Dragonfly
33 years ago - David Zavimbe is born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
31 years ago - 2-year-old David's brother Isaac Zavimbe is born.
30 years ago - 3-year-old David & Isaac Zavimbe lose their parents to HIV/AIDS. They are sent to an orphanage.
26 years ago - 7-year-old David & Isaac Zavimbe's orphanage is raided by the Warlord General Ayo Keita of the Army of the Dawn, a domestic terror organization. They are taken as child soldiers.
22 years ago -11-year-old David & Isaac Zavimbe lead a recruitment raid into a village, fighting off an ambush alone. When they stop their own squad of soldiers from hurting the women of the village, they are made elite trackers, nicknamed 'the Dragonflies'.
20 years ago - 13-year-old David & Isaac Zavimbe, when ordered to firebomb an entire village to kill one man, refuse to follow General Keita's orders. Isaac gives away their position, and in punishment is crippled with a machete by Keita and almost killed before David is able to stop him, running into the jungle. He returns and kidnaps Keita, delivering him to his enemies before returning with Isaac to an AIDS orphanage.
17 years ago - 16-year-old David helps construct his brother Isaac Zavimbe's designs for a home-made solar array & cellular amplification tower for their orphanage.
14 years ago - 19-year-old David leaves the orphanage when his brother receives a special scholarship grant to attend MIT in the states, completing the training to become a police officer to attempt to atone for the sins of his childhood.
11 years ago - 22-year-old David discovers a cache of stolen gold hidden by one of the domestic terror groups. Unwilling to hand it over to the corrupt police, he contacts his brother Isaac to return home so they can use it to design & build the tools necessary to fight corruption and protect the people, reclaiming the name Dragonfly.
10 years ago - 23-year-old David first meets Anansi the Spider, saving people from floods in Nigeria.
9 years ago - 24-year-old David first meets William Glenmorgan, working with him to thwart one of the largest ivory smuggling operations on the continent.
6 years ago - 27-year-old David, seeing the rising tide of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reaches out to other heroes in Africa to assemble as the Kingdom, to defend the people and their revolution.
As we assembled the Kingdom, a team of heroes protecting the various countries of Africa, one of the first names to come up was Batwing, the Batman Incorporated character that went on to have his own series. While we do have plans to use the more Gotham-based version of Batwing down the road, it still seemed really obvious that the original Batwing, David Zavimbe, was a stellar character all on his own. If you imagine his tech and armor jut slightly differently, without the Bat-branding, this could absolutely be a unique hero. The results really are fantastic; the concepts at play here are really compelling, and we think this just is a fantastic semi-original character concept. Let us know what you think!
David Zavimbe's Comic HistoryIf you REALLY want to be technical, the first appearance of the character that would eventually become David Zavimbe was in "The Batman Nobody Knows", a backup story by Frank Robbins in Batman #250 from 1973, in which Bruce takes a group of inner city Gotham kids camping (why?) and they all regale each other with campfire stories describing the way they imagine Batman (a framing device that was used in the Animated Series episode Legends of the Dark Knight.) one of the kids (who happens to be black), described a version of Batman he called 'Batwings', who was "Muhammed Ali, Jim Brown, Shaft an' Super-Fly all rolled into one!"
Decades later, Grant Morrison set about the awesome task of taking every single version of Batman that had EVER appeared and making them all canon as part of their massive Batman Incorporated story arc. One of baker dozen newly introduced characters, Batwing, was clearly modeled after the old one-off design, but didn't really stand out among all the new spinoff Batman characters. A year, later, when DC was resetting itself post flashpoint in the new 52, one of the new launch titles was a self-titled series for Batwing. It was pretty easy to miss among all the other high-profile new stories, and David himself didn't stick around as the mantle of Batwing was passed on to other characters, but anyone who spent the time to read this series got treated to a slick, innovative little tale by Judd Winnick about an entirely new hero, and we happen to think this is exactly what we need for a particular corner of our project. |
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Our Dragonfly StoryWhile the regular Batwing makes more sense if he's closer to Gotham, there's actually something really special about the original Batwing, David Zavimbe. He has an unbelievably evocative backstory, which sets him up as a unique hero with his own story, and perhaps the single weakest part of that story is the fact that he needed Bruce Wayne to show up to give him him armor. Given that we're building a team of African heroes, and the fact that he actually seems to be uniquely suited to be the guy responsible for assembling that team, it basically just falls to us to work out how to adapt him so that he can function completely on his own.
In his original backstory, when they choose to reject the evil general that has turned them into child soldiers, David's brother Isaac is apparently killed, leaving him alone. In order to give David his own support system, we actually chose to instead have Isaac survive, albeit in a wheelchair, so that they can grow up together in an orphanage, and Isaac can go on to help design the armor and tech David uses once he acquires the funds to do so in the form of the stolen gold he recovers. These small changes actually allow David to be a fully autonomous hero all on his own. Even the name we chose, Dragonfly, is actually from his existing story, as David and Isaac were called 'the dragonflies' when they were young, and David can now reclaim that name as a force for good. Of the characters we assembled for the Kingdom (a team name actually taken from his series), David is by far the one we changed the most, but we think that this new version of the character and the role we've found for him in the world absolutely speak for themselves. |
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