Green and Black

Green Arrow & Black Canary

I was pretty stoked when these characters got married a few years back because, after decades of flirting the issue, the two finally seemed to move to the next step and get a happy ending.  While Wally West remains my family-man superhero, Ollie and Dinah get to be the crimefighting couple.

Haha!  Her wedding "gown" has fishnet stockings. Heheh.

For Ollie's story, his happiness came to a screeching halt with the conclusion of Cry for Justice after he (SPOILERS!) murdered the villain and went on the run from the rest of the Justice League.  Or something like that. Frankly I didn't follow too closely after the story started dismembering heroes and murdering babies.  But rather than leading down the path of outcast murderous vigilante divorcee (like in the post-BN DCU), I'd much prefer a story of redemption.

Fortunately, while the (SPOILER!) murder of Prometheus happened before the My52 launch date and is thus part of my canon, the story of his downfall came after, so I'm able to branch off and have Black Canary talk him away from the path back into the vigilante murderer he had been once before. Because the murder was brought about from extreme grief, there's room for extenuating circumstances to keep him out of jail.  They may not let him back into the League, but they can't keep Dinah from staying by his side.

Dinah's story isn't so rollercoaster-y, which is kind of a shame.  Sure she doesn't have any great hole to dig her out of, but she also hasn't had any major highs to play off of either.  She recently gave up her adopted daughter, Sin, but that works to my advantage because I just want the two of them (Mia's off to the Teen Titans and, if he's still alive, Conner will go roam the Earth or something).

Bye.

Ollie recently lost his mayoral position in Star City, so the two of them set up shop in Dinah's florist shop.  It's not very exiting, but they become strong members of the community they're fighting for.  The new mayor, of course, is as corrupt as they come and GA & BC are declared outlaws and hunted by the police even as they're rescuing citizens.  To fill his days, Ollie manages to politic himself into a City Council position to at least keep his eye on the dirty dealings. 

Something I want to address just for my own satisfaction, though, is to unkink Dinah's timeline. More details when I get to talking about the Justice Society, but I've been trying to come up with ideas to justify the growing time gap between WWII and my sliding timeline, a gap that currently requires Dinah's mother to have given birth at age 60.  I know it doesn't bother everyone, but it's something I'd like to nail down.

For Dinah, I think the solution lies in her pre-CoIE's origin.  Before they were a straight-up mother/daughter legacy, the JSA Dinah had a daughter cursed with a destructive "canary cry" and had to be placed in Limbo for her protection.  Somewhere along the way, Society Dinah transformed her mind into the body of her daughter and joined the League with a new sonic scream.  It was an odd solution to an odd problem, but it was the situation until CoIE came along and made a more linear timeline.  

All this was so she could be young enough to date Green Arrow.  Seriously.

So my ticket to bridging the timeline is to use Infinite Crisis to reclaim a bit of that Limbo story. Now, WWII Black Canary can have given birth in the 1950s (at the decent age of 30 or so), only to discover the Wizard's curse and be forced to place her daughter in Limbo.  Then, during a later adventure, Black Canary II can be rescued from Limbo in time to become a founding member of the Justice League.  Perhaps she's rescued as a baby and allowed to grow up, but I don't exactly have a timeline for all of that worked out yet.