Phantom Lady
1919 - Sandra Knight is born.
1932 - 13-year-old Sandra attends a European finishing school where she studies Savate.
1938 - 19-year-old Sandra returns home & saves her father from a kidnapping. She starts using her suitor's "dark light projector" as a weapon, becoming a deliberately sexy pinup hero.
1945 - 26-year-old Sandra & Iron Munro are flung forward into time in a temporal explosion that killed the rest of the Freedom Fighters while taking out Vandal Savage's Secret Labratories.
57 years ago - 26-year-old Sandra reappears, and stays with Iron Munro while they attempt to rebuild their lives.
55 years ago - 28-year-old Sandra leaves Iron Munro when she realizes that she is pregnant. She gives up her son Walter to adoption & begins working as an operative for Argus.
46 years ago - 37-year-old Sandra helps to establish the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres, a finishing school & clandestine training program for young women.
35 years ago - 48-year-old Sandra retires as a government operative & becomes the headmistress of the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres.
31 years ago - 52-year-old Sandra has Amanda Waller as a student in the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres.
23 years ago - 63-year-old Sandra helps found Checkmate, a secret, extra-governmental spy organization. She reunites with Iron Munro when he consults with Checkmate. Amanda Waller becomes one of her best operatives.
16 years ago - 67-year-old Sandra befriends Dee Tyler, a new student at Université Notre Dame Des Ombres, and encourages her to work with her Dark Light Projectors.
14 years ago - 69-year-old Sandra's trust is broken by Amanda Waller, who leaves Checkmate for a tactical director position in Argus. She has Iron Munro join Waller's new government-controlled Freedom Fighters.
13 years ago - 70-year-old Sandra's credibility is undermined when Kobra deliberately lowers it's global profile in response to Amanda Waller leaving Checkmate to assume leadership of Argus.
9 years ago - 74-year-old Sandra takes the students of Madame Rouge's exposed secret assassin academy into the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres.
8 years ago - 75-year-old Sandra helps Dee Tyler craft her new Phantom Girl identity when she makes a major break thru with her hardlight projectors.
6 years ago - 77-year-old Sandra orchestrates a congressional oversight hearing over the Quarac Bombing, resulting in 41-year-old Amanda Waller loses her poistion as tactical director of Argus.
now - 83-year-old Sandra & Iron Munro meet their granddaughter Kate Spencer & her son Ramsey. They bring Kate into the Freedom Fighters.
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Phantom Lady is a bit of a challenge as characters go, because she was very deliberately designed as a pin-up character. Sure, other characters like Black Canary might have a pin-up ELEMENT in their design, but Sandra Knight was very deliberately designed to be airbrushed onto the side of an allied bomber. The overt sexuality of her early appearances were actually pretty controversial, especially after Quality Comics stopped publishing her and something called "Fox Features" started doing a bunch of unlicensed books with her. They took over the numbering of the original books, gave her a blue even skimpier costume, and really mucked up the question as to who owned the rights to her. Of course, that was all cleared up once DC acquired the Quality characters (DC has always been the proverbial bull in the china shop when it comes to litigating character rights.)
We're not even going to try to dispute Sandra's role as a pin-up girl. It's part of the DNA of the character. A quick google image search for Phantom Lady will make that immediately evident, but we don't recommend you do it where anyone can see you. Instead, we'll simple make that be part of her original intention as a hero. A young, worldly woman in wartime Europe COULD decide that she wants to be this sort of hero, and so we'll simply have to decide that she did just that. |
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Moving forward from her wartime career, we get into what was for us one of the most complex exercises in breaching out timelines. As a WW2 era character, along with the rest of the original Freedom Fighters, she exists in our "past" timeline... But she obviously has quite a bit of business in our current timeline as well. We are determined to not have anyone cross over between the timelines without some sort of temporal event. In this case, it's the detonation of the Nazi temporal research facility that claims the lives of the rest of the Freedom Fighters but flings Sandra and iron Munro into the future. This is by far the shortest temporal jump any of our characters have made so far. At the time of this writing, a jump from "1945" to "57 years ago" is only 14 years. Obviously that gap will get larger as time goes on, which is the entire point of this exercise.
Meanwhile, we've elaborated heavily on Sandra's later career. The finishing school she founds becomes a huge part of several character's stories, not the least of which is Suicide Squad founder Amanda Waller. We've also tied her heavily into the foundation of Checkmate, one of the large spy organizations in DC. All of this makes her a virtual living legend by the time her legacy as Phantom Lady is passed on to Dee Tyler, a character we're taking a lot of liberties with, but with good reason: In the comics, Dee Tyler is basically a carbon copy of Sandra Knight. By giving her a new character concept, we're letting Sandra be a unique and unmistakable part of the building blocks of DC. |