Joan Garrick
59 years ago - Joan WIlliams is born in Keystone City.
41 years ago - 18-year-old Joan goes to Midwestern University to study chemistry.
37 years ago - 22-year-old Joan gets her bachelors degree in chemistry, and begins her graduate work.
34 years ago - 25-year-old Joan earns her MS in chemistry, and becomes a Star Labs researcher.
24 years ago - 35-year-old Joan leaves her position as a researcher and returns to Midwestern University as a chemistry teacher.
21 years ago - 38-year-old Joan meets Jay Garrick, learning that he is the recently time-displaced original Flash. She helps him acclimatize to the modern world.
12 years ago - 47-year-old Joan & Jay Garrick are married.
7 years ago - 52-year-old Joan & Jay Garrick both retire from teaching.
Joan Garrick is usually depicted as a sweet grandma character, baking the heroes cookies or working in her garden, almost always still wearing her apron. It might surprise modern readers to know that for what is probably the bulk of her appearances she was less of a sweet old grandma and more of a tall glamorous modelesque blonde and is largely responsible for the archetype of the heroic character's love interest. We're going to need to alter her story a little bit to make her fit our timeline, but the end result is, we hope, actually going to make her an even more interesting character.
Joan Williams Comic HistoryJoan appeared for the first time all the way back in Flash Comics #1 in 1940. She was a college student alongside Jay Garrick, and while Jay worked as a chemist and also played on the football team, from the very first page it was obvious that the only thing that REALLY mattered to Jay was getting a date with this beautiful fellow student. Even after he has his lab accident, he doesn't actually use his powers until he sees Joan out his hospital window and runs downstairs to see her. The first time he suits up as the Flash, it's to help Joan find her kidnapped father. Maybe I'm making a bigger deal of this than is necessary, but given the way love interests of other heroes all seemed to be presented as obstacles for the hero to overcome, to have Jay so obviously smitten with Joan from the very first panel just strikes me as revolutionary.
|
Over the course of the original Flash comic Joan eventually learned Jay's secret identity and became his closest confidant. Decades later, as Jay and the Justice Society had their role in the timeline reimagined, making them World War II heroes who were still around thanks to being regularly de-aged, we started to see Jay alongside the modern Flash characters, which meant we would also regularly see Joan. They were not only married, but had been married since the 40's. To fit the new storyline, Joan was now much older, so much so that she was pretty much an entirely different character archetype.
There's really no other way that this story COULD have unfolded, given Jay's role in the timeline, but it does wind up being interesting how Joan skipped entirely from young vampish love interest to beloved elderly grandma. There's a well documented tendency to avoid depicting women of a normal adult age in a lot of entertainment, and while we weren't TRYING to, we're actually going to wind up doing exactly that. |
Our Joan Garrick StoryWe're going to be bringing Jay into the modern timeline in order to have him serve as the father figure to the modern Flash characters... but also because he and Joan go on to become Bart Allen's foster parents. It's easy to skip Jay forward in time, but harder to do so with Joan without fully copying what happens with Barry & Iris, skipping THEM forward to the 30th century. It actually makes more sense for us to wait until Jay has made his time jump, and THEN introduce him to Joan.
This moves their entire relationship much further into their mutual adulthood, but we actually find that incredibly charming. You just never see stories like this outside of certain hallmark movies, but the idea of two people in their late 30's and early 40's meeting as coworkers, finding mutual interests, developing a romance... One of them discovering the other is a time-displaced former superhero and helping get acquainted with life in modern times... it all just feels very organic, and a fun story to tell. This means that the Joan of our story is an adult woman in the middle of a successful career as a chemist and teacher, and we're actually really pleased with that. |