Tom King on his Black Canary series: ‘This is a fight that if Batman got in the ring, he’d get his ass kicked’

To comics writer Tom King, who’s taken the reins on Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, legacy is the one core theme the DC universe has that Marvel’s comics universe simply can’t compete with. “We can explore this idea that I think every human being has to deal with — how do they inherit the world from their parents, and how do they pass it on to their children?”

King isn’t alone in his observation about the generational thread of DC Comics’ continuity — James Gunn initially named his Superman movie Superman: Legacy. Through any number of factors, including having decades-older continuity to pull from, a history of narrative resets, and an origin back when sidekicks were a much hotter superhero trend than they are now, the DC Universe is chock-a-block with dynasty-style lines of superheroes who inherited their mantles, sometimes from predecessors who are also successors themselves. Marvel Comics legacies, though growing much more common in the last decade, are still the exception more than the rule.

With Black Canary: Best of the Best, King and artist Ryan Sook (Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, Legion of Super-Heroes) are drilling into one of the oldest second-generation superheroes DC ever produced: Dinah Lance, the Black Canary, daughter of Dinah Drake, the Black Canary. The dramatic potential of a vigilante daughter following in her mother’s footsteps kept Black Canary steadily in the limelight at DC Comics, and gave Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons their most directly-inspired-by superhero in Watchmen. And now Dinah (and her mom, Dinah) form the emotional core of King and Sook’s six-issue tribute to Rocky and Raging Bull.

In Black Canary: Best of the Best, the two creators are telling the story of a globally televised, bare-knuckle prize fight between the DCU’s two best martial artists. (Yes, even better than Batman.) Black Canary and Lady Shiva face off in a series where each issue is one round of the fight. Black Canary: Best of the Best #1 (released on Nov. 27) revealed that if Canary takes a dive in the sixth round, supervillian Vandal Savage will walk away with an enormous bookie payout — but he’ll also cure her mom’s cancer.

Polygon sat down with the two creators to talk about Black Canary, superheroes in civilian clothes, King’s inability to escape personal work, and the most frustrating thing DC films can do that DC comics can’t.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: What fascinates you guys most about Black Canary? And was there a specific story that defined the character for you?

Tom King: What fascinates me personally about her — and you’ll see this in the book — is, I think the great DC theme is legacy. […] Dinah really represents that, with her mother being the Golden Age Black Canary, and her having to define herself in that shadow, and also cast her own light.

The defining story, that’s an easy one for me. Alex Toth did a Black Canary series [1972’s Adventure Comics #418-19]; it’s bizarrely, like, a backup in an old Supergirl comic, but it’s fairly famous, so a lot of people know it. In my opinion, it’s probably the best-drawn superhero comic of all time. It just defines who she is. It’s light and breezy, it’s just her fighting a group of gangsters, probably 16 pages or something — and it’s an utterly perfect comic.

Ryan Sook: I would echo that same sentiment about that story by Toth, who’s one of the greats; it’s one of the great jobs of his whole career. That story is a comic book masterpiece.

As someone who’s read the script and story [for Best of the Best] all the way through, it’s a development of the character that I hadn’t seen before. Not just Dinah Lance, but [her mother] Dinah Drake also, and their relationship.

I feel like it’s familiar, but totally brand-new. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s everything you want to have about a Black Canary story — you get all of that, but it totally surprises you, too. Tom’s great at doing that with characters that we love. He writes them feeling familiar, you know these characters, but then there’s always this twist that you didn’t see coming. It shocks even me, even as I’m drawing it.

Your first issue ends with a twist about Dinah’s plans for this fight, related to her mother’s cancer. And the second pivots the story a bit. Dinah is choosing between her mother and her mother’s legacy — big stakes when her entire identity is her mother’s legacy. What connection do you feel to this very specific relationship and these themes?

King: [hesitates] You see me hesitating because I’m hesitant to admit how personal anything is to me. I always want to hide myself in my stories. I never set out to tell a personal story, I always think, Oh, this is going to be a nice little fiction. And then I look back and I was like, Oh no, this was all scraping my own heart and soul out.

But legacy is important. My father wanted to be a novelist and never achieved that goal; wanted to be a writer in Hollywood, never achieved that goal. And my mother was a studio executive who was very much — they were very, very divorced, I would say would be a way to qualify them. Because he didn’t succeed in his business, my father couldn’t support his family, and had to disappear from my life. And so my mother was very much like, You can’t go into the creative arts, because I’ve seen that tear a man apart.

And then I’ve somehow found myself entirely ensconced in creative arts. So I feel that pain of the legacy of your parents, and how it shapes you, and how you run from it, and then you end up just running around a track to where you started. And all of that is definitely in the book. So yeah, it’s obviously a very personal work, as personal as something like Mister Miracle or Strange Adventures.

So much of the book is these prizefighting announcers and these boxing scenes—

King: [laughs] I know, I’m talking about the book like it’s this sad, depressing thing, but it actually a big old — it’s like Rocky, it’s—

It’s essentially a six-issue brawl! What went into nailing the vibe and the visuals of this epic prize fight? Are you fans of the sport already, or did it involve research?

Sook: I took the lead from the script, but it was lots of research. Lots of MMA fights and lots of WWE reference and research and stuff, which I didn’t have on lock already. But this was the story, visually, that I’ve been [wanting to draw] nearly 30 years. I’ve drawn all kinds of superhero comics, I’ve drawn lots of horror comics, mostly supernatural stuff. And the thing that I love about this story is, Tom has this great ability to take these characters who have abilities that are beyond human and strip it down to the knuckle and bone, and just have this great battle. And you discover what I always love about comics — you discover that integrity is far more powerful than any laser beam, or even the Canary Cry.

Those things are awesome, and you love ’em, and they’re metaphors [for integrity and such things], but I like this story where you get to strip it away. And then we do the same thing with the visuals; it’s very stripped away. I wanted to just draw what Tom wrote, so that every punch that he wrote, it’s a punch that you feel, and every kick. And it has a lot of impact when you look at it. But it’s balanced by those great emotional scenes. It just makes it a lot of fun — fun to look at, fun to see the balance between those two, differences in the world. But it has a grittiness and a real-world-ness that I’ve been missing in comics for myself for a long time.

King: I love the announcers. I wanted to make a comic in the tradition of these great fight movies like Rocky and Raging Bull, which is just a genre of films that I enjoy. I was like, How could a comic capture that? One of my favorite comics that I ever did, Marvel Two-In-One annual #7, which is [written by] Tom DeFalco and [drawn by] Ron Wilson, is all about the Thing fighting the Champion in a boxing match. I worship that comic. I wanted to see if I could do that, if I could extend it, if I could tell a story in just four corners of the ring that was as exciting and as big and as nuanced and as incredible as any epic event that DC or Marvel could put out. That was the challenge I wanted from the beginning. And with the way Ryan draws it, it feels that big. It feels that important.

Ryan, in this first issue, you do one of my favorite tropes in superhero comics, which is just a big spread of superheroes standing around in civilian clothes, where you can still tell who every single one of them is just from context clues.

Sook: I’m glad you liked it. It was fun to draw. Tom left it wide open for — well, I shouldn’t say wide open, I drew what he wrote — but he really set me up to do a great page there.

King: [laughs] It was wide open! It was something like, “A bunch of superheroes sitting around watching TV. Batman is not there.” That was basically the description. Ryan did all that wonderful storytelling.

Shoot, I would have bet money the guy on the couch just inhaling protein from a plate was supposed to be Batman. Now I have to reassess.

King: I was like, The one person who’s not attending the watch party is Bruce Wayne. He’s still at his computer watching crime that day.

Tom, you’re on this streak of female-led stories.

King: I am! It’s bizarre to me. I dunno, it was not a plan.

I don’t want this to be like, Wow, a male writer who does female characters, so fascinating, because we never ask women that question about writing men. But I’m curious if you have your own thoughts on that pattern in your current work.

King: I swear, it’s an utter coincidence, it was not something I intended. Some of it’s also just schedules. These books were written years apart, in terms of Jenny Sparks, and Wonder Woman, and Black Canary. It just happens to be that the schedules lined up so that they’re all coming out at the same time. And also obviously Supergirl is hitting.

Kelly Sue [DeConnick] has that great quote that I just quote back when I get this question, where she’s like, ‘When people ask me what it’s like to write women, the first step is to pretend they’re people.’ [laughs]. Which I just love. Somehow, in one joke, it encapsulates the entire thing. I write female protagonists because they are interesting people with interesting lives and interesting dynamics, and that’s how I think of it.

Speaking of Supergirl, I know you can’t say anything about what’s going on in your DC Films projects, but I’m curious if there’s anything you hope to bring to Supergirl and Lanterns in film that you couldn’t do in comics.

King: Hey, you’re talking to a comics guy, I’m never going to say some other medium can do more than we can do. [laughs] I’m born and raised on comics. It’s my first and last love. I’m writing comics today, just having spent six months in LA working on Lanterns. I think the idea is the audience. [Films and TV shows] can bring eyes to these characters. As the guy who wrote the Penguin book — slightly more people watched the Penguin show than read my book. Like, five or six more people? [laughs]

I think that’s what [movies and TV] can do. In comics, we’ve been showing what’s amazing about Superman, what’s amazing about Green Lantern. And we can bring that energy to a huge, wider audience, and show them just how amazing these characters are, and how they can speak not just to the times in which they were created, but to the times now. They can speak to deep issues and to fun issues, and they can make you laugh and cry. I guess that’s what it is — it broadens the appeal of characters I love.

The thing I try to point out to people about the success of the MCU, etc., is that it proves these stories are universal, and the thing that was keeping them from a wider audience was distribution. It’s just more difficult, financially, logistically, socially, to get down on a comic book than a movie. It’s not that the stories were bad — they are incredibly appealing. But getting them in front of people is hard.

King: [Movies and TV are] much easier — comics cost $4 to $5 a pop, and to get embroiled in our universe, you have to buy so many of them. It’s much easier to order a Netflix subscription for $20 a month and watch 20 movies. But hopefully — I mean, I’ve been saying this for 10 years — hopefully those movies lead people back to the books. James [Gunn] is a huge fan of comics, and obviously it’s where I come from, so it’s a fantastic platform.

[With sudden pique] You know what they have over us? They can use music. In comics, I can never do a needle drop. I am incredibly envious when you’re like, Oh man, the emotions in this scene aren’t working. All right, I’m dropping in “Hallelujah.” I never get to do that in comics.

Lady Shiva is definitely one of my problematic faves. She’s a bit of a dated dragon-lady stereotype. But there weren’t many girls in Batman comics when I was getting into them. So the idea that when Batman needed someone to train him, in KnightsEnd, he went to a woman — that was so powerful to me as a kid. We’ve done a lot of talking about Canary, but Shiva is the wall she’s up against in this book. Why Lady Shiva?

King: I mean, the book is called The Best of the Best, and Lady Shiva is the best hand-to-hand fighter in the DC universe. Male, female, what have you, she’s number one. And Black Canary is number two. This is a fight that if Batman got in the ring, he’d get his ass kicked by both of these women. And I say that as a guy who’s written hundreds of issues with Batman [laughs] and loves the character, but that’s what this fight is about. It’s about who is the best fighter in the DC universe. And it just happens to be that the number one champion and number one contender are both women.

As for Shiva’s character, this is a book about a fight, but it’s also a book about a mother-daughter relationship, and sort of flashing back to that. Lady Shiva is playing the heel here. She’s Andre the Giant to Hulk Hogan. I want to be totally upfront, it’s not an incredibly nuanced portrayal of a wrestling heel. She’s the immovable object, and Dinah’s the unstoppable force. That’s the role she plays in this, as someone who cannot be defeated. This is Galactus coming to Earth and facing off against Mister Fantastic. That’s how big it feels. That’s the hill that Dinah has to climb.

Sook: I can’t say it any better than that, but as a visual contrast and a character contrast to Canary, I think she’s portrayed very well, because you know what the stakes are right up front. You know what the stakes are right out of the gate. And when you realize that, when you get further into the issues — I mean #4 and #5 — I’m still drawing ’em. I’m as excited to draw them as I am to read ’em, because like Tom said, [Lady Shiva is] there as a set piece, and yet still he breathes this great character into her. And the contrast between the two of ’em — at times, you really love to hate her. So it’s cool that way.

Black Canary: Best of the Best #1 is out now, with issue 2 coming out Dec. 25.