Casualties of Retcon V: Donna Troy

Some characters fade after a bad retcon - recall Power Girl (discussed here), the Falcon (discussed here), Guy Gardner (discussed here), and the like - and others have to bow out altogether, like whatever might answer to the name "Hawkman" these days (discussed here).

When changes to a character's history become too drastic and self-contradictory, they can cause a sudden disappearance not explicable in the logic of stories but perfectly comprehensible on editorial terms. After a seemingly endless series of retcons beginning back in the 1960s, Donna Troy now sits on the fence where anything more may make the character unusable.

Her problems, oddly enough, began before the universal shakeups that came with Crisis on Infinite Earths and again with Zero Hour: Crisis in Time. Yet each of these events further confused, rather than clarified things. What has DC done, and has anyone found a way out?

Too Many Origins

An attempt to discuss the origin(s) of Donna Troy quickly end in bedlam because of the fusion of too many mutually exclusive but equally canonical (or non-canonical) stories that have attempted to explain the character.

An origin does not do enough to illuminate the question of the history that led from the days before today's Donna Troy to the present. Grotesquely, DC has dabbled in reworking the character a number of times over thirty years (a span much longer than her presumed time on earth).

To make sense of her, however, we must explore the muddied waters of a series of origins and the reasons for each successive change.

The Sidekick Era

The junior sidekick represented an idiom of the superhero concept from its earliest days with characters like Batman, Captain America, and Sandman. Some characters retained their younger partners into the Silver Age. Robin and Speedy have roots going back to the Golden Age of comics with their mentors Batman and Green Arrow. Other characters seemed to require or profit from the presence of a junior complement; thus DC created Aqualad for Aquaman, Kid Flash for the Flash, and Wonder Girl for Wonder Woman.

In that more innocent period of comics, these sidekicks did not really require origins separate from those of their adult equivalents, and therefore sometimes dispensed with them altogether; this lack of emphasis on the origins of the sidekick would provide a window of opportunity for later writers to explore these origins as they attempted to flesh out the sidekicks.

At first, though, as far as Web-based research could reveal, Donna Girl began as something like an apprentice to Wonder Woman, spawned on the island of the Amazons. For the purposes of creating a backup feature like "The Teen Titans," this sufficed.

The First Makeover

In the late sixties, DC enjoyed some maturation of writing in some titles. While the science-fiction heavy story of the early years of DC's Silver Age could work for several years in formulaic application, the rise of Marvel forced DC to scramble to keep a decent share of a comics market that had begun to contract. DC did not initially try to make itself over in the image of Marvel - its editors had much to do with the company's attempt to maintain a distinct identity - but DC did attempt a number of experiments and editorial shakeups that brought about a maturation of several of its key concepts.

A generation of talent born in the 1930s and 1940s helped forge this new sensibility, though the old generation of figures born in the twenties, such as Nick Cardy and Gil Kane, eagerly kept up with the changes. In Teen Titans, a maturation of the story model demonstrated this new standard.

Wonder Girl, therefore, received a new origin in Teen Titans in an issue that also gave her a new costume less derivative of the Wonder Woman concept. No longer an Amazon, Donna Troy recalled a past where Wonder Woman had rescued her, as an orphaned infant, from a burning building, and had taken her to the land of the Amazons, where their therapeutic technologies gave her powers similar to those that Wonder Woman enjoyed.

This revised origin would provide subsequent storytellers hooks upon which they could increasingly convolute her history, and in the New Teen Titans title of the eighties, stories did involve Donna in a quest to attempt to recover her lost past. Each new revelation may have fueled interest in the short term for the story arc that included it, but this ultimately began attaching continuity barnacles to the character by giving her a past that showed signs of becoming too difficult to summarize.

The "Troia" Concept

Some things about Donna Troy as "Wonder Girl" dated the character. While artists like George Perez and Nick Cardy could make the red Cardy costume look great, it definitely dated from the sixties, incorporating period features of style like the low-slung hip belt. Also, nothing about the costume really pointed back to a connection to Amazon heritage, especially in its more recent and more martial aspect (a view much more in keeping with the Greek tales from which we derive this particular version of the Amazon concept).

Were DC to need to introduce a new Amazon character, the name Troia and the semiHelladic detailing of this costume would have worked well. It worked slightly less well in the case of Donna Troy because it reminded the reader of the character's detachment from her original roots. An old-time reader would more likely respond with recognition to the name "Wonder Girl" than to "Troia."

However, the Troia makeover represented an attempt to reconnect her to the Amazonian concept of her origin. It might have fixed the character, or at least provided an enduring patch, but for some of the stories that followed. In a much-cliched fashion, Donna miraculously became pregnant and gave birth to a demon and involved much of the Teen Titans canon in a time travel tale where evil beings from the future sought to eliminate her to prevent her from spawning. One may suggest, as a comics axiom, that writers cause parthenogenic births from female characters when they suffer the worst of writers' block. Such stories almost always work the same way, and generally strip the dignity away from the characters they involve, as well as inducing an "Oh, no, not again!" reaction in savvy readers (this column details other miraculous births in comics).

Darkstar

Stories like the one previously alluded to, combined with the comics continuity principle - "if someone printed it, it happened" - led to DC's Draconian bouts of housecleaning in the middle of mega-events like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time. If these events do much to annoy readers, let us at the same time acknowledge their potential to strip away some of the Godawfulest dreck stories that appeared in print, but never should have.

In the aftermath of Crisis on Infinite Earths, Donna Troy had already achieved some continuity dissonance. DC had decided to subtract Wonder Woman from the equation for the early Justice League, evidently desiring to hold off the revised introduction of the character until Wonder Woman's new history could appear in print. This left Donna Troy with a history as Wonder Girl that predated the appearance of Wonder Woman. This had a series of cascading, mostly awful effects, as DC attempted to explain away Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl appearances, often through the retroactive creation of unappealing proxies.

The Troia makeover probably hoped to disconnect Donna Troy adequately from the early history of DC's current generation of superheroes, but subsequent stories managed to blow this opportunity by requiring makeovers themselves.

Thus, by the time DC's Zero Hour appeared, Donna Troy had connected with a superhero team called the Darkstars, who owed somewhat to the concept of the Green Lantern Corps. The Darkstar concept, in the absence of a Green Lantern Corps that DC killed off (using Green Lantern Hal Jordan as its proxy), failed to appeal to readers in its own book and the presence of more established DC characters like Donna Troy and John Stewart couldn't help it; for the most part, the Darkstars no longer appear in DC titles.

This incarnation of the character took her far enough away from her original concept that a reader who remembered her from 1965 would not make any obvious connection from Wonder Girl to Donna Troy the Darkstar. The character had reached a state of rootlessness, and John Byrne, who had done much to fix Superman in the 1980s (in many of the ways that DC had not allowed Dennis O'Neil to do), pulled the character from a directionless role in Green Lantern to attempt to remake her within the pages of Wonder Woman.

Byrne and "Avatar"

Byrne has had a certain feel for the mythical elements of Wonder Woman that place her into a larger context in some ways like the internal mythos of Kirby concepts like the New Gods or the Eternals. His work evokes much controversy these days, since some comics readers have declared him a persona non grata, but Byrne still shows a few tricks up his sleeves now and then.

Byrne took upon himself to fix Donna Troy. Retcons had taken away from her connection to the Amazons (and, occasionally, put her back there). A number of stories had stamped the amnesia angle into the character in ways that made it too imprudent and drastic to attempt to ignore them unless DC chose to publish another Crisis event.

John Byrne, therefore, chose to create an explanation that both provided Donna Troy with a new origin befitting the magical and mythological elements connected with the Wonder Woman franchise and explained why she enjoyed so many mutually contradictory pasts.

Byrne crafted a story where he explained how Donna Troy came about. He detailed a past in which Amazonian magics created her as a doppelganger for the juvenile Princess Diana, who would become Wonder Woman. This doppelganger had a separate identity, despite beginning as a magically-generated copy of Diana; a demonic character, mistaking her for Diana, kidnapped Donna and subjected her to psychological torture by implanting a series of memories stolen from the minds of women who had lived brutally miserable lives. When Donna went missing, Diana and Donna's creator mistakenly assumed that the spell had dissipated, returning Donna to oblivion, and therefore no one bothered to find out what had happened to her.

This origin does have its flaws, but it manages neatly do deconvolute much of Donna Troy's history. DC could do much to fix the Donna Troy character if they would stick by this origin and put some kind of moratorium on future Donna Troy retcons, but perhaps we should not hope for DC to exercise this much control over writers and editors in the long run.

On the Green Lantern Roller Coaster

Byrne might have found a formula to explain both the nature of the Donna Troy character and the rationale behind her multiplied origins with a baroque tale that keeps both the baby and the bathwater. However, if Donna Troy's recent treatment in Ron Marz' Green Lantern provides a representative sample of how we can expect writers to treat the character, we can consider her mostly unfixed. Even if Byrne's explanation reconciles a handful of mutually incomprehensible threads, we still have Donna Troy wandering around with an identity pieced together from the memories of another superhero. Redeeming the character will require resolving that side of the persistent side-effects of too many retcons. DC, however, seems to lack a clear design of how to use the character, and has released her to show up in the pages of Green Lantern as an old flame who reappears as abruptly as she disappeared in the first place, mainly to provoke a breakup between Kyle Rayner and Jade.

A cynic might say that if DC has a young and female character with no apparent place to occupy in the DC universe, it will assign that character to do duty as Kyle Rayner's girlfriend.

After all, DC has coped with two troubled victims of retconning in this manner: both Jade and Donna Troy. The former only enjoyed a year or two of prior history before Crisis on Infinite Earths pulled her setting, the defunct "Earth-2," out from under herself and her peers, so her retcons did not involve the drastic historical surgery that still affects the Donna Troy character.

Given recent portrayals, Donna Troy still remains a borderline character. A few more hits to the core concept might place her in the same limbo from which Hawkman awaits some future redemption. Contrarily, a few good stories could straighten her out for the long term. We can only hope that some writer will soon make the effort to make the character viable again. Note that Mark Waid redeemed Adam Strange with two stories in Justice League of America without requiring anything like a retcon. Will someone at DC make the attempt for a character who has suffered close to twenty years of ill-use in a comics career approaching its fortieth year?