Kimiyo Hoshi
44 years ago - Kimiyo Hoshi is born in Japan.
26 years ago - 18-year-old Kimiyo attends the University of Tokyo.
24 years ago - 20-year-old Kimiyo marries Hisahito, a fellow student.
23 years ago - 21-year-old Kimiyo has her first child, Imaku.
22 years ago - 22-year-old Kimiyo begins grad school.
20 years ago - 24-year-old Kimiyo has her second child, Yasu.
19 years ago - 25-year-old Kimiyo begins her doctoral work.
17 years ago - 27-year-old Kimiyo divorces her husband. He gets primary custody of their kids.
15 years ago - 29-year-old Kimiyo earns her doctorate, and joins Jacob Finley's photon project along with Arthur Light.
14 years ago - 30-year-old Kimiyo is forced into hiding when Arthur Light kills Jacob Finley and steals his photon technology. She is found by the Justice League and helps them defeat Light, choosing to continue her own research.
6 years ago - 38-year-old Kimiyo labs are broken into by Arthur Light, her advanced research updating his light manipulation technology.
1 year ago - 43-year-old Kimiyo accepts an invitation to assist Will Magnus & Karen Beecher on Oolong Island, and chooses to join the permanent staff there.
We get regularly asked how we're going to include Kimiyo in our timeline. She's a fairly prominent member of the Justice League, and has been for decades, so it's a reasonable question to ask. In practice, we've always struggled to answer it, because while the comics have always been quick to include her, We don't think they've ever really found a way for Kimiyo, the superhero, to work.
Kimiyo herself DOES work, however, and we hope you'll agree with the role we've built for her.
Kimiyo herself DOES work, however, and we hope you'll agree with the role we've built for her.
Kimiyo Hoshi's StoryKimiyo's first appearance is literally in the Crisis of Infinite Earths, which is quite possibly the single most complicated place a characters origin story could happen. She was a Japanese scientist observing the effects of the ongoing Crisis that was subjected to a beam of energy from the Vega system when the Monitor deliberately chose to activate her as a new hero. She needed Katana to translate for her since she only spoke Japanese, and her personality was basically built around her being... well... difficult to get along with. After the Crisis, she made a brief appearance in the earliest issues of the JM Dematteis Justice League, and would later be a part of the Justice League International and Europe. She would regularly appear across the DC landscape and be counted as part of the Justice League lineup... but in practice, every time she became a regular member of the Justice League it was a pretty clear indication that the series was likely to be cancelled pretty soon. The simple fact is this; Kimiyo Hoshi has never really worked as a superhero.
You know how she HAS worked, however? As a scientist. She's a GREAT scientist character, and that's a role that we absolutely need more of in our timeline. We're making her one of the new staff of Oolong Island, working alongside the Doom Patrol. She absolutely has a history with Doctor Light, and even helped the Justice League stop him, but all the superheroics should really be beneath her. Kimiyo should be a character who truely believes that she is one of the most important minds in the world, and and that she is using it to help mankind. She doesn't need a costume for that. |
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