'Black Canary' stars rockin' superheroine

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Dinah Lance is gonna rock 'n' roll all night and take out bad guys every day.

The DC Comics world has always been full of superheroes with day jobs — Clark Kent as mild-mannered reporter, Bruce Wayne as billionaire playboy — and Dinah is the lead singer in a touring rock band called Black Canary in a comic book titled, you guessed it, Black Canary.

Writer Brenden Fletcher's Batgirl series reintroduced Dinah as a frontwoman in fishnets to "give her something new to do," he says, plus it made sense with a heroine whose powers are based in her voice. Now Fletcher's teamed up with artist Annie Wu to take Dinah and her new bandmates on the road and into lots of trouble.

"She's still a crimefighter or superhero at heart. That's who she is," Fletcher says. "There's always going to be aliens or ninjas or superspies or something that need to be punched."

Black Canary No. 1 introduced the new dynamic as well as Dinah's penchant for engaging in bar brawls during the middle of the set list. A mysterious group is seemingly after young band member Ditto — who has some interesting abilities of her own — and issue 2 (out Wednesday) finds Dinah getting her charges ready for battle.

"It's a time when the band takes a turn into the sort of outfit that they may become in the future," says Fletcher, adding that the group discovers that one of them is pretty gifted during training. "They're not going to just be a bunch of musicians on tour anymore, if Dinah has anything to say about it."

This first story arc focuses on the Black Canary band's current tour, the search for whatever's after Ditto and how certain members of the band have a greater history with one another, according to Fletcher.

Someone from Dinah's past returns at the end of issue 2, which also sees the debut of Bo Maeve, the former lead singer of the band who's not a big fan of her replacement. The third issue explores why exactly the aforementioned mystery character is back on the scene, and Fletcher says it culminates with something having to do with Bo, who gets the spotlight in the fourth issue drawn by guest artist Pia Guerra (Y: The Last Man).

Bo is "someone who's potentially not to be trifled with," the writer adds. "She's more of a problem than anyone realizes at this point, and that's going to turn into a major story point."

Fletcher feels there's no more dangerous time for a band than when they're on the road, and he knows from experience. The Montreal scribe has been a singer in rock bands, still works as a vocalist and figures Black Canary is a love letter to his touring days.

He's had Dinah's life in a way, though "I've never jumped off the stage and thrown a microphone at an alien," Fletcher says. "This type of book lets me dig into my own past and build characters and situations around things that I've actually experienced."

Wu has a background on stage as well, mainly in dramas, comedies and musical theater. She's also a pop-culture junkie and has worked all the music and rock history knowledge she's accumulated over the years into Black Canary.

It's a modern time with smartphones and the Internet in the comic, but being an indie rocker like Dinah is still a DIY gig so Wu works in aspects as such as screenprinted gig posters and cheap Xeroxes musicians make for basement shows.

There's a publication in Black Canary called Burnside Tofu, and Wu says she thought of making it a blog "but I wanted to make it a dumpy little zine that was in the world of this book."

Rocking influences have also made it into Wu's designs. Every once in a while, Dinah puts on a cape for shows so she can do a dramatic reveal when she takes a stage, and that moment comes from David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona, Tim Curry's Dr. Frank N. Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and also a little bit of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

The artist also sees Bo Maeve as "a weird Frankenstein thing together of things I love," she says. "She loves being on stage, and the way I've been trying to draw her is very dancerly. She vogues into every room she enters.

"I've been thinking a lot about Stevie Nicks because I gave her a lot of flowy shawls and things to twirl with. She's much more of a drama queen, whereas Dinah's a little tougher. She's going to be a lot of fun."

Fletcher figures that Dinah will return to Gotham City at some point, but for now he likes the rock-band plot device because it's the main part of her life at the moment that complements her gig as a superheroine. (Katie Cassidy's Black Canary on the CW's Arrow TV show has a day job as a lawyer.)

"I need to understand the reality of the character. Crimefighting for a living never feels like it makes a whole lot of sense," Fletcher says. "These people need to have real lives, and they need to be invested in something other than putting on their suit or armor or spandex and going out and arresting people or punching them in the mouth."