Cyborgirl
24 years ago - LeToya Charles is born.
11 years ago - 13-year-old LeToya begins working as a runner for Intergang.
9 years ago - 15-year-old LeToya Charles loses her right arm from abusing the drug Tar. She enters into a Wayne Foundation rehab program.
6 years ago - 18-year-old LeToya Charles earns a full scholarship to attend Howard University, where she meets Vic Stone.
5 years ago - 19-year-old LeToya Charles becomes Vic Stone's undergrad assistant in his development of his nanotech limb replacement. When she tries to get him to use her as a human subject and he refuses, She breaks into his lab and subjects herself to the nanites, which promptly consume up to 80% of her biomass. She fights him to a standstill, forcing him to render the nanotech inert, ending his research and leaving her paralysed.
3 years ago - 21-year-old LeToya Charles is able to restore low-level function to her nanite body in order to walk again, and reaches out to Will Magnus, going to his island lab and stealing data from T.O. Morrow's servers, using it to reactiviate her tech, She fights the Metal Men to a standstill and escapes.
now - 24-year-old LeToya Charles is brought into Tartarus by Vandal Savage to challenge the Watchtower.
Here's a fun character we brought in for a very particular reason, but who wound up really springing to life as we fine-tuned her story. You'd be forgiven for never having heard of her; she's only appeared in about 12 issues total. This is essentally an original take on this character, but we really enjoy what she brings to the table.
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Cyborgirl's Comic HistoryTechnically, Cyborgirl's first appearance is in 2002's Wonder Woman # 179 by Phil Jiminez, who was creating a new spin on the classic tream of Wonder Woman baddies, Villainy Inc, and added this original character to the mix. I say technically, because there is on earlier appearance of a character that I think might have at least been an influence on Cyborgirl; a gender-swapped version of Cyborg that was included in the unused pitch trailer for the DCAU Justice League from 2000.
In any case, Jiminez's Cyborgirl was a pretty boilerplate villain-based-on-an-existing-hero template whose entire backstory was sucinctly summed up in a few panels. She was a user of the drug Tar (a reference to a story element of the 90s Steel series) whose aunt was a part of the project that gave Vic Stone his cybornetics. I'd say this sort of setup was basically a soft-lob of the character for the next writer to grab her and build her up further, but the 2000s just weren't the best time for that sort of thing. She appeared once in a Cyborg miniseries, actually going up against her namesake for only a few panels where Vic handled her pretty effortlessly, and then again in some group shots during Final Crisis. Notably, there's another similar character that showed up during Cyborg's rebirth series called Variant; another female counterpart to Vic, this one a former CIA agent who partners with Vic before betraying him. |
Our Cybergirl StoryThe main reason we went back and started working to adapt Cybergirl was because we needed a counterpart for Cyborg on our version of Tartarus, but as we did so there were a few interesting ideas that came up. We wanted to give her a stronger sense of ownership of her self, and her story, and her cybernetics. We also wanted to give her a stronger connection to Cyborg, to really make her feel like a potential nemesis for him, by tying her more into his story. And lastly, we wanted her to really present a challenge for him.
The solution came from within our own timeline, where we'd established that Vic spent the time after the disolution of the New Teen Titans studying Biochemistry where he earns an advanced degree. Given that he's working with the technology of his own cybornetics, we imagined he would be planning something new that would actually help people in the world; a nanite-based technology that could provide people with a new generation of artificial limbs. This technology would represent something deeply important and personal for him, so when LeToya steals it and corrupts it, making her a living weapon, this would be a deep betrayal of Vic and his work. |
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As for what the tech IS, the idea is that she had originally lost her arm (which would go a long way to explaining why Vic chose her as his undergrad assistant, given his well-documented sympathy for other people with physical handicaps) and that his nanites were meant to help her grow a new one. She then corrupts his technology with tactical programming, consuming much of her body (like Cyborg) allowing her to reshape her limbs into various weaponry. This would represent a pretty functional threat for Vic, or for other heroes for that matter... but the really narratively weighty part of this is that she represents a corruption of his work, and a personal betrayal. This was supposed to be a medical technology, afterall.
We also really like the idea that she actually manages to reactivate the tech even after Vic disables it, showing that she has taken ownership of it beyond what even Vic understood. This could feasibly allow her to even upgrade it with new more powerful weapons or programs in the future, which makes her an even better ongoing enemy for Cyborg. We really like the way this one took shape. She worked so well we actually used her to challenge the Metal Men as well, since it made sense that she would want the technology of T.O. Morrow in order to fully restore functionality to her nanite body, and the way to do that (given the placement in her timeline) would be to pick it up on his former island labs. She's now on the team we original designed her for, but I can see a lot of ways this character could go on and be a very effective villain at large. |