Alright, after chatting with @TalkinLadyShiva he encouraged me to do this post in which I delve into the surprisingly complex origins of the blonde bombshell of the JLA, the titular Bird of Prey - the Black Canary. It was a long, rocky road for her to where she is now...

So join me as we delve into the past of the TWO Dinahs and the many men in their lives, of which Green Arrow is just one!

(Artwork by @OttoSchmidt72 )

Dinah's story begins with this guy - Johnny Thunder. One of the backup strips in Flash Comics #1 and for many years thereafter, Johnny was a loveable dimwit in command of a nearly all-powerful genie who bumbled his way through countless adventures.

Originally by John Wentworth and Stan Ascheimer, by 1947 Johnny's strip in Flash was done by Robert Kanigher and a young Carmine Infantino, both future superstars of DC and beyond. They introduced a mysterious masked femme fatale villain to Johnny's stories in issue 86 (1947)

Originally posing as a criminal to get into criminal circles, Canary soon dropped that pretense and the mask and became an ally of Johnny, and within a year she had fully booted the poor guy out of his own strip, which became simply "Black Canary".

Here she was also given an origin - a policeman's daughter who failed her tests to become a policewoman herself and instead became a florist living a double life as the glamorous Black Canary. She was also the girlfriend (in both identities) of private eye Larry Lance.

One interesting curiosity is that Marvel/Timely already had a character much like Dinah when she debuted. The Blonde Phantom had first appeared a full year earlier, and was a mousy blonde secretary to a private eye who became a glammy crimefighter (and her own romantic rival)

What was up here? Plagiarism? Probably not. More likely both of these strips were inspired by a very common genre at the time - the screwball mystery adventure.

Codified by author Dashiell Hammet through his iconic characters of Nick and Norah Charles...

...the idea of a man and a woman solving mysteries while quipping at each other was enormously popular, and set off a huge slew of imitators. No doubt both Black Canary and Blonde Phantom drew on this tradition (though some "influence" cannot be ruled out)

Not content with merely kicking Johnny out of his own strip, Dinah also took over his spot in the JSA after a few cameos, and remained a member until the very final case of the golden age run in late 1949 (her own strip having petered out a year or so earlier)

And so Black Canary was a forgotten golden age heroine, right? Well, Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowksy had other plans. They had already revived the JSA and decided to team them up with their successors the JLA in a series of annual crossovers, and Black Canary was a very frequent...

...participants in these stories, starting with the very first one in JLoA #21-22 (1963). In these stories she was simply an older heroine returning to action, and still had no powers. She also had no relation to the JLA or Earth-1 until the series was taken over by Dennis O'Neil

Denny changed everything. In JLoA #73-74 the combined forces of both teams fought the star-monster Aquarius, who nearly destroyed the assembled heroes.

The fateful moment that changed Black Canary's entire career happened in issue #74 (1969) where during a battle with Green Arrow she ended up incapacitated in the path of Aquarius' attack. Larry Lance, who had only just recently been revealed to have married Dinah was present...

...and laid down his life for his beloved wife. Dinah was a widow, her happily ever after shattered.

In the very next issue (#75), Denny revealed that a disconsolate Canary was done with Earth-2 and asked Superman to take her to Earth-1, where she applied to join the Justice League rather than the JSA.

In that same issue, Dinah also discovered she now had a super-powered sonic "canary cry" which Batman theorized was a result of Aquarius's magic mixed with her dimensional travel. Put a pin in this, we'll come back to it shortly.

(As a side note, despite being a very popular JSA member in the 60s, Dinah's only shot at a solo comic... ish... was in a couple of Brave and the Bold issues where she teamed up with fellow JSAer Starman, fighting the Mist, the Sportsmaster and the Huntress. Other than this? Nada

With her move to the JLA and Earth-1, however, Canary was suddenly in the limelight. Only a year later in Green Lantern/Green Arrow 78, Dinah met the titular heroes on their trek through the US and joined up, having many adventures both on and off earth with them.

Since these stories were mostly written by O'Neil, it's safe to say he had a soft spot for Canary. This is also when the very cursory contact between Green Arrow and Black Canary from previous stories blossomed into a full-on romance, and for the remainder of the 1970s...

...the two would rarely be seen apart, though Dinah stayed a member of the JLA when Ollie left. It's important to note that during this period, while she was increasingly depicted as acting and looking younger, she was still a golden age heroine seeking a new life.

That GL/GA story where she was introduced? It was all about her trauma about losing her husband. But all that would change, and not due to the Crisis. And to understand this we need to backtrack a bit and talk about Johnny Thunder again.

In the 1964 JLA-JSA crossover Gardner Fox had introduced the Johnny Thunder of Earth-1, who was a cruel, greedy jerk rather than loveable goof, but unfortunately able to command Earth-2 Johnny's thunderbolt.

By 1983 someone at DC must have realized that the age gap between Green Arrow and Dinah was widening far too much and there needed to be a better explanation as to why she looked and acted so young. And boy did they come up with one... the worst possible one...

In JLoA #219 and 220 Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Chuck Patton revealed that EVERYTHING we thought we knew about Canary's Earth-1 life was a lie, courtesy of the returning Earth-1 Johnny Thunder, who terrorized Dinah with hints that her past was a lie...

The climax had Canary find the body of her husband Larry and... herself? It turned out that the original Dinah didn't escape Aquarius at all - she was given a lethal radiation dose. No sonic mutation, she just started to die while Superman was flying her to Earth-1

But it turns out she and Larry had a daughter who they also named Dinah who was cursed with sonic screams by their old enemy the Wizard and who the Thunderbolt had hidden in limbo where she slept for decades. Who could have thunk! So Dinah asked to see her child one more time...

Wishing her daughter could continue her career, the Thunderbolt then ERASED THE MIND of the sleeping daughter, now an adult, put a copy of the dying woman's memories in there and then just erased her memories of dying so she'd think she came through fine and now had superpowers.

I'm sorry but everything about this story is wrong and bad and it's the worst Roy Thomas comic I've EVER read and I love the guy. So Dinah now knows she's her own daughter and decides that she can stop moping and go back and have sex with Ollie without regrets. Or something.

So we went from older golden age widowed heroine given powers seeking a new life, to secret daughter mind erasure.

The Crisis MERCIFULLY wiped that last story out of existence where it belonged, and post-Crisis Dinah got to become a JLA founder, since Wonder Woman was out!

Canary's post-Crisis history went largely unexplored until Secret Origins #50 (1990) when the outstanding team of Alan Brennert and Joe Staton told the new story of the two Dinahs. A heartbreaker, I recommend you read it.

By this point, Dinah was a "proper" legacy hero and a mainstay of the DC universe, starring in both Justice League, Green Arrow by Mike Grell and even her first solo series since the 1940s. And then came Birds of Prey, and the rest is history.

From villain, to heroine, to golden age nostalgia character, to Justice Leaguer, to Green Arrow's OTP, to... let's forget... to JLA founder and star of games, cartoons, TV shows, movies and beyond, it's been a wild 73 years for Dinah.

Thanks for reading, folks