Cover Story - Top 10 Black Canary Covers

Edited by Robert Beach

Hello, and welcome to Cover Story, diving as little into the world of comics as we can. Legends of Tomorrow is still blowing up our screens, and as such, we’ve got another Cover Story to celebrate their team. This week’s episode had a major emphasis on White Canary. Because that character doesn’t exist in the comic, I’m showcasing Black Canary, which is pretty much the next best thing, especially for Arrow fans.  

While Black Canary has only enjoyed an ongoing comic once in the history of DC, she’s been featured on plenty of Justice League and covers and throughout the Birds of Prey book that helped make her a standout name in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. With that said, let’s dive into the shallow end and get the cover story on one of the biggest female heroes of DC comics. 

Week of Review - Birds of Prey

Edited by Robert Beach

Yesterday, I talked about one of DC/WB’s more successful endeavors to preserve their television presence into the 21^st century; today, I’m focusing on a less successful example. Before we discuss Birds of Prey and what I think of it, we’ve got to go back and talk about a little show from 1997 known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer took the world by storm in 1997 with its winning combination of genre tropes and aesthetics and girl power. Buffy was the last of the popular genre trinity that had started with Star Trek: The Next Generation in ’89 and been cemented by The X-Files in ’93. 

There had been plenty of genre shows before like the original Star Trek in the ‘60s, 6 Million Dollar Man in the ‘70s, and V in the ‘80s, but these three shows demonstrated there was a chance for widespread, mainstream appeal within previously geek genre markets. When DC decided to re-enter the realm of TV after the conclusion of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in 1997, they decided to stick with the Buffy aesthetic, which is how we got Smallville. With Smallville’s success, WB wanted to create a sister show that was more female centric as they’d had a lot of success from that mold with Charmed. In 2002, they created The Birds of Prey, one of my all time favorite superhero shows.