Alysia Yeoh
21 years ago - Alysia Yeoh is born in Gotham City to Singaporean parents.
10 years ago - 11-year-old Alysia tells her parents that she is transgender. Her father refuses to accept her.
7 years ago - 14-year-old Alysia's parents seperate. She stays with her mother, who approves of her beginning hormone therapy.
5 years ago - 16-year-old Alysia begins researching surgical enhancement technology.
3 years ago - 18-year-old Alysia connects with other activists in Gotham during the earthquake. She undergoes gender reassignment surgery.
2 years ago - 19-year-old Alysia's mother passes away, leaving her their large apartment in Burside. Alysia creates her art studio and begins working with the Transhuman Collective in Neo-Gotham, enhancing her own body with surgical upgrades.
now - 21-year-old Alysia takes Stephanie Brown as her new roommate. She helps Stephanie learn about the Transhuman Collective.
This isn't the first time we've built someone by combining more than one existing original character from the comics, but I think this one is much simpler than usual. This is Alysia Yeoh, as she appears in the comics, just slightly updated with influence from a very recently created character. I hope you'll let us know if you follow along with why we decided to go with way, but we think she works really well in the version of the modern Gotham we're creating.
Alysia's Comic HistoryAlysia Yeoh appeared for the first time in 2011 in the first issue of the new 52 Batgirl series by Gail Simone. This was the series that brought Barbara Gordon back as Batgirl, which a lot of people have a lot of opinions about. Barbara is amazing, there's no denying that, and having Gail write her is a unique joy, but bringing her back as Batgirl meant that characters like Stephanie and Cassandra were getting sidelined, to say nothing of Barbara no longer serving as Oracle, one of the best character DC has ever had.
In the very first issue, as Barbara is now able to walk again thanks to a deus ex machina spinal implant, she decides to move out of her father's place and gets a new roommate, Alysia Yeoh, a young artist, activist, bartender and aspiring restauranteur. They have a lot of fun banter, all in that unmistakable Gail Simone style, and eventually Alysia starts to get a little more involved in the ongoing story before we eventually learn that she is trans. Even as Gail's run on the book ended Alysia continued to appear in the Batgirl of Burnside era, which even included her wedding in a story that really highlighted why the era was so fun. Alysia has actually appeared in other places, like in the animated Harley Quinn series. She's also one of the 'Batgirls' from the Bombshells series... a reference that has actually come back around and shown up in some modern appearances where Alysia has taken the Bat in Bat Family literally. |
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Miracle Molly's Comic HistoryMiracle Molly was one of the new characters introduced during the James Tynion IV run on Batman. These stories hinted at a more futuristic Gotham, all looking absolutely gorgeous as drawn by Jorge Jimenez. Molly was a part of the "Unsane Collective" a group of transhumanists who were using technology to adapt their own bodies, while also wiping their own memories and freeing themselves of their past trauma. Molly was a very colorful and character-forward design, and she operated less as a new Gotham villain and more as a sort of ideological revolutionary trying to free people from the systems of oppression controlling them, which managed to leave Bruce on the back foot for a bit, because a lot of what she said was hard to argue with and left him sounding a little bit old-fashioned.
There's also a point to be made here because Molly and the Unsane Collective were all Transhumanists, which is an intellectual movement advocating for the use of technology to modify and enhance cognitive & bodily function as a way to evolve the human condition. This is different than being Trans, or Transexual, which is a person whose gender identity differs from the physical gender they were born with. |
Our Alysia StorySo what are we doing here, exactly? This all began with the understanding that the Batgirl of Burnside arc, a story that presented Barbara Gordon as a much younger character, actually worked incredibly well as a story to tell with the new Stephanie Brown Batgirl. They fit together really well, and we were excited to use it.
In practice, however, we found that Alysia, as written in the comic, doesn't really have a lot going on. She's a bartender, she's trans, and she's Barbara's friend, and that's kind of it. We could have just included her like that, but we were aware that she wouldn't be the first character we'd added who was the trans roommate to a female hero, and that redundancy really made us want to find something interesting to do with her. In the meantime, Miracle Molly was introduced in an even more recent Batman story. This era really stands out for the unbelievable art by Jorge Jimenez. Her story isn't bad, it's just part of a much larger plot we're not adapting, but she has a really fantastic look, and given that we're introducing the idea that modern Gotham is starting to evolve into more of a cyber-cityscape, the introduction of the idea that people are starting to adapt to the idea of upgrading themselves really contributes to that. So, very simply, we just took Alysia exactly as she appears in Batgirl of Burnside, and introduced the idea that she's part of a new transhuman movement in Gotham. Which means that she's a transhuman transwoman. Everyone likes that. |
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