Madam Rouge
54 years ago - Laura De Mille is born to an aristocratic French family.
43 years ago - 11-year-old Laura De Mille begins attending a french finishing school for girls.
35 years ago - 19-year-old Laura De Mille becomes a stage actress.
32 years ago - 22-year-old Laura De Mille is in a horrible toxic waste accident, unaware that it was staged by the Brain and Mallah. The Brain stabilizes her, twisting her mind. She returns to her school as headmistress, marrying a rich british aristocrat, and opens the school’s catacombs as their new labs.
30 years ago - 24-year-old Laura De Mille is the public face of the Brain's criminal organization the Brotherhood of Evil, selling his experiments to the highest bidder, as Madame Rouge.
29 years ago - 25-year-old Madame Rouge gives birth to Angela Hawkins.
15 years ago - 39-year-old Madame Rouge and the Brotherhood of Evil attack the Doom Patrol's Doom Manor, but in retaliation are tracked to Paris & trapped in the catacombs. Madame Rouge fakes her death, and takes over her old school with a new identity, arranging the death of her husband and bringing her daughter Angela Hawkins into the school as she turns it into a secret assassin guild.
9 years ago - 45-year-old Madame Rouge is confronted by Gar Logan and the Teen Titans, who uncover her secret assassin academy. She is imprisoned and the school is closed, her students taken in by Sandra Knight at the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres.
4 years ago - 50-year-old Madame Rouge is freed from prison to restart the Brotherhood of Evil by Emil La Salle & the Brain, who drugs her and Angela Hawkins to control their reunion.
The Brotherhood of Evil is an esoteric bunch of baddies, but given that their main characters are a monkey and an inanimate object, I don't think they would actually come together as a particularly effective foil for the heroes in question if they didn't have one of the absolute best classic femme fatales in comics right at the forefront of their membership. Madame Rouge is a classic archetype of a character before you even start to look at her powers, but with them added in she becomes someone who really deserves a larger spotlight.
Madame Rouge's Comic HistoryMadame Rouge's first appearance along with the rest of the Brotherhood of Evil, was in Doom Patrol #86, the first issue after the series was renamed. She wasn't yet superpowered, but was instead a manipulative spy character, a master of disguise, and above anything else, a classic femme fatale. As her appearances continued, we learned that she was previously a young French actress who suffered a schizophrenic break, and then had the Brain suppress her remaining good persona, leaving her a remorseless villain. This of course means that as her appearances continue, her suppressed good personality would surface periodically, which was a pretty classic trope with female villains, allowing them to maintain a lingering romance with the hero. In this case, with The Chief.
In the years following the destruction of the Doom Patrol, largely at her hands, Rogue made appearances in other books as one of the truly great villains of the era. She made an early appearance in the New Teen Titans, where she confronted Beast Boy, who saw her as the killer of his adopted mother, Elasti-Girl. In their climactic battle, a defining moment for Gar, he knocks her into some sci-fi machinery, leading to her death. In her final moments, she seemed to access her lost good personality and called out to the Chief. It was pretty amazing. |
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Our Madame Rouge StoryMadame Rouge's powers really are great. They fit the world of the Doom Patrol really well, but also elevate her conceptually; giving her all the abilities of a master of disguise and dangerous femme fatale but also making her unbelievably dangerous, able to fight entire superhero teams singlehandedly, like a sinister, sexy Plastic Man.
For our version of her, we're deliberately combining the accident that originally split her personality with the one that gave her her powers, because it helps explain what brought her to the attention of the Brain in the first place. We're going to dial way back on the split personality stuff once we clear the Brain's initial meddling, because she's really a great villain, and we'd prefer that she maintain agency over her own actions. Then we went on to use her for all sorts of cool stories, because she is a GREAT character and we love using her. |