Black Canary: Best of the Best #5: Like Mother, Like Daughter

Black Canary: Best of the Best #5 picks up with round five of the action-packed matchup between Black Canary and Lady Shiva as the fight gets more intense than ever before. While the fight continues, the story transitions back to Black Canary’s past adventures with her mother back when she started being a hero. Getting down to the core of the character, the issue explores why Dinah wants to be a hero in the first place, as well as what the legacy of the Black Canary title means for both her and her mother.

Ryan Sook continues to showcase his amazing ability to showcase the impact of each blow as the fight intensifies. While superhero fights are not typically known to be slow and organized, Sook takes advantage of the mixed martial arts style of fighting in a ring to fuse together a more realistic combat, all while maintaining that superhero sensibility. This leads to punches that feel impactful and leave a lasting impression, whether it is a black eye or cuts on Black Canary or Lady Shiva’s faces. This gets intermixed with crazy moves that sometimes feel straight out of a WWE match but also contain that same impact. All of this to say, the fight looks as brutal as it feels, giving readers a sense of drama that sometimes is missing in traditional superhero tales.

While the present-day story focuses on the fight and the narration from the announcers, the meat and bones of the plot stays with the flashbacks that help round out Black Canary’s character. This entire story has been about the relationship between Dinah and her mother, with this issue helping to define what exactly Dinah is fighting for, despite the fact that her mother is extremely hard on her. What evolves is a very emotional tale that showcases how this complex relationship functions, with the main idea always going back to one idea: Dinah idolizes her mother.

Whereas Dinah takes a lot of personality traits from her mother, she also is quite rebellious, and King explores that by showing a day-in-the-life of the hero going to work. This results in another intense argument between the two, with the argument consistently coming back to the reasons why Dinah’s mother is so hard on her. This will hit home for a lot of people who have struggled to live up to their parent’s expectations, especially when it comes to parents who want their kids to learn from their mistakes. This is ultimately why Dinah’s mother forces her to train so intensely, as she knows that Dinah needs to stay safe in order to stay alive and be happy.