early 1948), she kicks Johnny off the book so thoroughly that she gets the cover.

And nobody was happier about it than Johnny’s writer and artist! I almost feel sorry for Johnny.

I was drawing Johnny Thunder, which was not much of a character. I suppose he could have been better because his “Thunderbolt” was interesting, but the situations they were in were pretty juvenile. Bob Kanigher wrote those stories, and he had no respect for the characters. These stories were nowhere near as good as ‘The Flash’ stories. DC knew it. They knew “Johnny Thunder” was a loser, so Kanigher and I brought the Black Canary into the series. Immediately she got a good response, and it was, “Bye, bye, Johnny Thunder.” Nobody missed him.
CARMINE INFANTINO

They were definitely pushing her: a month before her regular series (if we go by cover dates), she meets the Justice Society in All-Star Comic #38…

…and she joins the team at the end of the story.

Black Canary would stay as a member for the rest of the Justice Society run… which isn’t a lot, considering their last adventure was All-Star Comics #57 from 1951.
Meaning that Black Canary was a member of the JSA for a little over 3 years.

She would return in the Silver Age on the pages of Justice Leage of America #21 in 1963.

She would continue to be part of the JSA during their various team-ups with the JLA.
Until in 1969, where on the pages of Justice Leage of America #74, she witnesses the death of her husband Larry Lance (who had been her love interest in her original series).

This has nothing to do with Black Canary but I would feel bad if I didn’t mention that Superman appears to be a priest in this.

At the end of the story she decides to leave Earth-Two, where the Justice Society lives, to Earth-One and join the Justice League.

The Justice League is initially uncertain whether to let her join, considering that she has no powers and is only good at fighting.
You might argue that this is the same JLA formation that includes Batman and Green Arrow, but she doesn’t have their money and gadgets!

So it’s certainly VERY CONVENIENT that the same magic nonsense that ultimately killed her husband ended up giving her a genuine superpower.
And it’s pretty powerful, a sonic scream usually called the Canary Cry.

Yeah don’t think too much about the specifics.

It’s also the story where Green Arrow becomes an interesting character loses his money, and from this point forward Black Canary’s career will often hinge on their relationship.

She’s an important part of the groundbreaking “Green Lantern / Green Arrow” run by Danny O’Neil and Neal Adams.

By this point she was firmly established as a regular on Earth-One books, and her originating from Earth-Two was starting to cause a few problems… she was definitely younger than the rest of the Justice Society, having debuted after all of them, but they were STILL supposed to have been active in the war.
So by 1983 the idea that the same Black Canary of 1947 STILL looked like she was in her early thirties at worst was no longer believable.

Enter Justice League of America #219-220, written by Gerry Conway and (of course) Roy Thomas.
Which not only tells us what she sees in Green Arrow…

…it introduces us to her daughter, who was born after the JSA disbanded.
Confusingly, both mother AND daughter are called Dinah.

However the Wizard… a JSA villain who is a wizard with the power of having great imagination for codenames… cursed her with the Canary Cry, so Thunderbolt had to hide her in another dimension.
I need to remind you that we started with “she’s very good at punching people”.

And it turns out that when Superman took her to Earth-One back in 1969, he first made a stop in the magical dimension where the original Black Canary was switched with her daughter.

So we’ve been following the DAUGHTER all this time, while the mother was in stasis.
Superman was the only one to know about this but decided to keep his mouth shot because even after the Silver Age he can still be just. The. Worst.

When people argue about the original Multiverse being easy to follow and complain that Crisis on Infinite Earths was not necessary to clean up the mess that had been accumulated… I always think back about the time they retconned Black Canary into being her own daughter.

That insane retcon wasn’t even that necessary since Crisis streamlined things: the original Black Canary was active in the Golden Age, and the one active in the present was her daughter.
Which only kicks the problem down the line, and at SOME point I’m sure she will eventually be retconned into being the granddaughter.
If she hasn’t already.

The two characters are SO interchangeable that I might as well talk about the daughter’s history, because she’s already WAY more popular than the original ever was.

The next important phase of her life comes in 1987, where in the Mike Grell miniseries “Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters” she’s brutally tortured to the point of losing her Canary Cry.

As if things weren’t tragic enough already, in Green Arrow vol2 #34 in 1990 she learns that the torture also left her unable to have children.

After leaving Green Arrow… who was also dead for quite a while… in 1999 Black Canary joined forces with Oracle (the former Batgirl) to form the Birds Of Prey team.
The two had EXCELLENT chemistry, and the book proved successful enough to last 127 issues all the way up to 2009.

Since Black Canary had lost her powers, the series REALLY hyped her ability in combat. Until in issue #34 her powers where restored by the Lazarus Pit of Ra’s Al Ghul.

Birds Of Prey evolved into its own little franchise, and it has A TON of characters associated to it.
The Chuck Dixon (#1 to #46) and the Gail Simone runs (#56 to #108) in particular are HIGHLY recommended. But the series has had several relaunches since.

After multiple deaths, resurrections and retcons, Black Canary eventually marries Green Arrow in 2007.

Personally, her relationship with Green Arrow is the least interesting part of the character.

She’s definitely one of the most well-connected ones in the DC Universe: she’s associated with the Justice Society, she’s a member of the Justice League (she was even retconned into a founding member post-Crisis, replacing Wonder Woman), of the Birds Of Prey, and she’s even counted as part of the Bat-Family.
Out of all of these, I find the most interesting her relationship with her mother (not a lot of heroes have a Golden Age hero as a parent!)…