Hi! In lieu of your ‘being a female comics character stan is hard’ post, do you have any comic recs for dinah that rewrote your brain??

this is SUCH a good question, and unfortunately i'm going to have some unsatisfactory answers for you! firstly, i'm relatively new to comics and there's a lot i haven't read yet. secondly, i've yet to find a dinah run where i am completely and totally enamored with no qualms or questions. so i'm listing out the comics i've read and enjoyed, but i'll talk through some caveats with each of them.

birds of prey (1999)

i'm sorry for even mentioning a run written by chuck dixon. let me just start there. this is like, the second comic run i ever read, so my opinions of it are complicated and i don't necessarily recommend it. i just need to list it here, because it was my introduction to dinah and it's part of why i love her so much. again, sorry.

BUT.

a huge portion of this run covers the era when ollie is dead. this is really important context, because i think it's a chance to see dinah on her own and away from him and the rest of the league. it's just her and babs! the birds of prey name comes to encompass a lot of other heroines after a while, which is great and i support it, but for getting full pages of just dinah, this run is excellent. she is kind, she throws herself recklessly into every situation with wild abandon, she protects others even when she doesn't have to -- or really shouldn't -- and sometimes she's even allowed to be funny. also, she's just beautifully drawn for a lot of this, up til they change the art around issue 50. (sorry, but i hate the art of a lot of the bop runs. doesn't work for me.)

dinah and babs are spectacular together for so much of this run, and i love their dynamic dearly. sometimes tim and steph and ted are there and they add an extra level to the dynamic that i really appreciate. just... ignore everything else. and i do mean everything; the plots are absolute bullshit. this is the one where she's briefly engaged to ra's, a thing that makes me so mad i genuinely cannot talk about it without screaming. it's so fucking stupid. i will beat dixon with a stick for that.

the longbow hunters (1987)

dinah lance in the longbow hunters is everything to me. she has complexity, she has depth, she is her own woman and she loves ollie so much.

this run is explicitly meant to be darker and more mature, and i think it gives a little more freedom for dinah to be forthright and open and developed in a way other comics of the era just... didn't. but, that being said, she isn't in there a ton. it is an oliver queen-centric comic from the 80s, and that means she shows up every now and then before it switches over to him narrating his internal thoughts for a while. but those panels she is in have been rattling around in my brain for AGES, so they're powerful despite being fewer.

cw for some extreme levels of violence against women in this run, and specifically for violence against dinah.

(and, yknow, if this one works for you -- there are a couple black canary runs/miniseries from 1991-1993 that have good dinah moments. i can't recommend them outright because, frankly, the writing is hard to follow and the plots and characters don't always make sense to me. but dinah's there, she's pretty, she's doing the detective thing and i love her.)

green arrow (2001)

i am only referring to the first fifteen issues of this run as written by kevin smith. i have not read the rest of 2001 in full, as i have heard that it is incredibly frustrating, and so i have cherrypicked issues here and there when i am in the mood.

that being said. god i love dinah in this one. again, it's a story about ollie, but the pages that are from her point of view KILL me every single time. she's hurting, she's mourning, she's complicated and capable and so strong. god i love a woman. dinah is everything to me.

black canary (2007)

this little miniseries is good. i think about it a lot. ignore the wedding special that comes after and also anything else, i appreciate getting to see dinah with family of her own and i really love mia in here. not that mia is the point of this answer, but i think she needs some appreciation as well. dinah gets to be protective and mad and loving and all of those wonderful things i appreciate about her, and it isn't even centered on ollie. it's all for her little sister! and that's incredible!! i love dinah so much here even if i wish there were a little less "everyone knows what's going on except her" happening, because i think it's unnecessary and there's no need for it.

--

i HAVE read a few other birds of prey runs and justice league storylines, but none of them have provided as much insight for me into dinah's character and motivations as these.

Trust and belief and trust and belief and trust and belief and-

This is the start of something new

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I step all around the pieces on the floor / Wires and cords, and records, and tapes

not to like wax poetic about the literary nuances of Black Fucking Butler but i feel i need to point out how insanely campy it is. oh okay cool the butler is throwing butter knives at people with guns and winning. we're battling undertaker's zombie army by starting a boy band (we actually got the idea from the ZOMBIES' boy band). theres a curry making competition and its so important it needs an entire volume and a continuing motif dedicated to it. the Grim Reaper Death Gods are all cornballs with gardening sheers. the contradiction. the unintended irony.

i think the manga is like. toeing the line of camp. like its silly yet takes itself so seriously but its not too silly. my immersion is not broken by the silliness. but the anime is uncharted levels of camp. what the Hell was going on with pluto. you're gonna look me in the eye and tell me the phantomhives own a fifty foot dog thing and no one has noticed. simply one hell of a deer. ice skating. theres opium in funtom candy. the queen of england is maybe a little girl. speaking of which, the city of london just burned down. yeah the whole thing. the fifty foot dog was there too.

it's so ridiculously out of left field and the fact that none of the characters seem to notice or care feels like being gaslit. camp so visceral it's causing psychic damage. i am constantly begging the narrative to break character just once and acknowledge its silliness but doing so would negate the lack of awareness that makes it camp. its dated and timeless. an absolute milestone in camp history.

idk if it was the venus retrograde or what, but july 2023 was quite literally the worst month i've ever experienced in my life like.....every single day? awful? worse than the last? it's more likely than u think

I'm in Greece! I'm visiting my grandparents and will spend the next two weeks working on my novel, reading books and doing some work while sitting in their garden or patio

gale voice here feel the pulse of the magic in my heart that will eventually be the end of me. im on my knees before you like an animal showing its belly. im in excrutiating pain bc of the contact with the magic in my heart but please dont take your hand away please dont stop touching me

I'm still not over him nor this character of his like holy fuck man

I will never understand people who believe that Rhaenys wanted Baela to succeed Corlys just out of hatred for the Velaryon boys. Like- does this look like a woman consumed by anger and hatred? Does it look like a woman motivated purely out of spite?

She has plenty of reasons to want Baela to inherit over Laenor. PLENTY. She has plenty of motivation that has diddly-squat to do with her personal feelings towards the boys. I could literally bullet point them - big or small, emotional or political, logical or illogical, she has reasons.

One TF fandom argument that confuses me is when people put Megatron and Starscream versus each other like, when people say that it's "unfair that Megatron gets redemption but Starscream doesn't" (in regards to IDW1) because like. One, IDW1 in phase 2 was written by like 4 different writers, so you can't try to claim that there was some unified vision where the nonexistent Singular Writer of IDW was like "no Starscream isn't allowed to have nice things."

And second, I don't think the writers would even think of it that way? It's not like the writers were like "okay we have one Get Out Of Jail Free Card and we're going to spend it on Megatron, sorry Starscream maybe in the next reboot you can get it." The divisions fans make between X character likers and Y character likers are completely made up fandom drama and sometimes I feel like people don't understand that the writers aren't privy to fandom infighting/drama and wouldn't write Megatron and Starscream in opposition to each other as if one character's gain must come at the other's expense.

And finally............. IDW1 Starscream literally does get to be portrayed as a more morally gray person, have his feelings shown and treated as human, even make some friends/have people treat him nicely? IDK what fucking comics people are reading where they think that Starscream is treated as an evil villain with no redeeming qualities at all. Maybe it's the same Starscream fans who shit on TAAO/Scott or something, that's the only way I could explain it.

oh god i'm spiraling thinking about how this is going to make elaine feel after she hears asa did this as soon as she dropped him off! and beth and cara? danny and casper? stevie maybe being the one to find him?? IM LOSING IT

seriously i feel so bad for elaine, she has the least context of anyone in this situation. all she knows is that asa was acting weirder than normal and very secretive, then she takes him home and within hours he takes his life. she'll be rethinking everything he told her that day, i mean he literally said “If I can’t help anyone, then… I don’t know why I’m even here. I don’t know how much longer I can stand to be so useless.” she's going to feel so guilty :(

beth, who has been battling with herself over whether she should let asa be a normal kid with privacy and agency, and who only just convinced caroline to ease up on him a little. and cara??? this is quite literally her worst fear:

danny and casper, who both chose to pursue something for themselves instead of putting their family first like they always have in the past, who are terrified of being far away when their family needs them.

stevie, who convinced asa to look for finn in the first place, and who already has guilt over the way she froze up and watched a woman die because she couldn't jump into action quickly enough. stevie, who will have to be the one to intercept asa's parents at the door if the paramedics haven't gotten there yet.

jada, who we aren't sure how much she saw or knows yet, but the sheer amount of guilt she has weighing her down is already so so heavy. i can't even imagine how responsible she would feel for potentially being unable to save her best friend since the literal day he was born.

and finn??? the real kicker for me is that finn would/will be horrified when he finds out what asa put his family through, all for him. he got upset when asa did something as innocuous as burning family pictures, because asa's family loves him so much and he hates that asa has put such a strain on their relationship because of finn.

but i hope i've made it clear enough that this isn't really about finn. asa hasn't been cycling through antidepressants and seeing countless doctors since he was 12 for no reason; he genuinely does struggle with severe depression, losing finn was just the last straw. asa's ability to see ghosts has caused him so much pain over the years, but finn alone made it worth the heartache. without him, he feels entirely helpless. he's surrounded by people every moment of every day, but he can't connect with a single one of them. so while his motivation here may not have been to die and stay dead, i also can't say that he had a clear enough mind to be worried about the emotional impact this would have on the people around him. he knows that if caroline found his body, she would never recover from that, but even that is only a short-term consequence – he's not thinking about how his loved ones will feel in a week or a year or the rest of their lives. i can't really fault him for that. but the whole thing is fucking tragic :(

some illustrations/vibes from my uhh 29k memory trauma/disability focus orufrey fic, into the deep end.

Just checking for interest. Soon enough I will be working on remaking this blog, since I have the time to do so soon. How many of you would be interested in continuing threads, friendships, ships, etc. on the new blog when it done? Boop the ❤️ if anyone want to continue friendships (between muns).

guess who was not in the right emotional state to finish watching lars and the real girl

forever mad about how dirty they did aveline from act 2 onward