Golden Glider
46 years ago - Lisa Snart is born into a criminal family.
29 years ago - 17-year-old Lisa & her brother Leonard Snart start joining their family on heists.
26 years ago - 20-year-old Lisa starts hanging around Central Cities' super-criminals.
24 years ago - 22-year-old Lisa's starts dating Roscoe Dillon, nemisis of Johnny Quick, slowly absorbing his hyper-velocity energy.
23 years ago - 23-year-old Lisa cheats on Roscoe Dillon with Digger Harkness and gives birth to his son, Owen Mercer, losing him to the foster system.
20 years ago - 26-year-old Lisa joins her brother Leonard Snart's gang.
17 years ago - 29-year-old Lisa's brother Leonard Snart first becomes Captain Cold.
16 years ago - 30-year-old Lisa's brother Leonard Snart helps her tap her latend hypervelocity powers, becoming the Golden Glider & challenging the Flash.
15 years ago - 31-year-old Lisa joins the Rogues.
13 years ago - 33-year-old Lisa Snart is killed by Eobard Thawne in his bid to take control of the Rogues.
There are some characters that have managed to mean more to the larger mythology of DC simply by virtue of who they know. Golden Glider, the original character concept, is about as throwaway an idea as you're likely to find. Lisa Snart, however, has managed to play a surprisingly complex role in the larger story.
Golden Glider's Comic HistoryGolden Glider first appeared in 1977. She was a natural evolution of the classic Flash gimmick villain; A figure skater equipped with skates that created their own ice that allowed her to skate anywhere. What made her at least moderately more interesting was her motivation: she had been in a relationship with the Top, a Flash enemy that had died tragically. She blamed the Flash for his death, and since her brother was Captain Cold, we officially checked the "figure-skating" box on the list of weird themes for Flash Villains.
Lisa Snart was eventually killed during the Wally West era of Flash history, but her story was still added to retroactively; when Owen Mercer, the son of Captain Boomerang, was introduced and we all discovered that he actually had speed powers, there was a little bit of a scramble to figure out how that worked. A female Flash Villain that had an in-cannon relationship with a bad guy with sort-of speed based powers fit the bill. Lisa Snart was established as the mother of the new Captain Boomerang, leaving us a little bit of a continuity knot to untangle. |
Our Golden Glider StoryGetting Lisa Snart just right meant needing to establish all her competing relationships, and figuring out where they sat in out timeline. In order for her son to be over 20, she actually had to have him before Barry Allen was ever the Flash, so the solution to that was for her relationship with the Top to happen while he was still the enemy of Johnny Quick. Rather than make her a super-villainous figure skater (if you were super married to that idea, I don't know what to tell you) we actually had her pick up some of the Top's hyper-velocity powers. In the new 52 she's depicted as having a weird sort of ethereal phasing ability, and honestly the applications of all the weird speed-force energies in the world of the Flash are so varied, there's no reason this can't be the case.
Anyway... once her child is born, We found that she didn't need a weird relationship-based explanation to have started a life of super-crime; her brother was a lifetime career criminal, and she could absolutely be one as well. She has every reason to be a founding member of the Rogues. We altered the circumstances of her death to make her one of the victims of the Reverse Flash when he tries to take over the Rogues... making her the catalyst of the first time Leonard Snart actually winds up working alongside the Flash. |