Beast Girl
14 years ago - Kareli is born in the mountainous regions of Corvan IV
2 years ago - 12-year-old Kareli, while hiding from strangers in her village, slips and falls down a cliff, injuring her ankle. She is found by wild animals, and her meta abilities are triggered. Her powers run out of control, sparking waves of panic and anger in her family and villagers, forcing her to flee. She is found by traffickers, who sell her to the Reach, who begin experimenting with her meta powers.
1 year ago - 13-year-old Kareli is among the Reach subjects freed by Jaime Reyes. She doesn't have anywhere to go, so she stays on Earth. She gets help from Koriand'r and her Haven Project, doing so well that she starts to help them with her powers. She uses the name Beast Girl after her favorite Superhero.
There have been other characters using the name Beast Girl; a name dropped during Doomsday Clock, Beast "Grrl" from the Ame-Comi universe, and of course the character featured from the Teen Titans Go! episode "Beast Girl". All of these characters are pretty obviously a female counterpart to Gar Logan, which is fine, but the Beast Girl from Unstoppable Doom Patrol was a completely original character that managed to create a whole new vibe that DC really benefit from including. We're going to adapt her just a little bit so she fills a very clear role in our project, but I think you're all going to agree that this is absolutely the sort of character we need to make sure we include.
Beast Girl's Comic HistoryBeast Girl appeared for the first time in the 2023 in a new Doom Patrol series by Dennis Culver & Chris Burnham. It's a series taking place right in the midst of a bunch of modern DC crossovers, and ultimately seemed more interested in referencing lots of Doom Patrol history than in telling a new story, but what it does do, it does exceptionally well. It establishes a new team dynamic as the Doom Patrol become a rescue team, going out into the world to protect metahumans and giving them a safe haven where they can train to use their powers (which is an idea that has never, ever been used before by any other superhero team ever).
Beast Girl is introduced as a new team member from the first issue, and from the very beginning it's really hard to argue that this series wasn't built entirely as a showcase for this character. She's incredibly dynamic on every single panel, and infuses the book with a fantastic energy. She's a new metahuman with low-level empathic powers allowing her to affect people's amygdala... and also incidentally being the most adorable little thing ever. |
|
|
Our Beast Girl StoryAs much fun as Beast Girl is, we weren't specifically looking to include her; she's very heavily couched in a really inscrutable era of DC continuity that I'm only now starting to pick apart, so she was an easy character to skip. She's undeniably a ton of fun, however, so when I wanted to find characters that could be helped by Starfire's Haven Project, she was pretty much the very first option to pop up.
We're copying her origins directly, but we are changing her a tiny bit by making her an alien rather than just a metahuman with an inexplicably adorable appearance. Her meta powers are now JUST her empathic abilities. We can do almost the exact same thing, since our Haven Project is essentially doing exactly the same thing the Doom Patrol does in this series. The fun thing here is that the Haven Project isn't meant to be a superhero team. It's an organization meant to help people. Kareli gets to overcome her traumatic past by helping people, and that is fantastic. This is a fun character to include. |