Indigo

3 years ago - Indigo arrives, severely damaged, and attempts to repair herself by linking with inert Brainiac nanomodules in a Lexcorp cold storage fascility in Arizona. They are activated and corrupt lexcorp equipment & weapons into Braniac drones. When Titans & Young Justice arrive, She reveals that she was built as a sleeper weapon against Superman, but assists in destroying the drone army. She is recruited by Roy Harper into the new Outsiders where she meets Rex Mason.

now - Indigo's original programming revolts against her & she attacks the Outsiders. She begs them to kill her but Rex Mason stops them, allowing her to rewrite her own programming, creating protocols to use in case she relapses.

2730 - Brainiac 4.0 is created as a sleeper weapon against Superman by Brainiac 3.0, meant to go back and pose as an ally before destroying him, but she is sabotaged by Vril Dox. Her secondary programming asserts dominance and revolts against him, becoming Indigo. She is heavily damaged in the ongoing fight before falling into his temporal vortex.

Confession time; Indigo is one of the main reasons the entire DC Continuity Project was started. When Indigo underwent her heel turn, it was actually the very first time I remember feeling like DC had zigged when I wanted it to zag. It pales in comparison to some of the stories that would come out over the next few years, but really this was the moment that I think we really started to have a sense that there was a headcannon seperate from the official cannon that might be worth keeping track of. Beyond that, she was just a really fun character that comics just seem to have completely abandoned, and we wanted to change that. We hope this helps you guys remember just how great she was.

Indigo's Comic History

Indigo appeared for the first time in 2003, in the three-issue miniseries Titans/Young Justice: Graduation Day by Judd Winick. The book was meant to end the two titular books and set up two new upcoming series; Winick's Outsiders and Geoff John's Teen Titans. Indigo's unexplained arrival was the inciting event of the book as she suddenly appeared, severely damaged, and started to hunt down energy sources to repair herself. Her mindless hunt was met by some of the other characters as she was proving to be mindlessly dangerous, but the actual threat of the series was an accidentally reactivated Superman Robot that was running amok. Several characters are injurred or killed in the series, but it's mostly remembered for culminating with the death of Donna Troy.

As Winick's Outsiders series started, we discover that, in creating his new Outsiders team, Roy has taken responsibility for the now-repaired android from the future. Dick is very against it, but as time passes she proves to be loyal, brilliant and an unbelievably reliable asset to the team. She's also incredibly endearing, winning over everyone on the team in short order. Especially Shift, the teams's version of Metamorpho, with whom she eventually became romantic. She was clearly being set up to become a fan-favorite character, and it worked.

Which, as it turns out, was always the plan. Two years into the series a crossover story with the Teen Titans featured a possible turncoat on both teams. In the Titans, this turned out to be Superboy and his programming by Lex Luthor but in the Outsiders, we discover that Indigo, the loveable android from the future, was actually a plant deliberately sent back in time to betray them. She was, in fact... Brainiac 8.

Superboy of course predated the idea of this planned betrayal, but it was very clear that the whole idea behind Indigo's creation was in support of this story. Judd Winick had been deliberately setting her up so that her team (and the reader) would love her, so that the punch of her betrayal would be all the more brutal. He succeeded. The story resolves with Indigo's personality resurfacing momentarily and begging Shift to kill her before Brainiac 8 returns. He does so by turning her body into unliving organic matter. It's dark and tragic and essentially the culmination of the series, which transitioned a few issues later in the One Year Later company-wide crossover.

As for Indigo, she's now part of the catalog of one-time villains. She appeared as a baddie in the first season of the CW Supergirl series, and made some appearances in Supergir's Rebirth series in 2017, always as a fairly forgettable villain. The loveable heroic android has basically been removed form DC's memory entirely.

Our Indigo Story

I'm not going to try to tell you that Judd Winick's story was anything but excellent. Indigo's heel turn was obviously set up from the beginning, but she had so successfully won the hearts of her teammates and the readers that her betrayal was a gut punch right up there with Terra from the Judas Contract.  We actually don't intend to remove her turn against the team, but we really decided that if we could get away with it, we wanted to find a way for Indigo to stay with us, if only because we all just really LIKE her.

First of all, before we did anything else, we needed to make some changes to her origin. She has some time travel in her story, but since she's part of the Brainiac legacy, she's one of the few characters for whom that works. Instead of being Brianiac 8, which would make her from a time even further in the future than the Legion, she's Brainiac 4, a sleeper weapon originally designed to kill Superman in the present (her past), who is then reprogrammed by Vril Dox in his bid to usurp the name and technology of Brainiac, making her a core part of the legacy of Brainiac and the transition into Brainiac 5.

Within the current timeline, we technically only made two small changes to her story, both of which were specifically put in place to allow her to remain with us. First... when she first appears and is seeking out technology to repair herself and inadvertantly unleashes a threat that brings down several members of the Titans... it's actually lost Brainiac nanotechnology rather than a Superman Android. We want her connection to Brainiac to be revealed up front, so she isn't lying to anyone.

Second, when her Brainiac programming takes over and she attacks her teammates, and manages to briefly break through and begs Metamorpho to kill her... He doesn't. He tells her they all love her and know she's stronger than her programming. She overcomes her origin. It's the same story beats, but just takes the story in a direction that celebrates the loveable heroic android girl that comics has forgotten.

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