So...speaking of super-heroines...this is another bit of literary fun, a la the Baker Street Journal, or the World Newton speculations of Philip Jose Farmer...

Not to be taken seriously, but enormous fun to do.

Continuing...actually ending, for now, my series on the Justice Society members, for I'm stopping, for now, with their original line-up, before their decade of retirement...(next I may focus on the Justice League...)

Dinah Drake, the Black Canary, was the last such member to be elected; she worked with Johnny Thunder for a time, then helped with some JSA cases, and then was finally elected in his place, after Johnny dropped out. Her double identity and martial arts prowess (plus the many devices in her locket) made her fit in with the JSA...moreso really than Johnny ever did.

Dinah was trained by her father, police inspector Richard Drake, to be the best of all policewomen. The Drakes had a tradition of police work, going all the way back to a Drake in the original Bow Runners' , the first English police force, and many of Dinah's relatives ended up in police, detective, or intelligence work.

This particular Drake family was not originally English, though. They were descended from Radu, brother of Vlad Dracul, Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula. When a descendent came to England in the 1600's, he married a woman related to Sir Francis Drake's family, and shortened his name to Drake to curry favor with his famous in-laws. Vlad was relentless in hunting and punishing his enemies, but that part of their blood was tempered with a search for justice in their police work. According to Bram Stoker, Vlad was not beheaded as recorded in some historical records, but instead was cursed to be a vampire. (According to Stoker, Vlad was further descended from Atilla the Hun...)

In 1850, one of the English Drakes migrated to America, Roger Drake. (A nephew of his, Alvin Drake, stayed in England but fought an American detective, Nick Carter. Like Dinah Drake, he became a thief at least for a while, reversing the usual pattern of being a law officer in the family.) He like most of the family, stayed in police work, becoming a New York City cop on the beat. His wife was a reformed pickpocket, and he wanted to get her out of England before news of her previous crimes spread. She got the proclivity to light-finger from her father. Her father had been immortalized by Dickens as "the Artful Dodger", Fagin's best pickpocket and Oliver Twist's friend.

Roger Drake's son, Hugh Drake, became a Pinkerton detective. He married an Italian immigrant named Maria Cardona, who may have been the great-aunt to the Detective Cardona of the Shadow stories. Maria was also an accomplished singer with a tremendous range, which is interesting in light of the abilities of Dinah Drake's daughter...

Hugh Drake's son, Walter Drake, became a New York city police inspector. He and his wife Laurel, raised quite a large brood of boys, including Dinah's father, Richard, who also became a police inspector.

Richard Drake's mother was Laurel Fog, daughter of frontier gunman, occasional lawman, and martial arts expert Dusty Fog. Dusty had learned martial arts from an Oriental to help compensate for his small size. He in turn showed the martial arts to his children, and Laurel taught her many sons how to defend themselves. Richard was the most attentive, and passed on that legacy of martial arts to his daughter, Dinah. (Another descendent, Tim Drake, also distinguished himself in martial arts.)

Richard was the elder brother of a rather large brood...his brothers including Kerry, James, Paul, Larry (nicknamed Lefty), and Timothy....seven Drake brothers.

For instance, Richard's younger brother, Kerry Drake, became an assistant district attorney. (He was white-haired when we first met him in 1943, indicating he was somewhat older than Dinah.) He decided to join the police force, though, after his fiance and secretary, Sandy Burns, was murdered. In 1957, he married a police widow named Mindy, and became the father of quadruplets. Kerry fought Bulldozer, Dr. Prey, the Man with No Face, and many others. He was often helped by a much younger brother, Lefty.) His adventures were chronicled in a newspaper strip by Allen Saunders and Alfred Andriola.

Another brother became a private detective working for a lawyer in Los Angeles...Paul Drake, sleuth for Perry Mason.

Another brother, James Drake, became an African explorer, marrying Georgette Curtis, the granddaughter of Sir George Curtis, and great-niece of Sir Henry Curtis, an Englishwoman who was also interested in Africa. (Sir George and Sir Henry's stories are told in KING SOLOMON'S MINES and ALLAN QUATERMAIN.) Their son, John Drake, was a secret agent---and was the basis for the TV shows SECRET AGENT and THE PRISONER.

James Drake died under a lion's claws in the early forties', soon after John was born. He willed a special costume worn by a female witch doctor to Marla Drake, his favorite niece. Marla was the daughter of Jerome Drake, who married a Los Angeles heiress after managing security for her father. Marla and her brother Timothy were much richer than the other Drakes...but Marla, at least, was a true Drake and inherited the same desire to fight criminals. Donning the witch doctor's outfit, she became known as the Black Fury or Miss Fury, one of the first superheroines of the early forties, as chronicled by Tarpe Mills.

Timothy Drake, Marla's brother, had two sons. The older one, Jack Drake, carried on his father's industries, becoming a very rich man. His son, Tim Drake, in turn became a costumed adventurer himself---the third Robin, at least in the published comics. Tim was born circa 1975.

Timothy Drake's other son, Jack Drake's brother, Frank Drake, squandered his inheritance for the most part and later became a vampire hunter, looking for his famous collaterol ancestor, Count Dracula. He seems to have died in that quest...although whether the events of TOMB OF DRACULA happened exactly as recounted, or whether another vampire assumed Dracula's mantle to be more fearsome is still debated.

Paul Drake, the P.I., had a brief marriage and one son, William Drake. William married a Madeline Bass, a Jewish woman who may have been the illigitimate daughter of Jay Garrick's father, who was one of the ones who received a transfusion from Clark Kent/Hugo Danner in World War I. William and Madeline's son, Robert Drake, became one of Professor Xavier's special students, the youngest in his original class, a mutant able to induce cold and ice, called Iceman.

Dinah's mother, who so loved flowers, was Diana Duroc. She was the daughter of Hercule Duroc, also known as Flambeau, by his first marriage, when he was a criminal. Her mother, a florist in Gascony, died young. Hercule Duroc/Flambeau was a cunning criminal, and considered himself a noble one, extremely acrobatic and daring. (Just as his granddaughter, the Black Canary,started out as stealing from other theieves, and showed extreme acrobatic talent.) Like his granddaughter, he too reformed...in his case, upon meeting and hearing G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown (while wearing a rather unusual costume at the time, like his granddaughter)---and became a detective in his own right, later marrying a Spanish lady and raising another family of children. He accompanied Father Brown on many of his cases.

(Interestingly enough, Bobbi Morse, a secret agent who later became a superheroine named Mockingbird who resembled Black Canary in many respects, was descended from Flambeau's second marriage...)

Richard Drake relentlessly trained his only child, Dinah, to be the perfect policewoman. When she was rejected by the Academy, he died of a heart attack. Dinah Drake instead started a florist shop, but developed the identity of Black Canary to help fight crime and thwart criminals.

After the Justice Society retired, she married Larry Lance, a private detective who used to work with her father, and they had a child, Dinah Laurel Lance. However, the Justice Society foe Wizard tried to get revenge on her for foiling his second Injustice Society, and as a consequence, small Dinah gained the ability to scream in ultrasonic frequencies with shattering results.

It is not true that Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt put the young Dinah in another dimension; but it is true that Johnny and some of the other more powerful JSA members helped dampen young Dinah's cries through mystic means until she gained some measure of self-control.

When the Justice Society came out of retirement, Dinah aided in many of the cases, including the ones that teamed them with the younger Justice League.

When the JSA and JLA fought a star-being called Aquarius, Larry Lance sacrificed his life to save his beloved Dinah...but a side-effect of some of the energies released by Aquarius caused Dinah Drake, the original Black Canary, to die soon afterwards, as related by Roy Thomas. But it is not true that the Thunderbolt mystically transferred the mind of the mother into the child. Instead, the original writer, Denny O'Neil, blurred the truth to help protect certain details of the Larry and Dinah Lance family, and throw reporters off the track....so if they uncovered the "truth" about the League, they would be looking for a forty-something Black Canary, not a nineteen-year-old...but the daughter, Dinah Laurel Lance, then about nineteen, had been training to take her mother's place as the next Black Canary, and with the added ability of her sonic cry, soon became an indispensible member of the Justice League, and a lover of the Green Arrow of the time.

She has since quit the League and returned to the reformed Society, as well as working with the now-crippled Barbara Gordon, the former Batgirl, with the Birds of Prey. And both mother and daughter have amply added to the luster of..... the dynamic Drakes.