A couple of years ago I sent a friend request to writer Sarah Byam on Facebook. I had enjoyed Byam’s work in comic books in the early 1990s. Having seen this blog, Byam asked me if I was interested in discussing her work on it. I agreed, and she mailed me several books she had worked on. Among these was the four issue Black Canary miniseries she wrote that DC Comics published in late 1991. I read these back when they came out, but since then I sold off a lot of my collection. So it was nice to once again have them.
Soon after Byam sent me those books life sort of got in the way. I had to move into a new apartment, and find a new job, and so on. Byam’s package ended up at the bottom of one of the countless boxes of stuff that I threw together during the move, and only recently did I finally dig it out. So here, at last, is my retrospective on that Black Canary miniseries.
Written by Byam, the Black Canary miniseries has Trevor Von Eeden contributing pencil layouts, with the finished artwork by Dick Giordano. Lettering is by Steve Haynie, and coloring by Julia Lacquement.
“New Wings” was, according to the text piece by editor Mike Gold in issue #1, the very first solo series to star Black Canary. This was in spite of the fact that the character had been around, in one form or another, since 1947. Serving as a longtime member of both the Justice Society and Justice League, the Black Canary also had a lengthy association with Green Arrow, cast variously as his girlfriend, partner and sidekick. Nevertheless, it took 44 years for Dinah Laurel Lance to finally receive how own book.
Decades are an artificial construct, and truthfully there is very rarely a sharp delineation to separate them. That’s certainly true of the 1980s and 1990s, with the end of the former and the beginning of the later serving as a period of gradual transition.
This miniseries certainly straddles the two periods. In one respect it is very much rooted in the mid to late 1980s of DC Comics, which saw both the aftermath of Crisis on Infinite Earths, with its revisions to long-term continuity, and the one-two punch of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, which motivated a shift towards “grim & gritty” street-level characters.
It’s also very much of the early 1990s, when the comic book market was experiencing a huge boom, resulting in both DC and Marvel flooding the market with new books. As a result of those market conditions, the Black Canary miniseries got the green light, something that might not have occurred a few years earlier.
The 1987 miniseries Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters by Mike Grell had revamped Oliver Queen as a traditional archer, an urban vigilante based in Seattle, WA. That story had also seen Dinah Lance brutally tortured, causing her to lose her “Canary Cry” sonic scream.
Although taking away Dinah’s superpower was undoubtedly an attempt to more realistically ground her alongside Green Arrow, in retrospect it is also an example of the “Women in Refrigerators” phenomenon, in female characters being reduced to helpless victims.
The “New Wings” miniseries has Byam picking up those threads. Dinah is still recovering from the trauma of being victimized, and of losing her powers. She has also growing tired of constantly being in the shadow of the headstrong, arrogant Green Arrow, of playing the role of responsible adult to Ollie’s hotheaded thrill-seeker. Angrily tossing the accounting ledger at Ollie’s head, Dinah at last asserts herself. She informs him that it’s his turn to figure out how to pay the rent & bills, while she goes off to the mountains of Washington State in an attempt to find herself and regain her inner peace.
Visiting her “Auntie Wren” at the Quinault Indian Reservation, Dinah is introduced to Gan Nguyen, a reporter, radio talk show host, and social activist. Gan’s activities fighting against Seattle’s drug dealers have made him very unpopular with certain powerful people. On the trip back to the city Dinah is forced to change into her Black Canary identity to save him from a pair of racist assassins.
“New Wings” is, in certain ways, a very prescient piece of writing. The drug operation that Dinah and Gan are pitted against is run by rich, powerful men with connections to both politics and private industry who utilize the people from poor rural communities to do the dirty, dangerous work. The center of the cocaine distribution network is the town of Sandbar, which Byam describes thus…
“Sandbar is one of those quaint little seaside towns, too sleepy even for tourists to bother with. A little too ‘Mayberry’ for some, it’s a good place to raise your kids. A safe place.
“In Sandbar, people love the Fourth of July, and the old men press up their uniforms every Veterans Day.
“How does a town like that go bad? Stagnate? Lose its sense of purpose?
“Traditions of protecting freedom, of sacrificing, son after son, becomes traditions of protecting property, sacrificing truth after truth…
“Because the only thing more terrifying than the enemy… is change.”
Sandbar sounds very much like one of those Red State communities that in the last few years have wholeheartedly embraced Donald Trump. Their economy is in ruins, devastated by trickle-down economics and corporations shipping jobs overseas. Yet instead of recognizing who is actually exploiting them, they are all too easily distracted by the racist dog-whistles that scapegoat minorities, immigrants and non-Christians as the causes of all their problems.
Byam was clearly observant enough to perceive this burgeoning phenomenon way back in 1991, in the years immediately before the GOP, the Koch Brothers and Fox News would commence to enthusiastically fuel the fires of racism, xenophobia and paranoia among white rural communities over the next two decades, eventually bringing about the rise of the Tea Party and Trump.
There are a couple of reasons why I have now finally got around to spotlighting this Black Canary miniseries. One is the emergence of the hatemongering “Comicsgate” trolls in the last couple of years, angry white male fanboys who claim that diversity is destroying comic books, who want to return to the time when the industry was supposedly apolitical. There is innumerable evidence to disprove their lies. This miniseries, published in 1991, is certainly one example of how very wrong they are.
“New Wings” features a female character, Black Canary. It introduces a Vietnamese American supporting character, Gan Nguyen. It is written by a woman, Sarah Byam. It is penciled by a black man, the Guyanese-born Trevor Von Eeden. It is an extremely political story, tackling complex issues of racism, economic injustice, drug dealing, gun control and political corruption. It raises some difficult, uncomfortable questions.
The other reason is the 2018 midterm elections. This week over one hundred female candidates were elected to Congress. This is important. It has been less than one hundred years since women finally gained the right to vote nationwide, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. And, as the last few years have vividly demonstrated, there is still so much work to be done in safeguarding equal rights, in making sure that they aren’t stripped away, in protecting women from once again being reduced to second-class citizens. We need to recognize that the struggle against sexism & misogyny, as well as all other forms of injustice, is ongoing.
In additionally to being very well written and thought-provoking, the artwork on “New Wings” is exceptional. The collaboration between Trevor Von Eeden and Dick Giordano is extremely effective.
Von Eeden’s layouts are dynamic, superbly telling the story, both in the action sequences and the quieter conversational scenes. The finished artwork by veteran artist Dick Giordano is beautiful, with his characteristic slick, polished work on display.
“New Wings” did well enough that an ongoing Black Canary series was commissioned. Byam and Von Eeden returned, with Bob Smith coming onboard as inker. Byam continued to write stories that addressed political & social issues. She was one of those writers in the medium who very much helped my teenage self begin to broaden his perspective, to consider the intricacies of the world and the people who inhabit it. Regrettably the ongoing Black Canary title only lasted 12 issues, but the majority of them were very well-done.
It would be another few years before Black Canary would once again gain the spotlight. In late 1995 she was paired up with Barbara Gordon / Oracle in the Birds of Prey special, which soon led to the long-running, very well-regarded series co-starring the two characters.
Both the Black Canary miniseries and ongoing were my introduction to the work of Trevor Von Eeden. I instantly became a fan of his art. I was immediately struck by both his stunningly beautiful depictions of the title character, as well as his amazing layouts & storytelling.
It’s very much worth noting that Von Eeden has been vocal about the fact that he never felt any real affinity for the character of Black Canary. I say this because it definitely speaks to both his talent and his professionalism that he nevertheless did superb work on the series.
One other note: Whoever designed the series logo did a great job. It looks amazing.
It’s unfortunate that “New Wings” and the subsequent twelve issue series have never been collected in a trade paperback. However, it should be easy enough to find these in the back issue bins, or for sale online. They are well worth tracking down.
Hopefully in the future I can offer a detailed look at the 1993 series, as well as some of Sarah Byam’s other works. Cross your fingers!
In My Not So Humble Opinion 
Ben, I missed these books when they were published and have never read them, so I appreciate your review. It sounds like Byam’s writing influenced you in the way that that of Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, and others influenced me, when I was around the same age you were in ’91.
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Yes, I agree, for me writers such as Ann Nocenti, Grant Morrison and Sarah Byam were really pushing the boundaries and attempting to tell different, thought-provoking types of stories within the framework of the DC and Marvel universes in the late 1980s and early 90s, just as Englehart and Gerber had done in the 70s for you.
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