Black Canary: Best of the Best Team on Creating the Ultimate Superhero Underdog

Two of DC’s deadliest fighter are squaring up one on one in Black Canary: Best of the Best #3, and it’s been a slugfest in it truest form. When the stakes are this high, heroes bring their best, even when few others think they even stand a chance. All those elements and more are at the heart of Best of the Best #3, and ComicBook had he chance to dive into the series and its unique mix of superheroes, boxing, and pro wrestling with writer Tom King and artist Ryan Sook, and you can find that conversation below.

Part of the big fight experience is having someone to bring what’s happening in the ring to vivid life to those watching, and often that means having a two or three-man team on commentary. Best of the Best has that as well, but to say the commentary is one-sided is an understatement, though there’s an element of authenticity to that as well if you’ve ever watched a wrestling match. While there are plenty of names in UFC, WWE, AEW, and MMA that have similar vibes, it was actually the NFL that inspired this duo.

Yeah, I mean it’s a mix of people. They’re named after two of my friends, Mike Kronenberg. and John Siuntres does the Word Balloon podcast who are both huge boxing fans and lecture me all the time about how I should be a bigger boxing fan,” King said. “I’m a huge NFL guy, so there’s a lot of Chris Collinsworth, I think in there and sort of the over top descriptions. You know, I grew up with John Madden, so there’s that comforting sort of Maddeness. I think to some people there’s a little bit of an announcer named Hawk who’s the local White Sox announcer.

My wife’s a huge White Sox fan, and he used to be, he’s retired, but there’s just to pay tribute. RIP To Bob Uecker, there’s definitely some Bob Euchre in there from Major League, plus 50 years of the Brewers. Yeah, and there’s some Mike Tirico. Yeah. Maybe, maybe a little bit of Tony Romo. Yeah, they’re all over the place,” King said.

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PTI fans will also recognize some elements, as king is a huge fan of the iconic sports duo. “I’m addicted to a show called PTI on ESPN which is like two old dudes arguing. Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon. They are D.C. based just to make them even more fun, and they used to be both writers for the post here in D.C. when I lived here earlier. So. Yeah, there’s a little, there’s a little Wilbon and Kornheiser in there too,” King said.

As the commentary sets the picture for what’s happening in the ring, the action between the ropes is physical, visceral, and at times pretty brutal. You will feel the impact of every strike and every counter, and a steel step has rarely ever looked as painful as it does here.

“It’s been brutal, no? Yeah, no, it is. It’s the goal, though,” Sook said. “I always get a little bit hesitant. I started in comics when you couldn’t draw red blood on the pages. It had to be black and stuff. You had to be scared of kind of different things. So now I have that sort of reservation, but this book sort of pulls the, there’s no holds on this one. We want to feel all those hits and everything and, and it is a pretty brutal book, but those fights are brutal, man. I mean, you know, even the WWE, that stuff gets gnarly and you get the UFC and MMA, it’s just scary, scary stuff. So, yeah, definitely pulling from all that stuff, and it comes across in the story.”

While the fight itself is obviously a huge part of the series, this is at the end of the day a look into who Black Canary is as a character and what drives her to push through any obstacle that stands in her way. There just happens to also be a lot of punching to go along with it, and even an appearance from the Dark Knight to present another point of view.

I think, you know, obviously, in a book like this, everything points back to Black Canary. This is very much. It makes it sound like a boring homework book. It’s not. It’s about f punching, but this is a character. This is a character study, right? This is a deep dive inside the soul of a human being to understand sort of where she is, how she got here,” King said. “And I think, to me, the best sports movies and the best WWE fights and the best boxing matches are that, right? They’re like, okay, we’re gonna strip away everything till we get to the heart of you. To the soul of you.”

“So we bring in Batman to show how that reflects on Dinah,” King said. “I’ve written a lot of Batman, and he’s a very black and white character who thinks this is all absurd. Like, this is not how you, not anything you would do as a superhero, but this is something that she is doing, and so it sort of contrasts with her attitude and her willingness and also her ability to not be intimidated by him. And it helps elevate her to see how someone like her, who was raised by a superhero used to defend Gotham, is unimpressed by Batman, you know, and sort of finds her way forward. So it’s, everything here points back to Canary and points back to the match and points back to how she keeps fighting.”

Sook and colorist Dave Stewart have a way of drilling through all the crowd noise and chaos that surrounds Canary and showcasing the quiet moments of resolve that power this character forward, and the scaling back of bigger superhero elements allows those grounded elements to shine through even more.

“The thing about this book all the way along, is that you don’t have any of those comic book superhero effects and stuff to fall back on to make the page dramatic or dynamic,” Sook said. “It’s all based on that character, their figure and the emotion that’s coming through them. You don’t have any laser beams. There’s no Kirby dots, there’s no smolder. You know what I mean? It’s all completely stripped away all through the training and all through the fight itself, and it really lends weight to that. You can’t fake it. When she’s standing there, like you said in the ring, and it’s just her and everything goes quiet.”

“That’s the brilliance of Tom’s writing in this thing, is that he knows how to fill a page with hilarious one liners, informative, you know, expository dialogue, and then he knows when to drop it all out and let you just see that character standing there and you feel all of it. It’s weird how much when you’re just reading it, you can feel all of that quiet,” Sook said.

Canary is facing one of the most lethal combatants in the DC Universe in Lady Shiva, and Shiva is very much treated as that genuine and lauded threat throughout the series, and King went above and beyond to preset her as a force of nature at every opportunity.

“Yeah, I hate to say this, but I don’t think of Shiva as a character in this story. I think of her as a force of nature, as like a Kilimanjaro, as like a mountain you have to climb or as a desert you have to walk through. I think of her as sort of the great challenge. The great, you know, jungle, that gate, and so that’s why all the commentary is meant to do that. It’s meant to keep elevating her, to tell you how just this is an absolutely impossible journey,” King said.

“This is, you know, you’re walking up under 40,000 steps and you’ve only walked up 500 and you’re exhausted, you’re still looking up like, that’s what Shiva is. She’s the top of the mountain. By making one of the commentators completely in her corner, you know, it reminds me sort of when Vince was really pushing Roman Reigns on everybody and nobody liked him, you know, it’s like that, like the more he pushed, the more you hated him,” King said. “But that became its own sort of compelling story, right? So that’s part of that dynamic to be like, the more you talk about how no one can conquer that mountain, the more you’re like, she’s got to conquer it,” King said.

“You know, that’s for our sanity. Please, for our sanity. Come on. Yeah, there’s, in the next issue, there’s just an utterly brutal moment where, you know, Dinah finally gets the upper hand, and Mike turns to him and he’s like, wow. You have to admit, man, Dinah’s got it you know, she’s winning. He’s like, nope, it’s luck. It’s all luck. That’s all it is,” King said. “He doesn’t give her any credit.”

While the series deals with several themes and concepts, there is one central idea that powers all of it, and it’s one intrinsic to who Black Canary is and has always been. In act, there’s one element to all this that King looks at as his best version to date.

“I mean, there’s so many big themes in the book. There’s themes about mothers and daughters. There are things about how comics work, how you can tell small stories and make them big, how you tell big stories and make them small. There’s things about preparation. There seems a moral ambiguity, but probably the thing I most want people to take away is the thing makes me most happy about comics, which is that moment, you know, when you have been driven utterly to your utter limits and you have nothing left in your tank, and you just are like, f*** it. I give up. I can’t do it,” King said. “I can’t go on. And you go on. You get up from the mat. Those are my favorite moments in comics.”

“I try to write them all the time, and I think I never wrote that better than I wrote it in this series. That idea that, like, when you’re in that moment, you’re not alone. Your whole life is with you. It may not be in the room with you, but it’s inside of you. It’s in your soul, and so you can use that life to take one more step and keep on punching,” King said.

Black Canary: Best of the Best #3 is in comic stores now.

What have you thought of the series so far? You can talk all things comics with me on Bluesky @knightofoa!