Lady Shiva

34 years ago - Sandra Wu is born in a remote village in Myanmar among a community of refugees.

30 years ago - 4-year-old Sandra and the other refugee children are subjected to brutal and often lethal training by the Golden Dragon. To protect her sister Carolyn, Sandra undertakes the training for both of them.

20 years ago - 14-year-old Sandra's sister Carolyn is killed by her captors to try to stop Richard Dragon from saving a shipping container full of trafficked children. Believing her sister's death is the fault of Dragon, Sandra kills her teachers and abandons her village to pursue her own training. She joins the League of Assassins, quickly becoming one of Ra's Al Ghul's greatest prodigies. She takes the name Lady Shiva.

19 years ago - 15-year-old Sandra is kidnapped by the Monkey Fist Cult and brought to their island to be tested. She and Scandal Savage escape together and fight their way out. Shiva kills the Paper Monkey, the only outsider to ever do so in the history of the cult.

15 years ago - 19-year-old Sandra acts as the League of Assassins agent in Gotham, testing Batman. She tracks Richard Dragon and tries to kill him to exact revenge for the death of her sister, fighting both Dragon & Ben Turner to a stalemate. She is stopped by O-Sensei who reveals to her that Richard is not to blame. Believing she has no more to learn from the League, she becomes a student of O-Sensei.

14 years ago - 21-year-old Sandra infiltrates Kobra with Richard Dragon & Ben Turner, uncovering much of their operational data for the DEO.

13 years ago - 21-year-old Sandra leaves the dojo of O-Sensei, traveling the world to expand her skills, working as an assassin.

12 years ago - 22-year-old Sandra is targeted by the League of Assassins in Phuket to bring her back or kill her. She dispatches everyone sent after her and targets the top ranked League member in Thailand to cut off the attacks, finding David Cain. Finding him a worthy match she spares him and they sleep together. She leaves when she discovers his training of Cassandra Cain, but seeing her potential she intends to one day test her.

9 years ago - 25-year-old Sandra is hired to kill the vigilante Vic Sage. Seeing his nature as a blank slate, she ‘kills’ him metaphorically, wiping him from the city, and brings him to Richard Dragon, using him as a moral test of their competing philosophies.

4 years ago - 30-year-old Sandra is found by Richard Dragon, the only person capable of retraining Bruce Wayne to regain what he's lost after his broken back is healed.

3 years ago - 31-year-old Sandra finds Cassandra Cain in Gotham. Cassandra is clearly outclassed and battered in their confrontation, but she wins with a lucky sucker punch. The greatest challenge she'd ever faced, Sandra gives her one year before they will fight to the death.

2 years ago - 32-year-old Sandra and Cassandra Cain meet to battle to the death. Sandra stops Cassandra's heart, killing and reviving her. Cassandra ultimately defeats her, refusing to kill her.

1 year ago - 33-year-old Sandra receives an invitation to the Monkey Fist Tournament. She attends for the challenge and to prove herself the best in the world, but when Richard Dragon & Ben Turner reveal that something has happened to O-Sensei and they have followed the trail here, she chooses to allow Dinah Lance to advance to the final battle and instead join Dragon & Turner to discover the fate of O-Sensei.

now - 34-year-old Sandra joins the Golden Dragon to find their hidden central training facility in Bolivia and permanently destroy them. She encounters the Birds of Prey as they follow the same leads. They discover that the Golden Dragon are hiding the Brotherhood of Evil's secret military facility, and work together to defeat them.

Characters like Lady Shiva really can't help but serve the larger story in a largely utilitarian way. As the long-standing greatest martial artist in the world of DC she becomes an incredibly useful element to introduce in the telling of other characters evolution, presenting an impossible challenge, or serving as a teacher that absolutely anyone can learn more from no matter their level of skill.

There are stories, however, that have started to use her more as her own character, however, and other than one pretty major misstep that we'll get into later, you really can't go wrong with exploring what makes a character like this what she is.

Lady Shiva's Comic History

Lady Shiva appeared for the first time in 1976, in issue #5 of Dennis O'Neil's Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter. In the last few issues, we'd been introduced to the goddaughter of Richard Dragon's Sensei, Carolyn Woosan. After being kidnapped and saved a few times by Richard, she was finally killed in a motorcycle crash while Richard was trying to save her in a classic example of killing a potential love interest to motivate the male hero. In the next issue, Richard is introduced to Sandra Woosan, Carolyn's sister, who is to assist him on a mission as a sometimes operative of the spy organization GOOD. Soon, however, she reveals that she actually blames Richard for the death of her sister, and that she is actually the lethal Lady Shiva, a deadly combatant he's meant to face in a tournament. She discovers that she was lied to by the end of the issue, and becomes one of Richard's two main fellow Kung-Fu adventurers.

The series ended after 18 issues in the DC implosion in 1977, but Denny O'Neil quickly found a new way to use his characters in an entirely new series that set them up for a major role in the rest of DC's history. He wrote the extremely well-received new series the Question as the character was reimagined for DC. Shiva appears in the very first issue, hired to kill the Question. She gives him one of the great, historic beating in comic history, but she chooses to let him live, taking him to Richard Dragon to learn more about how to fight, setting the Question up to use the teachings of Shiva and Richard Dragon as competing ideologies, challenging the whole idea of irrevocable, unquestionable truth inherent to the Question. Through it all, it was absolutely understood that Shiva is absolutely the most dangerous, lethal martial artist on the planet.

Shiva made her first appearances in the world of Batman in a 1988 crossover story between the annuals of the Question, Green Arrow, and Batman, and then appeared as one of the three possible candidates to be Jason Todd's mother in the Death in the Family storyline. What really established her in her role as DC's premier, top tier martial artist was the one-two punch of the first Robin miniseries in 1991, in which she is selected to train Tim Drake, and 1994's Batman: Knightsend, in which she helps Batman retrain his martial arts skills after breaking his back. She is still, at this point, more a utility character than anything else, serving in other characters' stories rather than in her own, but in doing so she establishes herself as an incredibly necessary benchmark in the power scaling of the world of DC. She is unquestionably the alpha predator of the entire world, moving among its martial characters like a shark.

What makes this status as the most lethal fighter in the world so interesting is that it set her up to play a huge role in two series where two characters used their relationship with her to challenge themselves and rise to new heights. In Birds of Prey, Black Canary's rivalry with Lady Shiva helped establish her as one the the best martial artists in the world. Perhaps even more importantly, Cassandra Cain's Batgirl used Lady Shiva as her final impossible test, ultimately passing that mantle of greatest fighter in the world to the young hero. Of course... Shiva wound up mattering even more to the story of Cassandra than originally intended...

Lady Shiva & Cassandra Cain

One of the greatest elements of Cassandra Cain's original Batgirl series was the rivalry with Lady Shiva. As impressively as she'd been depicted in her appearances leading up to this, this is really where Shiva's supremacy and unparalleled lethality really came into focus as Cassandra's ultimate, unwinnable challenge, as their promised one-year-later fight to the death ticked ever closer.

Much later in the series, under a different creative team, Lady Shiva returned to the series in its final arc. This is the story that establishes, retroactively, that Shiva is ,in fact, Cassandra's mother. This revelation has gone on to define both characters, as neither ever seems to appear anymore without referencing their relationship. It's become practically the ONLY feature of either character anyone is willing to write about, completely forgetting that this is actually a retcon.

Shiva's role in DC is not meant to merely be the absentee mother of one of its heroes; she is meant to be an alpha predator for the entire world. Cassandra isn't meant to be the result of her incredibly impeccable Kung-Fu DNA, she's the result of the torturous training she endured and is overcoming. The connection between these characters was not improved by giving them a familial relationship. In point of fact, their bond was far more compelling when it was instead about their mutual skill level and the fact that only one of them can be the best in the world.

Our Lady Shiva Story

All that said, how did we set up our version of Lady Shiva? This is actually a robust timeline, because she winds up influencing a lot of the world around her, and while we were heavily influenced by canon events, we made a lot of little tweaks throughout. One small change to start: while introduced as Sandra Woosan, Shiva's name is more commonly written Sandra Wu-San. Since she's meant to be ethnically ambiguous, rather than give her the very specific Chinese-surname-with-Japanese honorific, we instead went with Sandra Wu, which, despite being Chinese, is such a common name she could absolutely be from anywhere.

We built her early life to roughly approximate a blend of her pre- and post-crisis origins, incorporating her blaming Richard Dragon for the death of her sister as well as their history of being subject to brutal and usually lethal training from a very young age. We invented the Golden Dragon organization here, a human trafficking organization that subjects its subjects to dangerous training, using the survivors as trained killers. The Golden Dragon is based on a few unrelated concepts in early DC, and in addition to providing a framing device for Shiva's origin, we have quite a few uses for them elsewhere.

Her timeline from that point forward is built from specific references to her comic appearances, just modified to serve us here. We made her an operative of the League of Assassins when she was much younger, letting her interact with Batman early in his career, testing him for Ra's Al Ghul. She leaves the league to become a student of O-Sensei, falling in with Richard Dragon and Ben Turner. This is a foundational part of her story, as her relationship with these two and with Richard Dragon in particular will go on to be a major part of several events in her life. When she finds a blank slate of student in the Question, she brings him to Richard Dragon to use him as a test of their philosophies. When Batman's back is healed, but he needs to relearn the application of violence in his art, Dragon knows that Shiva is the only person in the world with a chance to teach him.

And, of course, there's her interaction with Cassandra. Making them mother and daughter is a misstep, but they are absolutely bound together in their mutual potential, each seeing a twisted reflection of themselves in the other. Shiva is, without a doubt, Cassandra's greatest challenge and vise versa.

Shiva is a participant in a major martial arts event toward the end of our timeline, the Monkey Fist Tournament, where her relationships with the greatest fighters in the world will be tested... and in some cases, could actually lead to her starting to forge new relationships in the future.

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