Flamebird

24 years ago - Betty Kane is born.

18 years ago - Already a tennis progeny, 6-year-old Betty begins studying gymnastics.

14 years ago - 10-year-old Betty, a nationally ranked gymnast, is selected as an olympic hopeful.

12 years ago - 12-year-old Betty medals in the Olympics. She sees the newly-formed Teen Titans, and chooses to supplement her training with martial arts, privately hoping to one day emulate them and become a hero herself.

10 years ago - 14-year-old Betty first starts working as a small-time hero, protecting people at night while continuing her training.

9 years ago - 15-year-old Betty meets Dick Grayson after he's left behind his Robin identity. She helps him remember why he does what he does, and they work together for a time, taking on the names from a Kryptonian Folk legend, Nightwing & Flamebird. He returns to the TItans, and she accepts some designs from him to start building her own equipment, and begins building the resources to make her own spin-off Teen Titans West team.

8 years ago - 16-year-old Betty & Lilith Clay create the Teen TItans West, who work alongside the Teen Titans before they disband.

7 years ago - 17-year-old Betty & the Teen TItans West go to Donna Troy for help when Lilith Clay is taken by the Titans of Myth. They venture to Tartarus to save her.

6 years ago - 18-year-old Betty and the Teen TItans West try to stop the Ravens from stealing a nuclear weapon, but are decimated when Cheshire detonates the bomb in Qurac. She and the other surviving Titans are saved by the Doom Patrol, but she blames herself for their defeat, and retires as Flamebird.

5 years ago - 19-year-old Betty begins sparring with Dick Grayson, not realizing that he is Nightwing. She begins rethinking being Flamebird.

1 years ago - 23-year-old Betty helps Dick Grayson assemble the surviving Titans to save Donna Troy. Dick helps outfit Betty to become Flamebird again.

Betty Kane has had such a wild history in the pages of DC. Before you even get into her in-continuity story, she's fascinating just from the journey this fictional character has taken as she, and her role in the DC mythology, has evolved. We've come up with a version of her character that we think honors that, but also really gives her a great, original place in our story.

As a note, we're going to keep her name, but it would probabaly a good idea to come up with a creative way to differentiate her from the other 'Kane' or 'Cain' Batwomen or Batgirls, for reasons that should become clear.

Flamebird's Comic History

OK... Here we go. Everyone try to keep up....

The 1954 publication of Seduction of the Innocent, a long-since totally debunked book by psychologist Fredric Wertham, lead the US Supreme Court to investigate the corrupting influence of comic books leading to, among other things, the creation of the self-regulatory body the Comics Code Authority. One accusation made by this book was that Batman and Robin were gay.

In reaction, writer Edmond Hamilton created Batwoman in 1956, a potential love interest for Batman. This led, predictably, to the introduction of Bat-Girl by Batman creator Bill Finger. She was a sidekick for Batwoman and a potential teenage love interest for Robin. Betty Kane was the niece of Batwoman Kathy Kane, had barely any training, used makeup-themed gadgets, and her entire character motivation was centered around getting to kiss Robin, who wasn't really into it, because this is a comic for children.

Betty made a grand total seven appearances before Batman editor Julius Schwartz famously removed all the silly, extraneous characters from the comics. In the mid sixties, Barbra Gordon's Batgirl was created in a joint effort between Schwartz and the series producers of the live-action Adam West TV series, and was a deliberate effort to do a better job than was previously done with Betty.

Kathy Kane's Batwoman did return to comics in the mid seventies, appearing in several anthology series, which opened up Betty to return as well, even though there was currently a much more popular version of Batgirl in continuity. She showed up in the pages of Teen Titans, as a founding member of their spinoff team, Teen Titans West. When Wolfman & Perez created the New Teen Titans in 1980, members of the Titans West, including Betty, actually appeared in their civilian identities, talking about forming the team again.

Then, in 1985, the Crisis of Infinite Earths rewrote a lot of DC history, and suddenly Batwoman and Betty Kane's Batgirl no longer existed at all. This conflicted with the fact that Betty had, in fact, appeared in the Titans, and therefore Betty was retroactively going to be given a different superhero identity.

The names Nightwing & Flamebird are actually derived from Superman stories from the 50's. Whenever Superman visited the bottled city of Kandor, he would no longer have his powers, like the rest of it's Kryptonian inhabitants. While there, he & Jimmy Olsen would regularly fight crime Batman & Robin style as Nightwing & Flamebird. When it came time to find a new name for Betty Kane, she was given this legacy name that maintained her connection to Dick Grayson.

Our Flamebird Story

So what exactly is our goal with Betty Kane? The comics really seemed to struggle with what her role should be; she was at least moderately visible as a legacy Titan, but she would regularly be depicted as someone who was over-eager to be included in the Titans even though she didn't really seem to deserve it. In one issue in particular, as a new team of Titans was being assembled, we saw Betty sitting in her costume, staring at an unringing phone. Brutal.

We really want two things from our Betty. First, we want her to have a unique, but subtle, relationship with Dick Grayson. It's not a lifelong friendship, or anything romantic, but it's nonetheless important. She's a plucky kid who loves being a superhero and helped remind him why they do what they do while he was in a period of transition. This is why her name is so often synonymous with his, because they earned them together.

Second... we want to introduce the Teen Titans West, and she's a great way to do that. We've built a major tragedy into the timeline of the TItans around the Qurac bombing, and it actually fits thematically to have this happen to one of their spinoff teams. In the comics, Betty often seemed plagued with a crisis of confidence. We've created an in-story reason for her to experience that crisis that turns it into something for her to overcome, which lets her grow stronger in the process.

Flamebird's Costume

I'm actually a big fan of Betty Kane's original Batgirl costume; it can look very cool when done by the right artist, but Betty's role as Flamebird is ultimately a better one than her as Batgirl. The bizarre thing about her role as Flamebird is that it was invented in the mid-eighties, and very much looks like it. When you consider that, canonically, Betty is a childhood tennis prodigy and Olympic gymnast, then her flamboyant colorful costume makes a certain amount of sense, albeit in a very comic-book style. A version of this totally works as her original costume, the one she puts together when first taking on the name Flamebird and leading the Teen Titans West.

In the comics, Betty actually has a major costume redesign in the pages of a four issue Beast Boy miniseries from 2000. While Gar is having some Los Angeles misadventures, he runs into Betty, and by the end of the series she has a new costume and is his roommate, clearly attempting to set up a new Teen Titans West series. It's a pretty decent costume, still using the flame details but sacrificing her playful rainbow-colored costume for a more professional red and orange uniform. The reveal of this new costume totally works within our story as a way to show her choosing rise up over her self doubt and return to her role as a superhero.

Flamebird's Future

Betty feels like she might be a little bit of an extraneous character, but the way we've decided to use her she fill some very specific roles that really serve the larger mythology of DC, and that's always our main goal. She helps develop Nightwing, she helps us establish the Teen Titans West, and she gets to have a personal story about responsibility and self-confidence that totally works in the larger world of superheroes that just doesn't get told without her. That's a great character.

Betty was originally introduced as Kathy Kane's niece, and now that an entirely new version of Kathy Kane has been introduced to the continuity, her series actually brought in Betty as Batwoman's sidekick. Not only are we not using that, and not only is our version of Betty not Kathy's niece, but I don't actually think they've ever MET.

Betty is just recently choosing to return to her role as Flamebird. She's a spunky young hero, eager to do good, but I don't know if she's going to be joining any superhero teams any time soon. She's happy to just be out there in LA, fighting the good fight.

Allies & Teams