Grace Choi

26 years ago - Grace Choi is born to an addict teenage mother. She becomes a ward of the state and enters the foster system.

15 years ago - 11-year-old Grace runs away from her latest abusive foster home. She is abducted & used by human traffickers.

14 years ago - 12-year-old Grace's powers begin to manifest, allowing her to escape & free the other children.

9 years ago - 17-year-old Grace meets Roy Harper, and joins his new team the Outlaws as Powerhouse. They try to go up against William Tockman but are systematically picked apart. She is disillusioned with the idea of superheroics.

7 years ago - 19-year-old Grace becomes the bouncer at the Metahuman bar Chaney's.

3 years ago - 23-year-old Grace is recruited by Roy Harper into the new Outsiders.

2 years ago - 24-year-old Grace meets Anissa Pierce when she meets the Outsiders.

now - 26-year-old Grace & Anissa Pierce move in together.

The early 2000s were a really transformative time for strong female characters. Characters like Grace; a woman that just openly and unapologetically kicks ass, were still a new idea only recently appearing in the form of a Xena or a Buffy. Even in that context, Grace was just a revolution, crushing the very idea of what female characters were supposed to be in an athletic-taped fist.

Comic books have always been a power fantasy, but the particular fantasy at play with Grace was so new the popular consciousness was still working out what it even looked like. We just don't see characters like this as much as I think we should.

Grace Choi's Comic History

Grace was an original character introduced in Judd Winick's 2003 Outsiders. The book was notably 'edgy' with its deliberate use of sex and violence, but Winick just happened to be particularly good at weaving it all into a fun comic book yarn, with an energy similar to exploitation cinema, and a huge part of that fun came from Grace.

She was a freight train of a character; so tough she could take on almost any threat fist-first, but as the series went on she proved to be far more complex than she first appeared. She was sexually liberated, had an incredibly wise old soul, and viewed the world of heroes and metahumans with a sense of refreshing pragmatism that we just couldn't get enough of. As she and new hero Thunder's relationship deepened from a mentor & mentee into one of the sweetest, most romantic couples in comics, Grace had become something completely captivating.

Once Winick's run on the Outsiders came to a close, so to did the characterization he brought to his characters. Grace would continue to appear in other Outsiders stories, or in the larger DC media when it was revealed that she was actually an amazon, but for the most part she's best defined by this single series.

Our Grace Choi Story

While Grace's only relevant appearances are from one comic series and we don't have to do much to get her right other than have Arsenal recruit her into the Outsiders and establish her relationship with Thunder, there are some elements of her story that deserved a little attention.

First and perhaps most important, we had to decide how much of her tragic origin we wanted to include. In canon, it was revealed that she'd been a victim of child sex trafficking, and that is a VERY dark story element to include in our timeline. Generally, we try to avoid that sort of thing, but after a lot of discussion we finally agreed that in this particular case, Grace is just a more heroic character for having overcome what she's overcome. It informs so much of her personality and the way she views the world, and while we certainly don't need to dwell on these ideas in our timeline, we ultimately agreed that it was a disservice to her story to take it out completely.

Beyond that, there were also some elements of her story that were a little thin that we wanted to at least spend a little time on. She was basically introduced as having already been a hero for a while, but we've never actually seen her in action so we wanted to make sure to include some of her earlier adventures. Also, we aren't including any modern, active tribes of Amazons outside of Themyscera, so rather than making her a lost member of one of those tribes, her powers needed to be based entirely on her activated metagene, but since she's pretty much a Black Lightning character, that tracks. .

Grace & Thunder

The romantic relationship between these two started to show up much later in their Outsiders series, but when you go back to the original issues and re-read them knowing what is going to come it becomes really obvious that these two were meant for each other from the very beginning. Grace is tough and is constantly giving her a hard time, but through it all she is so incredibly supportive of Thunder, always building her up and telling her how great she is. It's adorable.

In the second issue, as part of their very first mission, Grace and Thunder work together to catch a crashing fighter jet. Reading that sequence again now, you realize that this is way more than just an introduction to their powers or a badass moment of superheroics... it was actually a meet-cute.

A lot of the focus these two get is specifically because they're a gay relationship between two women of color, and that IS cool... but honestly the best thing about them is that they actually read like two people who make each other better through their partnership, and who have legitimate, earned affection for each other.

Grace's Future

Grace Choi is a pretty unique character, in that she's absolutely one of the major powerhouses among the currently active superheroes, and has a well-established role in one of the main superhero teams, but she doesn't really have any desire to be a 'superhero'. She doesn't really have a costume, or a superhero moniker. She just is who she is.

So when we leave our current timeline, and look to Grace's future, I imagine it's largely going to be defined by her relationship with Anissa. Her partner is starting med school, they're moving in together... and they're both devoted members of the Outsiders. Wherever Anissa might be going in the future, you can trust that that is where Grace is going to be as well.

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