Lady Amethyst
32 years ago - Princess Amethyst is born to House Amethyst of Gemworld. When the sorcerer Dark Opal stages a coup against House Amethyst, she is brought to Earth by Citrina and place with adoptive patents, who name her Amy Winston.
19 years ago - 13-year-old Amy adopts Taffy as her pet.
17 years ago - 15-year-old Amy is found on Earth by Lord Sardonyx and brought back to Gemworld. She is saved by Granch & brought to House Amethyst, where she learns her true identity as a Princess of Gemworld. Wrynn captures her and attempts to steal her back to Dark Opal, but he is tracked by Taffy, who followed Amy into Gemworld and was granted a luck charm by Citrina, and is able to stop him when she becomes the alpha to a pack of Deathhounds. Citrina teaches her to use her magic while Lord Garnet teaches her to fight. She quests across Gemworld to unite the noble houses, meeting Lord Topaz, Lady Turquoise & Lady Emerald. Granch sacrifices himself to protect her.
16 years ago - 16-year-old Amy and her allies can attack Dark Opal's castle thanks to a spell cast by Citrina. They finally overthrow Opal, and Amy retakes the throne of House Amethyst. She & Lord Topaz cannot be together as they are nobility from different houses.
14 years ago - 18-year-old Amy chooses to remain in Gemworld. Topaz abdicates his lordship of House Topaz and they are married by Citrina, who steps down as regent as Amy becomes the Lady of House Amethyst. Lady Turquoise is Amy's maid of honor.
12 years ago - 20-year-old Amy gives birth to her & Topaz's daughter Amaya, who is delivered by Citrina. Lord Garnet is her godfather.
8 years ago - 24-year-old Amy becomes the new caretaker of Gemworld's magic when Citrina passes away, stopping a coup staged by Lord Mordru & casting him from Gemworld. She begins teaching spellcasting to her daughter Amaya.
1 year ago - 31-year-old Amy & Lady Turquoise journey deep into the heart of Gemworld to find a way to stop the armies of Eclipso after he blinds Topaz & enacts heavy casualties on House Turquoise. She unlocks the Elemental magic of Gemworld and is able to strip away his influence and finally reduce the Heart of Darkness to a harmless gemstone, ending the threat of Eclipso. & granting Topaz a magical second sight.
We were never not going to have Amethyst in our timeline. We adore Amethyst; it's one of those stories that really exemplifies just how great this medium can be. Amy Winston completely surpassed the idea of what a female protagonist could be at the time; by every possible metric, she is absolutely a hero for the ages. This is a story that DC will be retelling forever.
Amethyst's Comic HistoryAmethyst, Princess of Gemworld was a 1983 12-issue miniseries by co-creators Dan Mishkin & Gary Cohn, with art by Ernie Colon. It featured a 13-year-old girl named Amy who discovers that she's actually an adopted princess from another magical world, and when she travels there she becomes a beautiful, powerful (adult) princess equally capable with a sword or with magic, with a cast of friends and love interests. It's kind of a perfect storm of power fantasies; giving readers the sort of accessible fantasy landscape that wound come to define a LOT of properties across the 80's (predating She-Ra by a full 2 years), but also creating the sort of real-world beauty-play that Barbie had been building on for decades that was about to become a industry juggernaut. The whole concept was just a whirlwind of innovation, and if it had made it to the toy aisle it would have been a monster.
Meanwhile, the comic miniseries was a ton of fun to read, was gorgeous, and is one of my personal favorite books ever. |
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A follow-up ongoing series started a few years later, at first by the original creative team, but later on by future industry legends Keith Giffen & Mindy Newell, with a rotating cast of artists including the likes of Dan Jurgens & Karl Kesel. The initial core concept of Gemworld and it's cast of characters were used to drum up drama in this series to varying degrees of success, and at some point, Amy realized that her birth father was actually a Lord of Order, making her one as well.
After this series was completed, Amy's status as a Lord of Order had her appearing in other series like the Books of Magic; corners of the DC universe that skewed more esoteric and bizarre. This culminated in the third Amethyst series in 1987, again by Keith Giffen & Mindy Newell, this time at the height of their creative freedom. This take on Amethyst and Gemworld has been largely expunged from canon, but it's still worth reading nonetheless, if not for the intricate fantasy storytelling then for the gorgeous art by Estaban Maroto. The series ends with the reveal that Amber, the daughter of Topaz & Turquoise is in fact actually the daughter of Amethyst herself, a fact we're absolutely going to exploit later. |
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In 2011, one of the series launched in the New 52 was Sword of Sorcery, which featured a brand new take on Amethyst by another legendary writer, Christy Marx. This version of the character was far more grounded, traveling along with her mother, Lady Graciel. She was meant to be a reoccurring part of the larger DC universe and didn't quite have the same feel of operating in her own little fanciful corner of the world. She would go on to be heavily featured in the Justice League Dark, and even more extensively in the weird alternate-future series Future's End. This version of Amethyst kind of stands on her own, but is totally worth checking out if only to enjoy more work by Marx.
More recently, a version of Amethyst showed up as a member of Brian Michael Bendis's Young Justice series. There were elements of her story used to tie some story arcs together, and if you're a fan of Bendis' DC work then you'll probably like this too, although it might seem a little disjointed from what came before. This led into a new mini-series by Amy Reeder Hadley, which is absolutely worth reading if for no other reason than just how gorgeous her design and worldbuilding are, breathing all sorts of new innovation into Gemworld, which was already pretty spectacular to begin with. |
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Is this Okay?Amy Winston was a 13-year-old girl who, thanks to time flowing differently in Gemworld, had the body of a 20-year-old when she was there. Is this.. okay? On the face of it, no. Obviously. It is at least worth considering the context... this is a book designed for kids. It's power-fantasy wish-fulfillment. It's arguably similar to giving a young child a Barbie doll to play and empathize with. She's Shazam, but in a fantasy world. all her own. In that context... maybe it's not so bad?
Well.. here's the main problem. Traditional fantasy fiction, even fantasy fiction aimed at kids, has a way of putting female characters in vaguely sexual peril. I don't even think the writers (who just happen to be all dudes) were even aware of themselves doing it; but this is a 13-year-old girl, and the implications are just unpleasant. When you add to that the fact that this is a comic book in the 80's, it obviously can't help drawing Amethyst pretty sexually. That's just how comics were drawn, and they got a LOT more gratuitous before they got better. All the later incarnations of Amethyst do away with the age-change mechanic, and just let her be a teenager having teenage adventures. |
Our Amethyst StoryWe're keeping pretty much exclusively to the original continuity for Amy, with a few very specific changes. The first one is a small change, but probably has a pretty big effect on the character as a whole; we're getting rid of the age change thing, and making her 15 when her adventure happens. The second change is probably a much bigger deal; in the comics, Amy always wanted to go home after her adventures, right up until she wound up merging with Gemworld itself. We're not doing THAT, but we're also having her remain, moving permanently into her magical home to become a princess and later queen, where she has a child. This is a departure from the life journey of Amy Winston in the comic so it's understood that she still has a wide variety of adventures, and exactly how those adventures are going to be different, we really aren't sure. The intention here isn't to map out her whole life, just to understand that, once her original story is told and Lord Opal is defeated, she settles into her life as Princess.
We've moved her story a good deal back into the timeline to allow her daughter to be roughly the same age as the rest of our Future Teen Titans, because she's going to be amazing in that group, but what this also does is give us an opportunity to actually have an adult Amy Winston in our timeline; an actual Queen Amethyst. The closest the comics have ever really had to this was the Christy Marx run where Amy traveled with her mother, Lady Graciel... but I'm actually kind of interested in the concepts introduced in the '87 Giffen / Newell run. Having her be a more advanced mystic, more in touch with the magic of Gemworld, might be a really interesting take on what she becomes. |
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