The Four Color Media Monitor

Newsarama interviewed the unbearable Tom King, who's now turning out a comic starring Black Canary in an arena-based match with Lady Shiva, illustrated by Ryan Sook, but no matter the quality of the illustrations, anything written by King is an ill-advised venture. It says:

Black Canary is canonically the second best fighter in the DC Universe, and she's about to challenge the very best - Lady Shiva - to a one-on-one brawl to win it all to claim the mantle of the number one hand-to-hand combatant in the DC Universe.

For Black Canary: Best of the Best, writer Tom King, whose comic book accolades are too numerous to list but who is best known for stories like Mister Miracle, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and the current ongoing Wonder Woman series, is teaming up with artist Ryan Sook, who may just be the perfect collaborator for a story focusing on Dinah Laurel Lance and her mother Dinah Drake Lance.

The story takes Black Canary and Lady Shiva and traps them in, in King's words, the "four corners of a ring" for a knockdown drag out fight that hides a deeper core of the emotional reckoning between a mother and daughter as they both face their own life-defining stakes.

Well it's not hard to guess this'll be little different from the other trauma-emphasizing messes Newsarama made sure to gloss over. Curiously enough, the artwork provided of Black Canary and Lady Shiva doesn't look PC, but maybe that was King and Sook's hoped-for strategy of trying to deflect criticism over the story-based embarrassment this is bound to be. Fortunately, not many are fooled these days, yet DC and Marvel, in all their far-left influence, are still willing to waste money producing these very stories if that's what it takes to stealth their propaganda into the bookstores.

Newsarama spoke with King and Sook ahead of the November 27 release of Black Canary: Best of the Best #1, digging into the reasons why Black Canary is one of the most dynamic and interesting DC heroes, the influence the WWE and MMA had on the depiction of the big fight, and why King promises "you'll fucking cheer" by the time the limited series - and the fight - are done.

If he's going to employ vulgar profanity, he's not doing much to improve upon say, Aubrey Sitterson, who had a tendency to boast about his abortive GI Joe series several years ago at IDW, without offering much to convince he had an entertaining story at hand. That's another serious problem with King.

Newsarama: Tom, Ryan, first off, I just want to say, I got to read the first issue of Black Canary and I loved it. So the first thing I want to ask is Tom -

Tom King: Why so many words? Why so many words? [Laughs]

Nrama: I would never! [laughs] Tom, you've said before something along the lines that writing a specific character isn't necessarily important to you, it's all about finding an angle with a character that lets you tell a good story. So what was the thing that made you say, "Yes, I can do a Black Canary story?" What made it click for you?

King: It was two ideas coming together in my head at the same time. Number one, my oldest son became a huge WWE fan. That was not my nerd growing up, but he got way into it, the way I got into comics as a kid. And remembering how my parents sort of very much did not enjoy my comics and did not participate in my hobby, I kind of wanted to do the opposite.

So I decided to watch WWE with him, and read the books, and buy the toys, and I got very much into watching it. I became fascinated with the way they just had four corners of a ring to tell, like, 80 years of storytelling. The challenge of that just blows my mind, that they make it so compelling. And every writer sees something they love, and they want to participate in it.

That was half of it. The other half goes back to a retreat a long time ago, a sort of famous retreat, with me, Scott Snyder, Becky Cloonan, and James Tynion, and we were trying to plan a Batman event. So we jokingly came up with something called 'Knight Fight,' Knight with a 'K,' and the joke pitch was that all the Bat-characters would get together for a tournament. We just joked over who would win, and we all just decided that it would be Black Canary, because she's the second best fighter in the DC Universe. It always stuck with me, what an odd person for it to be. That's how she became the main character.

It was like, if she's the second best, who is the best, and how does Black Canary become the best? And I just started running with that.

Tynion's the worst of the lot mentioned, since he's quite the SJW himself, and already humiliated some of DC's most significant properties, before he left their employ, yet writers like King made sure to continue from where he left off.

Nrama: Ryan, how did Tom bring you into that vision of Black Canary? And what's your history with her? I know you've drawn your fair share of fishnets over the years.

Ryan Sook: I have done my share of fishnets over the years [laughs]. But Black Canary, she's a character I've only ever had the chance to draw in publication on a handful of covers over the years, and she's one of my all time favorite characters. I just thought there was always so much potential with her, even though I hadn't seen it fully tapped.

But I was working with our editor Ben Abernathy, and he asked me, "Oh could you do this other thing?" And I said I was kinda busy. But he goes, "Well I've got this Black Canary script that Tom King wrote…" And I was immediately like, let me see it, I want to do that. I literally had another thing lined up and I dropped it like a hot potato. I apologize to whatever that was.

But yeah, I was definitely in on this. I've been looking for an opportunity to work with Tom, whether he knew it or not. And when Ben mentioned it to me I just said, "I would love to do that." And it was a hard call, it's the only time I've ever done that in 30 years of comics. But I said to myself, I have to draw this book. It's Black Canary, she's one of my favorite characters. And she's got that great duality to her. She looks like an angel but she fights like a devil.

It's the drama that Tom wrote, the characterization that he wrote, and the backstory for both Dinah Laurel Lance and Dinah Drake Lance, it's this incredible mother-daughter story. That's what drew me in. And Tom was cool with it, the editor was cool with it, and I couldn't be happier.

Personally, I wonder why Sook doesn't see anything wrong with King's MO, any more than the interviewer does. After the awful job King did on Heroes in Crisis, easily the worst of his resume, I wouldn't trust the "characterization" on this miniseries any more than what's written in Heroes in Crisis.

Nrama: You both brought up some interesting points I'd like to touch on. First off, Tom, you mentioned writers wanting to be part of the things they enjoy, and I think this comic is a great example of how both comic writers and artists have to be able to step into all kinds of different roles to have these stories feel credible - you have to be fighters, commentators, all of it. How do you prepare for that, both in terms of how it's scripted, and how it's drawn on the page?

King: I mean, half of that is just trusting your artist. I'm not the kind of guy who's going to tell Ryan, this kick should look like this. And here's the exact move, and the physics would never work this way, and so on. That's just not how I write or read superhero comics. I just write something like "Black Canary kicks Shiva in her stupid face," and then Ryan makes it look realistic. So I don't want to say that I did incredible amounts of research into how fighting works. All that is from Ryan. [...]

And then, you know, you steal as much from non-fiction as you start to steal from fiction [laughs]. I stole from, you know, Neal Adams' Superman Versus Muhammed Ali, I stole from a lot of the Kickboxer movies I grew up watching in high school with my friends. It's called 'Best of the Best' as a tribute to one of my favorite kickboxing movies from childhood, starring Eric Roberts.

Whenever I see overrated writers (and artists) like these talking about "realism" today, it feels more like reason to worry than get excited about, because it's long come to be abused by SJWs and such to justify their shoddy storytelling. That King "stole" from various other sources reeks more of negativity than any positivity. And calling Shiva "stupid"? Even that's insulting to the intellect.

Nrama: My favorite scene in Black Canary #1 is where all Dinah's allies from the Justice League and other heroes are sitting around watching the fight, and there's just so much going on it almost feels like a Mad Magazine bit, just little visual gags all over the page. But it also shows so much personality, in a way that it feels like many superhero comics don't take the time to do anymore. How much of that spread was in the script and how much came straight from your brain? I just loved that bit so much.

King: Nothing, nothing was in the script. Ryan doesn't have to protect me. [Laughs]

Sook: No, I took everything from Tom's script, it's full of material. There's always those moments that you can try to add a little something, but the characters are just such great characters. I don't know, Aquaman and Mira showing up with a platter of seafood for the gang to share. I can't help but love to draw that kind of stuff. And, you know, Clark cooking hot dogs with laser vision.

You've got to have fun with it, because that's what they're doing. They're having fun, it's a get together for fight night. But they're still a team, that's kind of what I really liked about it. They're like, what's going on with Dinah? Why is she doing this? And I love their reactions. It's such a great scene.

I also find it annoying how PC advocates like King - and Sook - are the ones who get to decide whether to supposedly "have fun", but anybody who's truer to the best characterizations of yesteryear doesn't have that privilege? That's why the talk of this falls flat, and besides, King's already demonstrated in past years why he's not suited for the job.

Nrama: This is a question for both of you. What makes Black Canary so special and so unique in the DC Universe, even though she's a character that hasn't quite broken out into being a household name?

King: Oh, man. I mean, a few things. Number one, she's got an incredible silhouette. I mean, like, I think working with Batman, you're like, nobody looks cooler than Batman. But goddamn, Black Canary looks cool. Like Ryan said, it's when you're 11 years old and you're in 7-Eleven and you see a Black Canary comic. Like, oh, man, that that's somebody I want to see.

Number two, she has sides to her, but there's something about her that's like, essentially punk rock. There's something about her that's like, rebellious. There's something about her that's like, fuck the system, fuck you, fuck everyone, that I just very much gravitate to, and I think is very cool.

She's definitely the one who, you know, when Batman calls a mission together, she's the one who's like "That's a stupid plan." She's the one who will raise her voice. I love that about her. I love that she's a legacy, I love the story between her and her mother and their complicated issues. I love that she's a character who's existed since the beginning, almost as long as Batman, since the '40s.

And also, just to mention something that's maybe my favorite. What's the best drawn superhero comic of all time? That Alex Toth Black Canary issue. That lives in my head as, like, the greatest of our medium. Toth took her and made the greatest story. So that makes her awesome.

Sook: Yeah, absolutely. It's just great. She's a great looking character. I mean, that is really what it kind of comes down to. For me, I go back to that duality thing. She's beautiful, she looks like a bombshell - but she's a bombshell, and she'll go off. She's the kind of girl that will beat you up, and you fall in love with her because of it. That makes her really unique to me. And of course, she's a lot of fun to draw.

Oh for heaven's sake. Why would I want a woman I was in love with to assault me and potentially injure me very badly? Why can't it be because she'd rescue me, not unlike how there were times Wonder Woman could rescue Steve Trevor, and even he could give her a helping hand? That King continues to employ crude profanity is another letdown, and the talk of "complicated" issues is another reason to be wary of this new tale. Also, how do we know King/Sook aren't taking a negative view of conservatives, based on what's said about the "system"?

In the end, there's no use to buying a comic written by King, because he's done little to prove himself worthy of writing comics starring famous creations. Despite what he says, his work is just so full of contempt for the DC/Marvel creations he's now desecrating.

Labels: dc comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, violence, women of dc