Tom King Talks Fights and Family Legacy in Black Canary: Best of the Best #1 (Exclusive)

An exclusive interview about the Bird of Prey's newest six-issue miniseries.

I still can’t believe the sentence I’m about to type: for the first time in nearly a decade, Black Canary has a solo book. The DC heroine, armed with her prolific martial arts abilities and her supersonic “Canary Cry”, has become a mainstay of superhero storytelling for nearly a century (and my favorite character in all of fiction). But amid her prolific tenures on the Birds of Prey and the Justice League, she has only sporadically gotten a chance to shine completely on her own in publishing — until now. This week brings the debut issue of Black Canary: Best of the Best, a new six-issue miniseries brought to life by writer Tom King (Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Mister Miracle) and artist Ryan Sook (Legion of Super-Heroes, Action Comics).

Best of the Best tackles Dinah’s standing in a unique way, as she agrees to a public televised fight against her sometimes-adversary Lady Shiva in order to determine who is the best fighter in the DCU. The series aims to be a Woman of Tomorrow-esque exploration of Black Canary as a mantle, and based on the first issue of the series, the stakes are heightened for Dinah in both massive and personal ways.

In celebration of the release of Black Canary: Best of the Best #1, I had the honor of chatting with King about the years-long process of making the series a reality, his approach to Dinah’s various familial and personal relationships, and so much more.

I loved the first issue. It made me so emotional multiple times. I'm still just in utter disbelief that this book even exists. My first question though, is… why Coupeville? Because that hometown has never been in her lore before.

Tom King: It's probably because I associate her, a little bit, with Seattle, because of the Green Arrow sort of connection and them being Northwest kind of people. I literally Googled “small towns in Washington.” I had spent some vague time up there, on those little random islands that are off the coast near Seattle, in my college years. So I was a little familiar with the atmosphere. And so I was just looking for kind of... I wanted her to have that rural Northwest feel. People don't realize that the Northwest is Seattle, and then a bunch of kind of Texas that kind of surrounds it. I've set things in all sorts of different [places]. I like to get out of the cities, out of LA. And I read a lot of LA, New York stories. I wanted to write something that was a little more, a little different part of America.

In one of your previous interviews about the book, you mentioned the Alex Toth Adventure Comics stories as being a massive touchstone for you, and something that you really personally love. I felt a lot of that spirit in Issue #1. How did you kind of approach homaging it, and trying to carry the torch of those issues?

Oh, there's a big homage that happens towards the end. There’s a — I don't know if it's famous — but there's a great “go fight the world” line that Green Arrow gives to Black Canary in that issue. I'm going to paraphrase it here poorly, but it's something like “Don't quit until you're dead, and then you can only quit five minutes later.” Something like that, and that line comes up at a very key moment in the whole book. So, I do a direct homage to that Toth thing.

But yeah, I mean, I love Black Canary. I love her as someone that I think incredibly, incredibly good artists draw incredibly well. She brings out just the best in a certain kind of artist, which you're seeing with Ryan Sook in this. And just to say Toth, again, is my favorite artist in the history of comics. And he didn't do a lot of superhero work. And one of his big superhero things he did was these two little short Black Canary stories. I just think it's the best superhero art in the history of comics. He showed what comics could be. Twenty pages altogether, of “It could be this genre, and it could be romance, and it can be high action, and it can be absurd superheroes, and it can be all of that stuff.” So it was my chance to get a fantastic artist to unleash like Toth did.

You mentioned Ryan. When we've spoken in the past, you've talked about the collaborative process with your artists, and just kind of letting them cook, for lack of a better term. How has that been with Ryan? Especially given the specificity of the fight choreography, how has that back and forth kind of been?

This is a special case scenario, because I wrote this whole thing, I wrote all six issues, before Ryan saw the first issue. And then he knew it was going to take him a while. People who follow Ryan's career with a passion, as I have, know that he likes to take his time to make sure his art is right. And so I basically said, “Here's six issues, I'll see you in four years. Email me if you have any questions.” I mean, we're talking about this during COVID. You know, this is a while back. And I was like, “I have complete trust in you. You know exactly what you're doing.” And of course, he's a master. He's done masterpieces in comics, and here he is doing another one. So it was complete trust.

In terms of the fight choreography, yeah, a lot of that is on Ryan. Anyone whose read my scripts, it’s like “She punches him in the face. She does this.” I took a lot of inspiration from WWE, so sometimes I'd send a little of this clip, or I put it in my script, “Maybe this or that.” But most of what you're seeing, how the fight happens, is Ryan's work. It's all on Sook. Sook is killing it and is the co-creator in every sense of the word, as well.

How did you approach the rivalry between Dinah and Shiva? Gail Simone obviously laid a lot of that groundwork in her Birds of Prey run — did you go back and reference that, or did you just approach it within the context of the story that you were making?

This is not a story about Lady Shiva. She is the heel. But she's not the heel. And if you read the first issue, she's not the big bad. There's sort of another big bad that's lurking. She's the bad guy in sort of a very vague sort of way, in that she's the champion, and she's kind of rude about being the champion. And she thinks of herself as the best of the best. And she doesn't care about Dinah. So that's her. But this is, in no way, a deep examination of that character or their history. Their fight is an excuse to explore a different history, which is the history between Dinah and her mother, and to sort of point everything back at Black Canary.

So the fight, which is the biggest fight with the biggest stakes, it's all about her trying to do something that is literally impossible. She is not as good of a fighter as Lady Shiva, [who] is stronger, faster, more skilled. She should lose this by any level, and it's her overcoming the impossibility of the odds. That's what Lady Shiva represents, more than the complex character that Gail built. That stuff was wonderful, I just decided this is not the book for that. But this book is a fight book. It is about a bad guy versus a good guy, in the context of that one ring. In the context of the bigger story, it's a much more layered story about what it took to be this good guy that Canary is.

You mentioned the two Dinahs. I think your take on Dinah Drake is incredible. Once they first established the mother-daughter relationship, it's been really interesting to see her stories over the years and how much has still slipped through the cracks. How did you approach giving her her due, and recognizing she is this OG superhero that Dinah is now in the legacy of?

I think you had the perfect word, “legacy”, and all that goes with that. And the idea of someone doing the exact job their mother did, and the exact job their mother did so well, and the job their mother wanted them to do, and yet still feeling all the pressure that goes with that. The idea of “I can never wear this uniform like she did. I can never fulfill her expectations for me. They're always higher than I can reach.” I feel like a lot of people have that relationship with their parents. A lot of daughters have that with their mother, where their mother wants them to be a certain way. And no matter how much they try, how much they conform to that method, they're never exactly the way their mother wants them. And it creates just an endless sort of tension in life between the visions two women have for what the other woman should be.

That is sort of what I wanted to delve into, how you become your own person in the shadow of your mother, and how your mother recognizes you as that person.

One thing I really love in Issue #1 is seeing the Dinah and Shiva fight become this massive piece of monoculture, between the Justice League watching it, and Dinah's kind of conversations with random civilians. How important was it to include the cultural significance of this fight, and how the larger world is impacted by it? Will we get to see that in the remaining issues as well?

It was twofold. Number one, I wanted people to see that this wasn't just like, you read one issue and “Oh, it's two characters fighting. Who wins?” and then it just sort of goes on. This is the ultimate battle. It was sort of my tribute to sort of Neil Adams doing Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. It was the idea that this is an actual contest for an actual title, which is important. It's oddly important to me, and I think to most DC fans, of who is the best fighter in the DC universe. Who is the actual number one, of all number ones? Who's the guy who could beat up Batman, who could beat up Green Arrow… in a one-on-one contest without powers, obviously? These two women are the height of the height of the height, and I wanted to sort of project that. The way to do it was just to make it very public, and make sure that all the eyes were looking. And to also reflect the fact that people are reading this comic book, and that those are the eyes looking at it as “Who will win this fight? Who actually is the greatest fighter in the DC universe?” That was part of it.

The second part is, this is a public fight. It's essentially for money. It's in Las Vegas. It's the thing you'd see on TV any day. Why the hell would a superhero do this? A superhero doesn't do public fights. Batman is not like, “Oh man, I'm gonna go find out if I'm better than the Riddler today. Let's get in a ring in Vegas and take bets on it.” That's not a thing. So the fact that she has agreed to do this, the fact that she hasn't told any of the Justice League, including Green Arrow, including Ollie, that's a clue [that] there's a deeper layer to this fight, that's revealed in the last page of this thing, that will affect the entire issue and her relationship with her mother going forward. So it's both important, and a clue.

We hear a little bit about how the fight has impacted Dinah's relationship with Oliver. Outside of the people who are going to be mentoring and directly training her, are we gonna see the ramifications on Ollie, on the Arrow Fam, on the Birds of Prey, and the people in Dinah's life?

You will see Ollie plays a big part, as we go forward. You won't see a lot of Birds of Prey. I didn't want this to be a huge sort of examination of every aspect of every relationship. I think you can get kind of lost in that. This is very focused. This is about a fight. It's about a contest and it's about a relationship between a mother and a daughter. So yes, Ollie is a character in it, but he's not the central character.

This is not about her romantic relationship. This is a story about a woman. It's not about romance. I know I write a lot of stories about women that are, it's not this. This is the story about a woman trying to become at the apex of the best thing she can be, and at the same time, dealing with her childhood and her mother and what it means to be a superhero. It's about that aspect of her. It's not about her relationship with her team. It's not about her relationship with Ollie. It's not about her relationship with her trainers. It's about her mother, and her, and the fight.

What would you say has surprised you the most about the experience of working on Black Canary: Best of the Best?

That Sook is going to do all six issues. Look, it is very difficult in modern times to tell a comic book company, “I have a comic. I wrote it. It's good. I really love it. It's very good. You can't publish it.” [laughs] Because they pay money for these things, you know? And they're like, “Well, we only make money if we publish it. So it sitting on a shelf for years is us losing money. That's a bad idea.” And I was like, “But if you publish it now, you won't get six issues of Sook. You'll get an issue of Sook, and then you'll get an issue of an artist you’ve never heard of, and then you'll get three pages of Sook. And it just won't look good. It'll fall apart.” And for DC to have been like… they read the scripts and said, “This is something special. This is something big. This is another Supergirl. This is another Mister Miracle. Let's be patient. Let's give an A-list talent a chance to do A-list work.” And he's going to do it. He's on issue five now. He's going to hit issue six by the time we end this. And you're going to get six issues of Ryan Sook art, which hasn't happened. And every single page is beautiful. It's a masterpiece. But in art, not in writing.

It is amazing in writing, I will also say that. You mentioned the Woman of Tomorrow of it all. You first pitched the book to people on social media, saying it's a similar sort of investigation of a character. What do you think it is about Black Canary that warrants that kind of storytelling, especially at this current moment? She's been around for almost a century at this point, what makes now the perfect time to tell that story?

When was it not a perfect time to tell a Black Canary? Was it like “1987, Black Canary stories suck! She has too many shoulder pads.” [laughs]

I don't want to say “Oh, this is something that they'll resonate with today.” I just think she's an amazing character. She's an A-list DC character. And she should get TV shows. She should get movies. She should get all of it. She should get the treatment. She has the design. She has the attitude. She has the power set. She's just, she's an ultimate cool comic book character that jumps off the page and deserves the spotlight. So I don't think this is her time. All times are her time. I just got lucky and got a book out with her in it. That's how I would put it.

You're preaching to the choir here, completely.

She's an icon. She has an iconic silhouette that everyone in comics knows. And everyone in comics reads — you put her on a cover, people want to open that book. She has that thing that Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman have where you just immediately recognize her, and you immediately want to know her story. And so she should be as big as those characters.

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Black Canary: Best of the Best #1 will be available wherever comics are sold on Wednesday, November 27th. Be sure to be subscribed to the Go Read Some Comics YouTube channel if you want to hear my full thoughts on the issue.