Lian Harper
5 years ago - Lian Harper is born, the daughter of assassin Jade Nguyen & Roy Harper, while he is hunting her with his new Titans team to bring her to justice. He takes custody of her once she is captured. She briefly bonds with Rose Worth.
4 years ago - 1-year-old Lian lives full-time in TItans Tower with her nanny, Chanda Madam.
3 years ago - 2-year-old Lian moves to her apartment in New York while Roy Harper starts the Outsiders.
now - 5-year-old Lian gets full access to the Watchtower.
There are a lot of shenanigans that happen when superheroes have kids. Just like in most episodic fiction, characters are often prone to discovering adult or teenage children they never knew they had, but then there's also the constantly changing nature of comic book continuity to contend with. Often the kids are originally part of some alternate timeline that later get adapted into mainstream cannon, or else they're a function of transitions between eras in storytelling and have their lives retroactively written into the stories of their parents.
This is what makes Lian Harper is special. For all the superheroes that have had kids, Roy is one of the very first that we get to watch just being a parent. Before he was ever Arsenal he was a dude walking down the sidewalk pushing a stroller. There have been others since then, but Lian is always going to have a special place in our hearts.
This is what makes Lian Harper is special. For all the superheroes that have had kids, Roy is one of the very first that we get to watch just being a parent. Before he was ever Arsenal he was a dude walking down the sidewalk pushing a stroller. There have been others since then, but Lian is always going to have a special place in our hearts.
Lian's Comic HistoryLian's first appearance happened in 1986 in New Titans Vol 2 #21, as a payoff to the previous issue's cliffhanger ending, where Cheshire, holding Roy at gunpoint, accuses him of abandoning her after fathering her child, but it's in #21 that Roy meets a tiny, redheaded little baby.
A few years later Action Comics, which had become a weekly anthology series, included several episodic stores that depicted Nightwing and Roy, who was no longer an active duty Titan. They battled Cheshire in these stories, and ultimately recovered the infant Lian. From there you started to see Roy caring for his daughter regularly. As the 90's rolled around and Roy started to go by the name Arsenal, even leading the Titans for a good while, It was always understood that this reckless, flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants hero was also a loving dad of a very cute toddler (Who was now being depicted as Vietnamese, like her mother). Roy went on to be featured in the Devon Grayson Titans series, to lead a new team of Outsiders alongside Dick Grayson... and eventually even joined the Justice League. Through it all, Lian was always there in the background, getting to meet all of her dad's coworkers and getting tours of their headquarters. Then, in 2009, James Robinson wrote a miniseries called Justice League: Cry for Justice, in which Lian, who was maybe 5, was killed. It was not good. |
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Our Lian StoryLook, I love James Robinson. His work in Starman and the Justice Society is absolutely fantastic, even genre-defining. Also, there's room in the world for stories that involve tragedy, even in comics. Also-also, DC in the mid-aughts was absolutely chest-deep in stories that seemed desperate to one-up each other in 'adult' themes, completely wiping out any potential for whimsy in their comics. Cry for Justice just seemed like the inevitable result of that trend.
Still... Come on. There's no way this story needed to happen. Lian obviously gets to grow up. It's weird that we even need to say that. Beyond that change, Lian's story gets to be largely the same. She lived with her mom briefly, while she was on the run, until her dad finds her and takes custody. Then she gets to live alongside all sorts of different superhero teams, all of whom absolutely adore her because she's a precocious, adorable little girl, and they're not monsters. Mostly. |
Lian's FutureIn a generation slated to include the children of Circe & Ares, Mister Miracle & Big Barda, Wally West, Tempest, Batman & Catwoman, and even Superman... none of them are so absolutely guaranteed to grow up into a superhero as Lian. She's obviously going to be a great archer, but who knows what other skills she's going to pick up when she's literally been babysat by every superhero ever?
There's an adult version of the original redheaded Lian in the Kingdom Come, but of course one of the cool things about Lian is that she's half-Vietnamese (and a quarter Navajo!). We actually did a whole thing over in the page for Shado, where we decided to take the costume for the character Emiko Queen and deliberately save it, because it's SO perfect for a teenage Lian to start wearing when she inevitably becomes the leader of a whole generation of heroes. From there she can practically go anywhere. We've found this amazing art that's clearly meant to depict an adult Lian; we have no idea where it came from, but it's just fantastic. Lian's going to be an absolutely awesome character, and some writer is going to have a blast with her. |
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