Katana

35 years ago - Tatsu Toro is born in Japan.

25 years ago - 10-year-old Tatsu becomes a student at the Choju-Ryu Dojo.

21 years ago - 14-year-old Tatsu becomes a star pupil of Master Tadashi. She meets Maseo & Takeo Yamashiro. They both fall in love with her.

16 years ago - 19-year-old Tatsu is fought over by Maseo & Takeo Yamashiro. Takeo disregards the rules of the fight and almost kills his brother. She chooses Maseo, and Takeo leaves the dojo.

13 years ago - 22-year-old Tatsu & Maseo Yamashiro are married.

11 years ago - 24-year-old Tatsu & Maseo Yamashiro's twins Yuki & Reiko Yamashiro are born.

10 years ago - 25-year-old Tatsu's husband Maseo Yamashiro is murdered in the night by Takeo Yamashiro, who kills their children and burns their home but is unable to kill her as she steals the Soultaker and flees. She begins her war on the Yakuza as Katana.

8 years ago - 27-year-old Tatsu is recruited by Batman into the Outsiders. She becomes a surrogate mother to Violet.

7 years ago - 28-year-old Tatsu & the Outsiders fight the spirits of those trapped inside the Soultaker, including Maseo Yamashiro, summoned by Takeo Yamashiro with the Helleater Odachi. She fights Takeo to a standstill, forcing him to run.

6 years ago - 29-year-old Tatsu & the Outsiders discover that Helga Jace has been harvesting metahuman DNA for her experiments. While trying to stop her, she triggers her hypontic control of Brion Markov through his artifically enhanced Metagene. He fights the other Outsiders to a standstill before Violet is able to fully disable his powers, freeing him from Jace's control. Tatsu finally kills her, & the Outsiders are dispanded.

5 years ago - 30-year-old Tatsu must battle corrupt soul of Yamata-no-Orochi, the eight-headed sea dragon, summoned by Takeo Yamashiro when he unlocks the magic of the Helleater. She defeats the dragon and finally kills him, and is later recruited to the Global Guardians.

2 years ago - 33-year-old Tatsu journeys into the Soultaker with the help of Jason Blood, and is able to free the souls of her family. She retires, leaving the Global Guardians and passing the Soultaker to Violet.

There is a pretty long-standing issue in comics, and in fiction in general, of making characters built from the tropes and stereotypes of other cultures, and there is certainly an argument to be made that Katana is an example of this, but I would also say that she manages to overcome the worst of those issues by just being a really great character that thrives despite any issues with her origin.

Regardless of her cultural trappings, Tatsu has always been a compelling, tragic character and has enhanced any story by being part of it, and she's a core part of ours as well.

Katana's Comic History

Katana was one of the original characters invented to join the Outsiders, a new team for Batman to lead. They debuted in DC Sampler #1 in 1983, but of course their actual story begain in Batman and the Outsiders #1. Katana's whole story and costume are pretty obviously the result in the increased interest in Japanese culture in the early 80s after the release of the NBC miniseries Shogun. She could pretty easily have been a much less compelling character and instead have just been a series of cringy tropes (In fact, there are certainly moments in her original appearances that don't exactly hold up) but thankfully she was granted a cool, very personal story that gave her purpose outside of her cultural identity.

While training under her teacher, Tadashi, she was courted by two brothers, Maseo & Takeo. She married Maseo and had two children before Takeo, who had become a gangster, attacked them with a mystic, soul-sealing sword. Her husband and children were killed, leaving her with the sword and a vendetta against the Yakuza.

The bulk of Katana's appearances are in all of the various Outsiders series over the years. She wasn't a founding member of the 2003 Judd Winick redesign of the team, but joined them in issue #34 after the one year later timeskip, which I believe makes her the character that has appeared in more iterations of the Outsiders than any other. Unlike a lot of the other main Outsiders characters she's also made a lot of appearances in other series, as her overall design and persona are clearly just very cool. She's occurred often enough in the Birds of Prey that you could safely consider her a member of the team.

While she was included in a five-issue story called "The Dragon's Hoard" in the classic Ostrander Suicide Squad series, there really wasn't any precident for her being a member of the Squad when she was added (kind of as an afterthought) to the 2016 Suicide Squad movie, played by a tragically underutilized Karen Fukuhara. In the aftermath of this movie she was added to the 2016 Rebirth relaunch of the Suicide Squad, and has remained a member of the team for more issues than she's appeared anywhere else... although I don't know if they've ever really made a fully formed case for what she's actually doing on that team.

Our Katana Story

Getting Katana right is a pretty easy task. She is a fairly self-contained character and all we really have to do is to get her particular origin right, which is fun because it is immediately infuses our world with this classic feeling of old-world tragic melodrama. Once we have Katana's origin in place, she can pretty much immediately assume her role as an assassin targeting Yakuza as part of her mission of Vengance.

Of course, the next step of to have her become part of the Outsiders, but within that group one major element of her story that we need to make sure we establish is her relationship with Halo as their surrogate mother. This was absolutely a defining relationship for both characters, and we wanted to make sure we included it.

After this iteration of the Outsiders ends in our timeline we had some choices to make about what to do with her next. It never really tracked that she would be working with a secret American covert ops organization, but we did want to use her in another team enviornment. The answer, to us, was to make her be Japan's representative in the Global Guardians. She's an incredibly prominent character of international origin, and it seems like it would be a huge missed oppprtunity not to include her here. This means that, after working with the Outsiders, Tatsu would choose to step up and become a hero on an even grander scale.

Katana's Costume

Katana has gone through a lot of different costume changes over the years. For a lot of similar characters there's generally a pretty obvious stand out choice, but for Katana they all have their share of pros and cons, so it's a little harder to settle on a single look. For the most part, her early career, right up into the 2000s, featured a variety of red and yellow costumes of one kind or another, some with variations of modernized samurai armor, some more like a simple red skintight outfit with a Japanese flag detail. She underwent a pretty big change in her design after the new 52, particularly in her appearances in Birds of Prey and Suicide Squad. She started wearing her white half-mask and a variety of black costumes. At the time I really didn't like the change, and preferred her original red costumes, but I think I turned a corner after the first Suicide Squad movie. She continued to wear the white mask, adding a short black jacket and red sash around her waist. It was a look with it's own inherent logic; like something a rogue assassin killing Yakuza would wear.

Our Katana really has a distinct shift in her timeline, going from that rogue assassin to eventually becoming a sanctioned superhero representing her country in the Global Guardians. It makes sense that she would start out with that jacket-and-sash look, and then transition into something more traditional like the red suit with the Japanese flag.

Katana's Future

There is an opportunity with Tatsu that you don't get with a lot of other characters. Whether or not we take it might be a controversial decision, but it seemed like a shame if we didn't at least consider it.

Even after she claims revenge against Takeo for killing her family, her murdered husband and childrens souls are all still trapped inside her sword. She could continue to operare that way, but we could also take advantage of magic characters like Jason Blood to allow her to actually venture into the sword itself, where should could free their souls. Doing this would give her closure in a way that so many of these characters never get. Originally, we thought about passing her sword on to Cassandra Cain, but given that her surrogate child Halo is stepping up more and more as a hero in their own right, it makes so much sense to pass on the Soultaker to them.

If we do this, we could actually allow her to step away from her role as a superhero. Do we want to do that? Are we doing her or DC a disservice if we give this to her? Or is allowing a characters story to resolve worth making this sort of change?

Related Characters

Halo