Doctor Cyber
1909 - Cylvia Cyber is born to opium smugglers.
1914 - 5-year-old Cylvia Cyber's family expands it's smuggling operations at the beginning of the First World War to include a wide array of contraband.
1920 - 11-year-old Cylvia Cyber helps her mother murder their main drug supplier, taking over their operations.
1925 - 16-year-old Cylvia Cyber enrolls in Cambridge University to study technology.
1927 - 18-year-old Cylvia Cyber invents micro field-effect transistors, allowing her to develop technology beyond the current world standard. She hides her invention for her own use.
1928 - 19-year-old Cylvia Cyber leaves Cambridge, returns to her family's drug operations, and begins expanding into a broad spectrum of international crime, using her technology to drive their expansion.
1933 - 24-year-old Cylvia Cyber, her criminal organization the Tribunal now one of the largest in the world, earns a doctorate in electrical engineering before vanishing from the civilized world completely.
1939 - 30-year-old Cylvia Cyber's organization the Tribunal makes a fortune supplying armies with technology as the next great war approaches. Steve Trevor is assigned to gather intel on the Tribunal, but is found out, and in his escape crashes on Themyscira. When Hippolyta journeys from their island to take him home, she helps him fight the Tribunal, confronting Doctor Cyber.
1941 - 32-year-old Cynthia Cyber positions the Tribunal to profit from the ongoing War. She prepares to deliver incredibly advanced computer technology to the Axis powers, but is stopped by Hippolyta. She is thought dead in the ensuing explosion, but instead suffers horrible facial injuries, costing her her precious beauty.
1942 - 33-year-old Cylvia Cyber is revealed to still be alive, now encased in golden technological armor, and obsessed with wreaking revenge on Hippolyta, attacking her and attempting to capture her so she can have her strength and beauty stolen.
1945 - 36-year-old Cylvia Cyber, seeing that the War is about to end, launches a satellite to find Themyscira and steal Hippolyta's power.
Hippolyta & Steve Trevor pursue her onto the satellite to try to stop her. She is finally killed in the ensuing battle.
Hippolyta & Steve Trevor pursue her onto the satellite to try to stop her. She is finally killed in the ensuing battle.
Doctor Cyber is from a really bizarre moment in Wonder Woman's history, but in stepping into that era she managed to fulfill such a neat confluence of genre archetypes, and only got more interesting as time went on. The period of Wonder Woman's comics that she came from was not just strange, but also noticeably short. We really wanted to find a role for her because she has such a cool energy.
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Doctor Cyber's Comic HistoryTo explain Doctor Cyber, you first have to explain Dennis O'Neil's Wonder Woman run. O'Neil came onto the book in 1968 with the deliberate mission to revitalize what was perceived as an out-of-date character. Diana was given a far more modern (by 1968 standards) design, making her a sort of Emma Peel-style super mod spy. She then lost her powers as the Amazons retreat to a different plane of existence, and meets a blind elderly asian man named I-Ching who teaches her kung-fu, In effect, the book became a whirlwind of 60's era genre conventions. This lasted for about five years; in issue 203 in 1972 the writer that predated O'Neil, Robert Kanigher, returned to the series and reset practically everything right back to the way it was. The result is this weird little window of time where a whole new series cropped up with it's own worldbuilding and style, and then vanished as fast as it appeared.
Doctor Cyber was the secret arch-villain behind all the 60's era spy thriller action of the series. It was several issues before we discovered that she was (gasp!) a woman, but she was still a vintage femme fatale criminal mastermind in the classic bond-villain mold, complete with a giant sci-fi lair hidden in a hollow mountain and armies of jumpsuited minions. In short, she was the most 60's villain ever. |
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Cyber was supposedly killed in an explosion in her first arc, but of course she returned, now facially disfigured in the explosion and obsessed with having revenge on Wonder Woman. She hid her face behind a metal mask that expanded over time into a whole suit of high tech circuitry, taking this Bond-style nemesis and also making her a sort of Doctor Doom allegory.
O'Neil's run ended and Doctor Cyver was no longer Wonder Woman's main villain, and her role in the world of Wonder Woman enemies was never really firmly established, since the book wasn't a mod 60's spy adventure anymore. She would appear occasionally, but without that stylistic framework she was basically just a woman in a tech suit. She popped up here and there but it wasn't until 2016 during Greg Rucka's run that worked to redefine Wonder Woman during the DC Rebirth era that a new role was found for Doctor Cyber... She was now a tech expert that had loaded her consciousness into a computer system. It's not a BAD idea, but it's a far cry from the cool genre-baddie she was built to be. |
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Our Doctor Cyber StoryWonder Woman did so much of it's classic worldbuilding during the Golden Age that several of her original villains don't really translate to her modern adventures very well. We made the decision to use several of those classic villains as enemies for Hippolyta during her World War II adventures, and they work really well.
But Doctor Cyber isn't a classic Golden Age villain. She's a weird artifact of 60's comics. Still, it's worked so well to take Wonder Woman's other classic enemies and transpose them back to World War II... could we maybe do it with her as well? |
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Actually... yea. not only can we do it, but it works REALLY well. Introducing her during that era basically also creates an independent criminal organization operating behind the scenes, profiting off the ongoing worldwide conflict. Steve Trevor was always a spy first, and transposing this James Bond worldbuilding into the middle of World War II works really well.
Not only does her criminal organization serve the story well, but Cyber herself just fits that world. We had to rethink just what her technology is, but it turns out that field-effect transistors actually were invented in 1925, so we can have her invent a micro version of the same tech that year, and it built pretty effortlessly into a cool retro-sci-fi vibe. She very quickly fell into place as a great foil for wartime Hippolyta, not just working as a villain for the character, but actually presenting a cool arch-nemesis. There's also one more interesting result to this move. Golden Age comics were pretty notorious for their racist depiction of Asian characters. Doctor Cyber still represents certain problematic tropes, but she's also beautiful, dangerous, and brilliant, which is a huge sweeping improvement to the way comics presented Asian villains. |
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