Kalista
41 years ago - Kalista is born, the crown princess of the planet Euphorix in the Vega system.
31 years ago - 10-year-old Kalista is sent to begin her warrior training with the warlords of Okaara.
29 years ago - 12-year-old Kalista begins training with the sorcerers of Euphorix
22 years ago - 19-year-old Kalista escapes her home planet of Euphorix when it is taken by the Gordanian regime. She is captured as a refuge by the Citadel who imprison her in the Starlag as a political dissident..
19 years ago - 22-year-old Kalista partners with Vril Dox, the clone of intergalactic criminal Brainiac, to escape from Starlag along with several fellow prisoners. They form the Omega Men, fighting the control of the Gordanians in the Vega system.
17 years ago - 24-year-old Kalista & the Omega Men liberate the Gordanian planet of Slagg with the help of the slave dancer Felicity who becomes their newest member. Kalista is targeted by the intergalactic bounty-hunter, Lobo. Vril Dox outsmarts Lobo and he joins them as a probationary member.
9 years ago - 32-year-old Kalista & Vril Dox have an ill-advised affair.
7 years ago - 34-year-old Kalista & the Omega Men assist Dick Grayson as he ventures into the Vega system to free a kidnapped Koriand'r from her sister Komand'r. Assisting General Ph'yzzon's Tamaranian rebellion, they free Tamaran from the rule of the Gordanians, and capitalize on that victory to finally overthrow the Gordanian regime. Kalista is returned to her throne, assuming stewardship of five other planets in the Vega system. She gives Vril Dox a full pardon. The Omega Men are officially disbanded, their enemy defeated.
Kalista was not a character that made it into the original version of our Omega Men when we first created this project. We were just looking for cool space-based heroes that would be cool on a team together, and unless you've gone out and actually read the 80s Omega Men & L.E.G.I.O.N. comics, a lot of these characters are obscure to the point of being unusable.
But when you DO read them (which I did later) you start to understand the dynamics at play and what makes these books and these teams have a singular voice and character of their own... and you start looking for ways to carry that into your take on the team, because if this doesn't actually feel like the Omega Men... then what's the point? In this case, we found that a lot of the particular style and tone of the book could be achieved just by adding one character.
But when you DO read them (which I did later) you start to understand the dynamics at play and what makes these books and these teams have a singular voice and character of their own... and you start looking for ways to carry that into your take on the team, because if this doesn't actually feel like the Omega Men... then what's the point? In this case, we found that a lot of the particular style and tone of the book could be achieved just by adding one character.
Kalista's Comic HistoryKalista and the Omega Men appeared for the first time in 1981, a creation of Marv Wolfman on a book OTHER than the New Teen Titans. They appeared in Green Lantern #141, the denizens of a hidden city populated by weird-looking alien refugees and ruled by an incredibly powerful and attractive king and queen. I can't find anything that suggests Marv was trying to do a riff on the Inhumans but... I mean... come on. Marv continued his Omega Men story in Action Comics and then in New Teen Titans, in one of their earliest gigantic storylines that took them all the way into the Vega system.
This was followed up by the Omega Men series, starting in 1983. The series went on through a lot of the 80s, sort of morphing in it's tone and style as it generally mirrored the prevailing sci-fi tastes of the decade. Kalista's role in the series sort of ebbed and flowed, generally serving in a general protagonist role about as often as she was treated as window dressing. The Omega Men were largely dormant for a long time, until Tom King did one of his big redesign-the-characters-and-make-everyone-depressed miniseries. This gave us a really good-looking redesign of Kalista, focusing her on swordplay instead of hex magic, but in classic Tom King style, he also made her borderline evil. |
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Our Kalista StoryAs we built our reimagined take on the Omega Men, merging their general vibe with Vril Dox's L.E.G.I.O.N. we found that in order for the team to retain the feel of the original Omega Men, it needed to include the idea of a deposed royal fighting a resistance against the regime that took their throne. As all over the place as the book was, that was a core tenet of the book in its initial arcs, and we wanted that here as well. We could have used the original leader Primus, but the reality is that character never really settled into a recognizable shape. He literally changes his appearance completely over the course of the series, which was a big plot point.
Meanwhile, Kalista remained a far more consistent character. If we use her as the deposed royal, there's sort of a built in dynamic between her and Vril Dox that kind of falls into place dynamically without much effort. It can mimic the clash of leadership in the early Omega Men series between Primus and Tigorr, but it also kind of mirrors the way different relationships sort of crop up across both series. Our Kalista can be a sort of combination of the original spellcaster and the Tom King swordswoman (just... less of a despot). Also, we can recreate maybe Kalista's highest profile moment; when she is kidnapped by Lobo in his first appearance on the cover of Omega Men #3. Oh, comics... |