Welcome to Flowers & Fishnets

I’ve had this idea for a year to create a fan blog for one of my favorite comic book heroes.  Until I get my overripe fingers on a shooting star and secure a writing position at one of the major comic book publishers, this blog, if nothing else, can put my great love of the medium, the history, and the rich crop of characters to some use, be it constructive or not.  The hardest part was settling on a character to blog about.  There’s never going to be a shortage of Batman websites out there, and most of my other favorite super heroes of the DC universe were duly represented in quality if not quantity.  The hero that ranked highest on my list and who wasn’t being covered readily in the blogosphere I regularly followed was the dark haired florist who by night donned a wig, fishnets and leather and judo-chopped criminals as the blonde bombshell, Black Canary.

I do not profess to be an expert in the character, but I am a fan.  I have read many comics featuring Black Canary, but nowhere near all of them.  I’d like to, though, which is the reason why for my birthday this year, I treated myself to a discounted copy of The Black Canary Archives Vol. 1.  If I was going to blog about the Canary, at the very least I had to be familiar with her first appearance.

Cover art (mostly) by Carmine Infantino

The goal of blog is to read and review Black Canary stories as I find them in my collection of Birds of Prey trade paperbacks, or her original adventures in Flash Comics reprinted in the Archives edition, or her guest spots in The Brave and the Bold, to her role on the New 52’s Team 7.  Yep, even that.  And hopefully a lot more in between.  I’ll also add pics of Black Canary as rendered by some of my favorite artists in the medium over the years, and try to score some fun creator interviews with writers and artists who have contributed to the character over the years.  I’ll review my one piece of Black Canary merchandize: her action figure from the DC Universe Classics line.  Hell, maybe I can even convince my motorcycle-riding wife to dress up like Dinah--  No. I’m going to stop myself right there.

Flowers & Fishnets will pay tribute to any and all versions of the Black Canary I can come across.  That especially includes both the Golden Age Dinah Drake version, and the more contemporary Dinah Lance version.  Except in specific instances, I tend not to distinguish between the two and often think of them both as part of the Black Canary icon, just as I think of Carter Hall and Kator Hol as both being Hawkman, and Barry Allen and Wally West as both being The Flash.  When necessary, I’ll try to identify which version of Black Canary is being featured in write-ups and reviews of certain issues.

Sketch by Darwyn Cooke.

If you’re a fan of Black Canary, or you’d like to be, I hope you can get something useful out of this blog.  If not new information, at least something halfway interesting.  If you’ve never heard of the character and happened upon this blog because you googled “flowers and fishnets” expecting some kind of fetish website, I apologize for wasting your time.  Maybe some of the forthcoming fan art, however, will be to your liking.  Regardless of how you found this place, I hope you come back often.

As befits the Black Canary, I will sign off each post with...

Tweet-tweet!

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Hmm.  That might not work.