Lilith
25 years ago - Lilith Clay is left as a foundling on Earth by the midwife of Thia, the Titan of the Sun, in an effort to keep her from her mother. She is found in a burning house, and brought to an orphanage.
19 years ago - 6-year-old Lilith is adopted.
12 years ago - 13-year-old Lilith's precognitive powers begin to manifest, plaguing her with prophetic dreams. Her parents, unable to cope, place her in a psychiatric hospital. She escapes and begins to hunt for her biological parents.
11 years ago - 14-year-old Lilith has a series of precognitions involving the Teen Titans. She seeks them out, and helps them capture a serial kidnapper.
8 years ago - 17-year-old Lilith meets Betty Kane, and helps create the Teen TItans West, who work alongside the Teen Titans before they disband.
7 years ago - 18-year-old Lilith is taken by the Titans of Myth as they attempt to recall their lost children. She discovers that she is the lost daughter of Thia, Titan of the Sun. The Teen TItans West and Donna Troy venture to New Cronos to save her.
6 years ago - 19-year-old Lilith helps Donna Troy escape from the illusions of Ira Billings. She and the Teen TItans West try to stop the Ravens from stealing a nuclear weapon, but are decimated when Cheshire detonates the bomb in Qurac. Lilith is killed.
Readers of any Teen Titans team will always, sooner or later, meet Lilith. She's an incredibly prolific character in the pages of the Titans, always referencing her long history with the team even though she always feels like she's weirdly peripheral to the core group. As it turns out, that's the result of the very strange way she joined them, and the weird arc her time with the group took. Still, we like this character and want to find a way to make her work.
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Lilith's Comic HistoryLilith Clay showed up for the first time in 1970, in Teen Titans #25. This is a really weird issue; longtime series writer Bob Haney was out, and for a brief time we got a story by Golden Age legend Robert Kanigher. Immediately, the entire tone of the book changed as the titans, out of costume, meets a dancer in a disco with precognitive powers who predicts a tragedy involving the team. They are soon responsible for the death of a popular anti-war figure, and with the exception of Robin, all choose to abandon their superhero costumes and powers, join a strange hero-training program, and bring both Lilith and an un-costumed young man named Mal Duncan into their membership. The art in this arc by Nick Kardy is unbelievably good, but it's almost like the book suddenly stops being about superheroes at all, looking more like the Challengers of the Unknown. Kanigher didn't even finish the story arc; he was replaced by other writers after only three very weird issues.
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Lilith continued to be a weird legacy member of the Teen Titans, becoming a founding member of the Teen Titans West when they were introduced in 1977, and then later having a recurring role in the pages of Marv Wolfman & George Perez's New Teen Titans, where she helped out during the stories involving Raven's fall to the influence of her father. This is where she was introduced as being the daughter of the Greek Goddess Thia.
Later on, she became part of Dan Jurgen's Teen Titans, the team lead by a de-aged Atom. Here, she starts wearing black and red robes and going by the name Omen, and she is retconned to be the daughter of Mr. Jupiter, the team's financier (and a throwback to that original three-issue story by Robert Kanigher, where Mr. Jupiter was responsible for that weird hero-training program) Essentially, Lilith would eventually appear in some role in practically every Teen Titans book, although rarely as an actual member. She would die in the same story as Donna Troy in 2003, but would continue to appear in stories featuring returning dead characters right up until the New 52 in 2011. While she made a weird appearance as a villain in the all-but-fully-retconned 2011 Teen Titans series, she returned in her original characterization in the 2015 Teen Titans Hunt miniseries that attempted to re-establish the classic Titans. In 2016, when a new Titans series was launched featuring the original members, Lilith was a full member from issue 1, now in a green hooded costume and using the name Omen. |
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Our Lilith StoryLilith is a weird character to include, because she comes from a really bizarre moment in Titans history that was such a departure from their normal storytelling style. She's never really read as a superhero, exactly; never been one to fight bad guys, or to wear a superhero costume. She's more of a plot device, something the writer can use to forward complex plots because she is precognitive. Still, just the fact that she's been around the Titans for so long (technically she's the very first original character to ever join the team) that she always feels like she has a place among them, even if that place is a little strange.
For us, we made her a person who associates with the team, but never joins until the creation of the West Coast Titans, where she seems to find a home. We adapted her Wolfman/Perez origins since the Mr. Jupiter story has never made a whole lot of sense, and made her mother Thia a Titan of Myth, because that actually gives us a much better reason to tie them into the Teen Titans overall, and connect them with Donna Troy. |
Lilith's CostumeWhile we like the idea that Lilith will, at least at first, mostly prefer to wear civilian clothes rather than some sort of costume. once she comes to understand her role in the world by meeting her mother and seeing what it means to be a lost child of the Titans of Myth, we actually imagine that she might start to make the transition into a more traditional superhero, starting to wear the green hooded robes that she wears in the modern Teen Titans comics.
At this point, her story has largely been told; she's interacted with the original Teen Titans team, she's successfully helped Flamebird build the Teen Titans West, and helped connect Donna Troy to the Titans of Myth. The tragedy of the Titans West is the loss of so many young heroes, and Lilith, who has actually died in the comics, is clearly one of the characters who needs to be lost in this story. I'm just glad we can find a way to tell her larger story so it can serve the larger tapestry of the Titans and of DC so well, and in the end I think we have a really good character here. |
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