Bronze Age Black Canary II (Dinah Laurel Lance)

Okay, this may get a little confusing, but . . .
Back in Justice League of America #75 (November 1969), DC had a story where the Golden Age character Black Canary crossed over from Earth-2 to Earth-1 and joined the Justice League of America.

This was okay for a while. After all, the character was first introduced back in 1947, so this was only 22 years after that.

But by the 1980s, it began to seem a bit much to have a character (Black Canary) who was introduced back in the late 1940s not showing very much aging in the stories, especially when she had ties to a group of heroes that were active in WWII (the JSA) while the other members of the JLA had more of a shifting time frame for when they could have first been active.

So, in Justice League of America #219-220 in 1983, they introduced the idea of Black Canary actually being two women: a mother and her not previously revealed daughter.


We won't go into all the . . . complications that resulted from this, but suffice to say it was decreed that the Black Canary who appeared on Earth-1 back in Justice League of America #75 was now retconned into being the Dinah Laurel Lance / Black Canary II version.

After the merging of the Earths of the Multiverse into a unified Earth that resulted after Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, the idea of the two Black Canaries (mother and daughter) remained, but without all that strange stuff of the daughter having all the memories of her mother for nearly fifteen years.

Also in the post-CoIE revised history, Black Canary II was now a founding member of the Justice League of America, replacing Wonder Woman (who now had not yet left Themyscira for "Man's world" when the JLA was first formed).  


And then, as a result of 2005-2006's Infinite Crisis, Wonder Woman was retconned back into being a founding member of the JLA again, so . . .