Manitou Raven
1040 BCE - Raven is born in modern day Colorado among the Oshara Tradition.
1024 BCE - 16-year-old Raven becomes a tribal shaman.
1016 BCE - 24-year-old Raven discovers the Stony Path of the Manitou.
1000 BCE - 40-year-old Raven gives up his role as shaman to his successor to instead focus on following the Manitou
998 BCE - 42-year-old Raven & Dawn answers the call of the Stony Path & seals himself inside to play his part in the Godwar.
7 years ago - 42-year-old Raven & Dawn return from the Stony Path. He assists Kent Nelson & Diana Prince in freeing Billy Batson from the control of Circe, working the magic to free him outside the touch of the Gods.
5 years ago - 44-year-old Raven assists a depowered Diana Prince, empowering her to battle Ares & free Artemis. Dawn blames him for Diana's resulting death.
2 year ago - 47-year-old Raven forges the spells to hold the Red together while Gar Logan, Buddy Baker, and Mari McCabe fight Aku Kwesi to stop him from absorbing it entirely. To prevent the spells from collapsing he unlocks Dawn's mind, giving up his life to empower her to become the new Manitou Shaman.
Whenever we have characters liked this; characters that had extremely high profiles within specific runs of a book, characters that were clearly beloved by their creator but that other writers seemed to struggle with, characters who never really seemed to find their footing anywhere else, and perhaps most importantly, characters that are just downright WEIRD... I have to be very careful how I use them. I just have such a deep love of this sort of comic-book strangeness that I will often go WAY out of my way to include them in our timeline, and I have to talked back. Do they really enhance DC overall, or do I just like a challenge?
In this case, we all agreed that Raven was worth it, as long as we could find a role for him in the world that felt natural. He needed characters to interact with, and to contribute to the overall story that made it feel like he was always part of it. I think we did that, what do you think?
In this case, we all agreed that Raven was worth it, as long as we could find a role for him in the world that felt natural. He needed characters to interact with, and to contribute to the overall story that made it feel like he was always part of it. I think we did that, what do you think?
Manitou Raven's Comic HistoryManitou Raven appeared for the first time in JLA #66 in 2002. This was during the really super-interesting run by Joe Kelly & artist Doug Mahnke. Grant Morrrison had revolutionized the Justice League a few years previous, and Mark Waid carried that torch admirably, but Joe Kelly approached the League from a particularly different perspective, and wasn't afraid to make drastic changes to the status quo. Among his big changes was the introduction of Manitou Raven, a deliberately weird, completely original (but also kind of not) character.
Manitou Raven was Joe's take on Apache Chief, the character from the old Challenge of the Superfriends cartoon that was technically owned by Hanna-Barbera and therefore couldn't be used in comics (the same character who would later inspire the character Longshadow). Raven was an ancient practitioner of shamanic magic. The Justice League were trapped in the ancient past, fighting a group of characters all serving as heroes in a vastly different, more brutal world. Raven eventually allied himself with the League and helped them return to their own time (which, among other things, required him to murder Kyle Rayner and cut out his heart. temporarily.) He then joined the Justice League and served with them for the entirety of Kelly's run on the series, fulfilling the book's quota of bizarre, vaguely horror-themed magic. |
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Raven was a LOT. There was a lot to like about him; he was just a very different character with a completely unique look and power set. He basically did the same thing that any extremely high-power magic user would do on the team, fulfilling whatever need the story happens to present, but he did so with really interesting and sometimes deliberately scary visuals. Also... He's an unabashedly Native American character. There were a few cringy moments (particularly in filler issues with art by someone other than Doug Mahnke), but otherwise he seemed to be a real celebration of Native American culture.
When Kelly left the book, Raven essentially vanished from the team. A few years later, he would move on to join a new book also written by Kelly in Justice League Elite, which did an really great job of evolving his visuals and characterization, but also introduced a love triangle between him, his wife Dawn, and perennial dude-bro Oliver Queen, which unfortunately became the whole thrust of the character until he sacrifices himself to save the team at the end of the series. |
Our Manitou Raven StoryWe very much want to include Raven in our timeline, but unlike a lot of characters, adding him to any team feels like he's being diminished. The fact is that every time you try to squeeze him into a superhero-shaped hole feels like trying to stifle his weirdness. He works specifically in superhero comics written by Joe Kelly, because for him ALL superheroes have a sort of muted body-horror theme, but outside of his work you kind of want Raven to be his own thing; a powerful magic user practicing within his own world, like a shamanic Doctor Fate.
In fact, that is very much what we decided to do with him. Linking him to the magic of Doctor Fate establishes that he works with a very specific subsect of magic outside of the normal realm, so that when he is needed, he is literally the ONLY person that can do what he can do. We specifically chose the Wonder Woman story arc the Godwar as the catalyst that brings him forward to our time; where only his magic, magic that predates most of the gods, would be effective. From there, we found other Wonder Woman stories that would benefit from his involvement. There is some real synergy in tying him in as a recurring Wonder Woman character, it's a mythology that he fits without weakening his strangeness. We're not going to include the love triangle from the Justice League Elite series. That sort of drama CAN be fun and dramatic and interesting, but in this case it just felt tired. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because Green Arrow was just an unpleasant character to read at that point, it all just felt flat. Rather than that story, we're going to involve Raven and Dawn in a story building out of the concept of the Red, and all the characters related to it, as a way to pass the Manitou torch from Raven to Dawn. |
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