Nightshade

27 years ago - Eve is born, the princess of the House of Nightshade in Myrra, a world of stories.

20 years ago - 7-year-old Eve is present when Jim Rook arrives at the House of Nightshade. When he is named as a hero of her House, she begins to daydream about life as an adventurer.

14 years ago - 13-year-old Eve’s family are killed when Karkull usurps the House of Nightshade. Her mother Queen Maureen summons Jim Rook & Bobo, sacrificing herself so they can save her daughter. Adopted by Jim, she joins them on their quest to free Myrra from the threat of Karkull.

13 years ago - 14-year-old Eve, Jim Rook and Bobo attempt to infiltrate Karkull's castle, but are captured. They discover that Eve’s brother Liam was taken as the host for a dark magic entity called Incubus. Eve is corrupted by Karkull's dark magic, and gains the ability to manipulate shadows, allowing them to escape.

11 years ago - 16-year-old Eve, Jim Rook and Bobo defeat Karkull, freeing Myrra. They follow Incubus through a portal to stop him from entering the real world. Eve does not trust that Incubus was stopped. She takes the name Eve Eden, exploring the world to find remnants of the House of Nightshade.

10 years ago - 17-year-old Eve discovers that Incubus did survive the portal to Earth, and has been building a rising criminal Empire. She begins to work to undermine the organization, partnering with probationary Argus agent Hadley Jagger.

8 years ago - 19-year-old Eve becomes a full-time Argus agent, reporting directly to Sarge Steel.

6 years ago - 21-year-old Eve is approached by Amanda Waller, attempting to recruit her into Task Force X. Eve rejects Waller's offer.

5 years ago - 22-year-old Eve & Hadley Jagger go on a mission with the Suicide Squad, following a lead from Amanda Waller about Incubus, the entity possessing her brother. They come face to face, and while Eve attempts to reach her brother, Floyd Lawton shoots him on Waller’s orders, enraging Eve.

3 years ago - 24-year-old Eve and a group of heroes stop Felix Faust from manipulating the spells binding Siobhan McDougal & Valerie Beaudry, using them to attempt to rewrite the rules of magic. They take the name the Shadowpact, but don't yet understand why.

1 year ago - 26-year-old Eve and the Shadowpact cast their spell, drawing Mageddon into our reality. She returns to her role as an Argus agent.

now - 27-year-old Eve Eden returns to Myrra with Jennifer-Lynn Hayden & the Outsiders when Todd James Rice's powers are usurped by Karkull to bathe the Earth in shadows. They finally defeat Karkull with help from Jim Rook, and Eve remains in Myrra as the new Queen of the House of Nightshade.

Sometimes the circumstances of a character's publication history manage to put a character into a position that they might have never achieved otherwise. Martian Manhunter in the Justice League, or perhaps the Black Condor in the original Freedom Fighters. It increases their visibility, or just puts them in proximity of enough stories that they eventually are a bigger part of the world than their original role might have suggested.

I don't in any way think Nightshade was ever a bad character, by any means, but most supporting characters don't manage to get adapted into genre defining miniseries or become featured characters in extremely long-running series totally separate from their origins. She DID. We absolutely want to use her, but we actually had to get a little creative with her to make her work in the way we wanted.

Nightshade's Comic History

Nightshade started out as one of the Charlton character, created by Charlton comics in the early 60s alongside the rise of other superhero comics. Nightshade first appeared in the pages of Captain Atom #82 in 1966, a fellow agent assigned to work with Captain Atom using her shadow powers. She was primarily a supporting character, but had her own backup story that revealed that, rather than just being a government agent-themed hero, her powers were actually deeply magical. She was the lost princess of a lost magical realm, also called Nightshade. She made a few more appearances in Charlton, including as the lone female member of their Justice League allegory team, the Sentinels of Justice.

It's probably this role, as one of the Sentinels that gave her a fairly high profile in the 80s when DC acquired the Charlton characters. She was of course the basis of Silk Spectre in the Watchmen, although I think there's a chance that was just because she was the only female character available, because Sally Jupiter is way closer to Black Canary

As the Charlton characters were being integrated into DC proper, only a few of them actually got their own series. Nightshade became a member of the newly created Suicide Squad. In it she is a government agent, just like she was in the Charlton Captain Atom. She is the second person recruited by Amanda Waller to work with the Squad, supposedly in exchange for their help with one particular mission some time in the future.

See, it was already established in the Charlton origin (and then reinforced by her Secret Origins issue) that she had her origins in the magical land of Nightshade. She grew up on Earth, but her mother had brought her and her little brother to Nightshade, only to discover that the evil entity that forced her to leave, Incubus, was still there. She sacrificed herself to save her kids, but Eve's brother was taken, leading to a story where she continually tried to go back to save her brother, but never succeeded. She became a government agent, all with the intention of staging an incursion on her mother's homeland.

This all played out in Suicide Squad, where Nightshade made most of her appearances. She was the love interest of Rick Flag Jr, and was heartbroken when he died. She bounced around for a little while after this, more of a utility character than anything else, but she saw a bigger return when she was one of the magical heroes that came together to save the world from a rampaging Spectre in Day of Vengance, which led to the series where she made the SECOND most appearances, Shadowpact.

Our Nightshade Story

Nightshade is actually kind of a tricky character to figure out. She has a lot of history, because of the series she's appeared in and the characters she's related to, but for one reason or another there's really never been a definitive take on her. She's a magic character, or a spy character, and in both cases she feels like she doesn't QUITE align with the concept at play. We wanted to use her, but didn't really have an outline for how her disparate story elements needed to work together to make her feel like a solid, contributory character for out project.

I think the core problem we latched onto as a starting point was that her connections to her mothers homeland were so sporadic they're kind of non-existent. We wanted her to actually grow up in her magical land... and after a few attempts, we realized that her homeland needed so much fleshing out, it actually made the most sense to make Nightshade actually be a part of a whole separate magic land. Myrra is the magic land associated with Nightmaster, her fellow Shadowpact member, and if you imagine that the two of them actually adventured together when she was young, and that he's now sort of an adoptive father figure of this refuge magical princess... all of a sudden you have so much more framework to work with. We did give her some history as an Argus agent, but didn't actually bring her into the Suicide Squad, because it always felt like we were having to work too hard to make that fit. With this story in place, I think we were able to construct a history for Eve that makes her feel way way more complete.

Art by George Kambadais

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