June Robbins
76 years ago - June Robbins is born in Colorado, the daughter of rangers from Mesa Verde National Park.
63 years ago - 13-year-old June Robbins creates Blinx, her own programming language.
60 years ago - 16-year-old June Robbins traverses the Congo Basin in Sub-Saharan Africa as a volunteer with an Ivy University archeological research team.
58 years ago - 18-year-old June Robbins attends Ivy University on a full academic scholarship, studying Data Analysis, Robotics, & Machine Coding
55 years ago - 21-year-old June Robbins earns her custom Bachelors degree and begins a Phd program at MIT.
52 years ago - 24-year-old June Robbins earns her Phd in applied robotics.
50 years ago - 26-year-old June Robbins, Ace Morgan, Red Ryan, Rocky Davis, and Professor Walter Haley survive a plane crash on a volcanic island when their B-47 Stratojet transpacific flight encounters an unexplained spatial phenomenon. They bond over the belief that they had escaped death and felt driven to make something of their borrowed time. Upon returning to civilization, they begin an Adventure Club, The Challengers of the Unknown.
42 years ago - 34-year-old June Robbins and several creatures grow to giant size when the Challengers of the Unknown, experimenting with microbes from orbit, release a mysterious chemical into the atmosphere June helps the Challengers capture the creatures so they can all be treated.
39 years ago - 37-year-old June Robbins and The Challengers of the Unknown are attacked in Challengers Mountain by a rebuilt Ultivac. They are able to contain it, and June finds a language they can use to communicate with it, helping free it from the control of it's creator. It's consciousness is placed in the computers of the mountain while it's body is put in storage.
32 years ago - 44-year-old June Robbins and The Challengers of the Unknown are trapped in a rigged-to-explode Challengers Mountain along with a group of hostages when it is sabotaged by Hunzar Manning. Professor Walter Haley sacrifices himself, gunned down by Manning's men, to reconnect Ultivac to its body. Ultivac sacrifices itself to save everyone, proving itself an honorary Challenger. June, Ace Morgan, & Rocky Davis choose to go their separate ways, honoring their roles as the surviving Challengers in their own ways. June returns to MIT, becoming a professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.
28 years ago - 48-year-old June Robbins becomes the head of all advanced AI development for S.T.A.R. Labs
22 years ago - 54-year-old June Robbins & Ace Morgan are the first people Rocky Davis comes out to.
19 years ago - 57-year-old June Robbins is granted controlling interest of Morgan Aviation after the death of Ace Morgan.
8 years ago - 68-year-old June Robbins retires from her position at S.T.A.R. Labs. She returns to MIT to teach.
The original Challengers all were essentially defined by their name, specialty (and of course Kirby's ability to create unique looks for each person, even in matching costumes), but June is something else again. Kirby's respect for women as characters has been a solid through-line in his career, especially at a time when that just wasn't the thing to do. June was always limited by the roles comics would allow women to fill, only ever really allowed to be a supporting character at best, but she was super-competent, very in charge of her own agency, and often drove the plot. We absolutely would never have gotten Sue Storm or Rita Farr without June Robbins.
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June Robbins' StoryJune showed up in the second-ever Challengers story, in Showcase #7. She's introduced as the world's foremost expert on computers and thinking machines, and goes on to prove incredibly helpful through the whole issue. This is the issue that introduces Utivac, the giant robot monster with a soul that would continue to appear in Challengers stories, and June was very much his Fay Wray, but she was also a very capable colleague for the Challengers, helping over and over, even offering to take the place of Rocky when he's presumed to be dead. The other Challengers seem to be game, but when Rocky turns up alive, of course, the idea is pushed aside.
June would go on to appear CONSTANTLY through the Challengers series, always described as an honorary member, and often integral in introducing the story twist the others had to deal with... most famously in issue #15 when she manages to grow to giant size while still maintaining a very comic code-friendly amount of clothing. |
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June's role in the book declined as they started to relent more and more to reader feedback. Readers are generally reactive and not really good at innovative thinking, and they just got too many letters from kids who didn't want to see any girls in their adventure comic... I guess because of cooties? These are the same letters that eventually led to the team wearing progressively worse costumes. Weirdly, in the later years of the series, a different new member, Occultist Carinna Stark, would actually join, be counted as a full member, and have a love triangle with Red & Rocky. When the book came back from a brief hiatus of a few years, June was suddenly back and wearing a full costume... although STILL only an honorary member. It's really Darwin Cooke's New Frontier that really made the final argument that the whole idea of June being an honorary member was stupid. Any time you see the original Challengers appear now, June is always right there with them.
For our part, we wanted to just remove any nonsense around June's role being anything other than a full Challenger, so we just did the thing. She was actually on the plane when it crashed and has been counted as a full Challenger from the beginning. She's actually one of the only surviving Challengers all the way to the modern day. |
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