Preferred Origin For Black Canary?

[John Venus]

Black Canary (in)famously has multiple different origins even across multiple different media. Which one is your preferred version.

-Pre Crisis: Dinah Drake Lance who was the daughter of a cop raised to be one herself but chose to become a vigilante.

See here: http://blackcanaryfan.blogspot.com/2...nary-1978.html

-Post Crisis: Dinah Laurel Lance who was the daughter of Drake Lance and grew up with superhero uncles and aunts who inspired her to become a hero herself:

See here: http://blackcanaryfan.blogspot.com/2...90-secret.html

-New 52: where she is a street orphan taken in to a dojo where she was trained in martial arts.

See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU_vn1yiUKM

-Or Arrowverse where you had Laurel Lance who was basically Rachel Dawes and Sara Lance who was in the same accident as Ollie and was trained by the League of Assassins?

Or would you prefer something else entirely?

[Stanlos]

No contest for me. The mother daughter legacy for sure. Now more than ever since TPTB have crapped over WW's origin (which they would NEVER do with Bats or Supes). So definitely Mother Daughter. Were WW still intact I would say MD or the Detective.

[Agent Z]

I think you could do a combination of both pre and post crisis, with maybe Dinah going by Laurel to differentiate her from her mom.

[davetvs]

I like Black Canary as DC's Silk Spectre, a legacy hero pushed into it by her overbearing but well-meaning superhero stage mom.

[j9ac9k]

Even though it's no longer canon, I loved Black Canary as a founding member in "JLA:Y1." Even if the specifics aren't the same, I feel she still maintains that elevated status as being a key member of the JLA from its early days.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

The mother-daughter legacy from Post crisis. It allows you to build up Dinah and incorporate the other origins though surrogates.

[kcekada]

I voted for the first option -- but that also entails a mother daughter legacy -- except that the daughter actually thought she was the mother initially.

I'm fine with the second option, but my favorite Black Canary is definitely the Golden Age version who was a hero in her own right. The Bronze Age version is too tied to Green Arrow -- as evidences by Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters where Dinah was pulled from Justice League just so she could be tortured and depowered. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

[Thirteen]

Post Crisis legacy heroine got my vote, but that doesn’t preclude blending the superhero mother/cop father origins making Justice built into Dinah II’s DNA.

[Riv86672]

Even though it's no longer canon, I loved Black Canary as a founding member in "JLA:Y1." Even if the specifics aren't the same, I feel she still maintains that elevated status as being a key member of the JLA from its early days.

^^^Totally agree w. you on this.

I’m okay w. most of the suggestions posted, really. Just as long as the “Nu-52 Dinah Drake (Orphan Trained In Dojo/Team 7)” origin is hit over the head w. a shovel previously used to dig a deep hole, thrown into that hole, the hole filled in, and the earth then salted.

[Nullviahomo]

Legacy hero, definitely. Founding member of the JLA absolutely. Tied to the JSA by blood for preference.

In fact, were I allowed to reboot her whole history to tie virtually all of them together....

* Ra's al Ghul's Lazarus Pits are created and maintained by feeding them with successive generations of his ancestor Vandal Savage's descendants, the younger and healthier the better. So he has his followers maintain breeding pits in all of his strongholds.

* The (original, non-villainous) Court of Owls considered Ra's a potential future threat to America and used the Barbary Wars as cover to send two of its agents (a Wayne and a Kane) to investigate one of these strongholds outside Tripoli.

* They get in, cause havoc, clash with the League of Shadows, and eventually escape with a sample of Lazarus juice, documents torn from one of The Demon's own historical texts, and a young, blonde girl-child who was about to be sacrificed to The Pit.

* Physically and mentally 'perfect' thanks to her heritage (lots of icky inbreeding of Savage generations with the occasional addition of other 'superior' genes to offset the usual results of incest) this orphan is raised by the Court and eventually becomes their secret agent, the very first of their highly trained 'Birds of Prey' and tasked with protecting the young United States from 'unnatural' threats.

* Generation after generation, these agents serve the USA from the shadows. Even after the schism in the Court of Owls that ends its relationship with the Government, there is always a Codename: Black Canary defending the country. Always one at a time, since some quirk of genetics ensures that however many children each Canary has, only the first child inherits the genetic template for 'perfection', and the first child is always a girl.

* With the rise of the Mystery Men before WWII, the precursor to the DEO wants someone to spy on the Justice Society of America, so they task the next Black Canary in training to take on the codename 'Liberty Belle' and be their eyes and ears.

* After the War, when the JSA muster out of the wartime All-Star Squadron and try to go back to their pre-War status, the Government comes down on them, Liberty Belle's double-agent role is revealed, and the members of the JSA hang up their capes rather than become full-time 'Super Soldiers'. Eventually all costumed activity is banned by Congress in 1953 through an extension of the Vigilante Act.

* But while she was spying on the JSA, Liberty Belle was in a secret relationship with Starman, and she got pregnant. The next generation of the Black Canary program would have an active Metagene thanks to her father's... uh... Cosmic Rod.

* Fast forward to the present day, and the DEO runs its own top-secret metahuman Taskforce, working alongside ARGENT to deal with the threats its sister agency can't head off. Its field-leader is the new young Black Canary, Dinah Laurel-Lance, while its Deputy Director is her mother, the recently retired from front-line service Dinah Drake Lance.

The other members of the Taskforce are an enigmatic refuge from Mars and a swashbuckling revolutionary seeking asylum from Atlantis...

...and then the Second Era of Superheroics breaks out and you can guess what happens next. 8-)

[sifighter]

Yeah I’m going for post-crisis mother daughter legacy. Just a lot of more interesting material there if you ask me.

[Primal Slayer]

I'm 100% about the post COIE origin of DLL being a legacy hero and taking the mantle of her mother. Growing up in that lifestyle and mentored by the best of the best.

But let's not forget the third Arrowverse Black Canary origin of Dinah Drake lol. Undercover agent whose hit by the particle accelerator, gets her CC, taking under Arrows quiver to form her into BC to keep Laurels legacy alive *lol*

Or the 4th Origin of one E2 Laurel Lance. Hit by the particle accelerator and turns to a life of crime as Black Siren. Gets trapped on E1, steals her dead doppelgangers life and sees the wrong in her ways, becoming Black Canary to honor her E1 doppelganger and be the new Xena.

[phonogram12]

While I've always loved the character, I've honestly never cared much for any of her origins, tbh.

[MajorHoy]

I'm torn on this one.

Part of me prefers the Mother/Daughter legacy version, but even though they did a good job of cleaning that up with Secret Origins #50, I still can't get the taste of the pre-CoIE version from Justice League of America #219-220 from 1983 out of my head.

[bat39]

The mother-daughter origin any day. Though I think at this point it might make more sense for it to be a multi-generational legacy, with the current Dinah being the granddaughter or even great-granddaughter of the original.

Sara Lance remains my favorite live-action Black Canary though. And I do think that despite the mess that Arrow made of Black Canary, it inadvertently did a pretty good job reflecting all the convoluted backstories of Black Canary from the comics.

Laurel reflected Post-Crisis Dinah Laurel Lance as a 'legacy' who takes up the mantle originated by her female relative. And she had a tumultuous romantic history with Oliver Queen. She also had (Quentin) Larry Lance as her cop dad.

Sara reflected both the Golden Age Dinah Drake (the original Black Canary) and some aspects of Post-Crisis Dinah Laurel Lance (the League of Assassins training, her romantic history with Oliver, being the leader of a superhero team).

Dinah Drake was obviously another take on the Golden Age Dinah Drake. In an interesting twist, she's a cop herself, rather than being the daughter or wife of a cop. And she had the canary cry, like Dinah Laurel Lance.

E2 Laurel was kinda a take on Silver Age/Bronze Age Dinah Drake in that she's moved from Earth 2 to Earth 1, and has a canary cry.