Lillian Worth
41 years ago - Lillian Worth is born in Cambodia, the daughter of a British sailor and a descendant of the Cambodian royal family.
33 years ago - 8-year-old Lillian's parents are killed during a political coup. She is taken in by one of the brothels, protected by the women that worked there.
27 years ago - 14-year-old Lillian begins working to organize the sex workers in the brothels where she grew up, fighting for their protections and working conditions.
24 years ago - 17-year-old Lillian opens her own brothel, careful to create a safe environment for the sex workers there, providing them with education and health care.
17 years ago - 24-year-old Lillian takes in an injured Slade Wilson who is stranded in Cambodia during a military coup. Sheltering him in her brothel, she helps nurse him back to health, and they become lovers. Later, she gives birth to his daughter, Rose Worth
14 years ago - 27-year-old Lillian begins teaching her daughter Rose Worth how to protect herself.
5 years ago - 36-year-old Lillian is kidnapped by Wade LeFarge as he threatens to torture or kill everyone Slade Wilson cares about. She is saved by Rose Worth, her daughter, who is stalked by LeFarge but manages to fight him off. Ultimately, Lillian sacrifices herself to ensure Rose's safety.
Lillian Worth's Comic HistoryLilly Worth was the subject of a single comic issue, Deathstroke # 15 from 1992. Its very much in keeping with the tone and style of the Deathstroke series; in it an injured Deathstroke is taken to a secret brothel run by an old lover of his, and we see flashbacks of his time in the jungles of Cambodia when they met. It's all pretty ham-fisted in a way that clearly references 80s action movies like Rambo 2, but the most important part of the issue was towards the end, when we see that Lilly's brothel also sees to the care and education of the women working there, and we see one child with pure white hair very similar to Slade's...
This is of course Rose, and both she and Lilly come back during The Hunted story arc, when Rose is captured and Lilly goes completely ballistic trying to find and rescue her. It actually expands the idea of who Lilly is quite a bit, making her an incredibly capable operative and fighter, but even at the time there was this sense of pending doom about her, like you could just tell the story was setting Rose up to be something really cool, and to get there your comic book fan senses were screaming that something bad was going to happen to Lilly. In the end, of course, she does die; she attacked Rose's kidnapped but her vehicle went off a cliff and exploded. Rose is thoroughly traumatized, and on her way to becoming a badass assassin. |
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Our Lillian Worth StoryLook, I'm not going to pretend the depiction of this character was anything less than wildly problematic. To center a character around the brothel culture in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge is... I mean, comics were in a deeply transitional period in the late 80s and early 90s, and comics written about adult concepts were starting to really occupy the landscape... but this is a character that debuted in the Teen Titans, and this just feels like it's too much.
So why are we USING it? We weren't, at first. Lillian worth was just a Greenpeace worker and Rose's mom. When going back over it, however, we just couldn't shake how minimizing this was for Rose. The fact that her childhood was in such a strange and exotic place was so core to who she was. Lillian was, for as rarely as she showed up and as problematic as the concept was, undeniably interesting. We can take some of those ideas and build on them, making her focus on protecting the women around her and giving them opportunities. Hopefully, the version of this character we're arriving at feels more like something that fits into the world, while still giving Rose that incredibly strange but still oddly nurturing childhood she needed. |