Arrowette

18 years ago - Cissie King-Jones is born in Western Pennsylvania, the daughter of former Olympian Bonnie King.

12 years ago - 6-year-old Cissie's father dies. Her mother Bonnie King begins training her obsessively to follow in her footsteps.

4 years ago - 14-year-old Cissie adopts her Arrowette identity & joins Young Justice. She becomes best friends with Cassie Sandsmark. When she nearly kills someone, she chooses to retire, emancipating herself from Bonnie King with help from Helena Sandsmark.

2 years ago - 16-year-old Cissie wins Olympic gold & reconciles with Bonnie King.

Arrowette is a character whose entire arc is basically contained within one specific comic. Young Justice was one of the best comics of it's era, telling such compelling character-driven stories in a playful format. Cissie's character journey and her fantastically realized internal life is one of the gems in the series crown, and a great example of the sort of storytelling you can achieve even in the simplest of superhero premises. We really don't have to do much here, but hopefully we can depict her in a way that shows what's great about her.

Arrowette's Comic History

Arrowette's first appearance was in Impulse #28 in 1997, where she was introduced as a possible love interest for Bart. She was a reference to Golden Age Green Arrow love interest Bonnie King, and that first story did a fantastic job of telling a very concise single-issue story that asked questions about the morality of adults putting children superheroes into harm's way. This really was a fantastic series that has a ton of great little stories like this. Not long afterward, Cissie showed up over in the classic ongoing teen hero book Young Justice and became one of their main members.

The real innovation here is that the original premise of Arrowette put forward in her original appearance was an incredibly lush territory to explore further in an ongoing series. This was an incredibly good series that really treated every character with a staggering amount of care, and Cissie had a very specific voice and role in the story and the team, but her personal journey was also given a great deal of focus, and culminated in one of the most compelling character journeys you're likely to see in comics; she eventually realized that the healthiest thing for her to do was to actually stop being a superhero. So she did. It's kind of unprecedented, when you think about it.

Our Arrowette Story

This is one of those times where the timeline format sort of hampers us in being able to really tell the full story here. Over the course of Cissie's life, we can depict her growing up the daughter of Bonnie King and show her being trained to be a superhero. We can show her becoming Arrowette, joining Young Justice, and learning how to stand up for herself, choosing to retire as a superhero, and focusing on her Olympic training. The problem is, a lot of the events of the teenage superhero teams need to be sort of condensed so that all the events of those stories happen within a year or two, preserving the ages of the characters involved. So Cissie's time as Arrowette, her time on Young Justice, and her vast personal growth all basically need to happen within the same year.

This isn't incorrect, I don't think. We were all teenagers, and we remember how hectic and packed those years were with all sorts of growth and drama. I just wish our format was better equipped to depict just how wild that year was for her. Her ability to transcend her mother's expectations of her, thanks largely to the personal growth she experienced by having a close-knit group of friends, is one of the best self-contained character arcs DC has given us.

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