Phantom Lady
29 years ago - Delilah Tyler is born in Cambridge, the daughter of human rights attorney Albert Tyler.
26 years ago - 3-year-old Delilah Tyler's mother dies of a bacterial infection while building low income homes in South America.
21 years ago - 8-year-old Delilah “Dee” Tyler is accepted into a young engineer's program.
18 years ago - 11-year-old Dee’s father is killed by Kobra assassins. She becomes extremely withdrawn and isolated, attending several different boarding schools in Europe, not fitting in anywhere.
16 years ago - 13-year-old Dee is accepted into the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres. Headmistress Sandra Knight befriends her and gives her access to her private workshop. Dee starts experimenting with Sandra’s Darklight Projectors.
15 years ago - 14-year-old Dee begins to excel at the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres espionage & unarmed combat training. Sandra Knight encourages her, giving her private training, but also insists that she continue to pursue her private engineering work.
13 years ago - 16-year-old Dee begins auditing classes at MIT, developing her new hologram technology. Despite having access to the MIT research labs, she continues to return to Université Notre Dame Des Ombres to work in Sandra Knight's workshop.
10 years ago - 19-year-old Dee earns a bachelor's from MIT in mechanical engineering. She does not pursue a graduate degree or present her hologram technology, instead developing it further in Sandra Knight's workshop.
8 years ago - 21-year-old Dee reveals her new hologram technology to Sandra Knight, which allows her to create a fully holographic alternate body to either wear or deploy, as well as the ability to holographically manipulate her surroundings. Learning of her intention to find her father’s killers and recognizing so much of herself in her friend, Sandra helps Dee develop her own Phantom Lady persona. She begins tracking, fighting, and disassembling Kobra factions without killing them, saving that for her father’s murderer.
7 years ago - 22-year-old Dee finds Weiss, the Kobra assassin responsible for the death of her father. While disassembling his Kobra faction to find him, Weiss tracks her back to Université Notre Dame Des Ombres and takes Sandra Knight hostage. Dee uses her hologram technology to trick Weiss into believing Sandra has escaped and defeated him as her classic Phantom Lady persona. Dee chooses not to kill him, thanking Sandra for helping her navigate her vengeance without losing herself.
6 years ago - 23-year-old Dee Tyler is asked by Sandra Knight to join the American Freedom Fighters under Director Bones. She meets Frankenstein.
4 years ago - 25-year-old Dee Tyler helps free Frankenstein when he is captured by Van Helsing, and helps him defeat Helsing’s werewolf brethren and the returning Count Dracula. She is almost mind-controlled to become Dracula’s bride, but is protected by Frank.
Phantom Lady is a classic comic character, and the original Phantom Lady, Sandra Knight, has a really long and well-established story, but she's not the only Phantom Lady in DC history. There have actually been four other DC Phantom Ladies, establishing a precedent of a modern-day version of the character... but we would argue that these characters have really focused on her status as a pinup character rather than making them an evolution on the legacy.
Our version of the modern Phantom Lady is very loosely based on the second Phantom Lady, Dee Tyler, but rather than use her (pretty bare-bones) story, we're going to draw heavily from a completely different character from a completely different comic from a completely different company... but the ideas at play fit the whole concept of Phantom Lady so perfectly I don't think anyone could possibly argue against them. I would love to hear what you think!
Our version of the modern Phantom Lady is very loosely based on the second Phantom Lady, Dee Tyler, but rather than use her (pretty bare-bones) story, we're going to draw heavily from a completely different character from a completely different comic from a completely different company... but the ideas at play fit the whole concept of Phantom Lady so perfectly I don't think anyone could possibly argue against them. I would love to hear what you think!
Phantom Lady's Comic HistoryFollowing the Crisis of Infinite Earths, DC was exploring new legacy versions of a lot of their classic older characters. Dee Tyler was introduced in her own six-issue story in Action Comics, which was an anthology series in 1989. She was written by Len Stazewski, and drawn by Chuck Austen, and while she does definitely have a story (she was a graduate of Sandra Knight's espionage college, and was trying to uncover a mystery involving the blackmail of her father, the US Attorney General), but I think it's fair to say that the main point of the character was her outfit. She was almost cartoonishly sexualized, but given the history of the character you could argue that that the design was actually weirdly honoring her legacy?
She would go on to make regular guest appearances in books all over the DC landscape; Flash, Wonder Woman, Starman, Doom Patrol... she was clearly a firmly established part of the tapestry of DC characters even if she never really evolved into a more complex character. Eventually she become a part of a new Freedom Fighters team just like her predecessor, but that whole team was murdered in 2006's Infinite Crisis. |
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Since our legacy Phantom Lady is going to be Dee Tyler, the subsequent versions of the character aren't incredibly relevant, but are at least worth looking at, if only so we can see some other takes on the concept. Shortly after Infinite Crisis, an entirely revamped version of the Freedom Fighters was created by Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray, including Stormy Knight, the new Phantom Lady. The entire team didn't really seem to acknowledge the prior existence of earlier versions of the characters at all, and Stormy was no different, basically just a revision of Sandra Knight's story in an updated costume.
Following the New 52, an entirely new version of Phantom Lady appeared in her own four-issue miniseries, again by Palmiotti and Gray. This was Jennifer Knight, another complete reimaging with no connection to earlier versions of the character and a much, much worse costume. Finally, there's actually a far more recent fifth version of Phantom Lady. A 2020 Freedom Fighters miniseries related to the new Multiversity series told the story set in the new Earth X, showing new versions of the classic team fighting victorious Nazis as resistance fighters. It's honestly a really great series, and the new Phantom Lady Sophia Becker fits its tone really well. |
Our Phantom Lady StoryFirst of all, we really wanted Dee to be a very different person from Sandra. While Sandra is a poised, elegant, intimidatingly gorgeous superspy/superhero, we imagine Dee to be a brilliant but very sullen, withdrawn, isolated kid dealing with the murder of her father. When she befriends Sandra Knight, the headmistress of her boarding school, and gets access to her secret I-used-to-be-a-superhero workshop, Dee gets to build an entirely new holographic technology that she will use for an entirely new take on Phantom Lady...
(Here's a quick spoiler warning: we are aggressively ripping off Paul Dini & Kenneth Rocafort's Madame Mirage, a really great comic that you should absolutely read before I ruin it for you.) Dee's appearance as Phantom Lady is entirely holographic. She is projecting that appearance around herself, but she can also project it AWAY from herself. The awkward idea that Phantom Lady's deliberate sexuality is meant as a distraction suddenly becomes way more functional when it's meant literally. We really like this fanart by deviant artist CHUBETO for our version of what the modern Phantom Lady looks like, but since she's a hologram she could easily change her costumes on the fly. To really drive the idea home, there's absolutely no reason for Dee to look like that at all when not in her holographic disguise. She could actually be a small blonde? |
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These are the two big updates to the core concept of Dee Tyler; an update in the way her powers work, leaning way more into using illusions as a weapon, and a dramatic rethink of Dee herself, both in her looks and her personality, making her a driven tech genius who has been given a way to channel her grief and anger by this amazing mentor figure. With that in place, we just needed to fill up her timeline with all the training and schooling she would undergo, and a really classic story of a young heroine setting out on a mission of revenge.
Of course, the eventual goal with this modern Phantom Lady would be to put her in the new Freedom Fighters. It makes sense that Sandra would recommend her protégé for the team, and for Director Bones to take her on at Sandra's say-so. The idea of her being this amazing stealth and espionage expert works great in the group... and we also decided we liked the idea of her befriending Frankenstein, and even included her in one of his madcap adventures. |
Getting this character where we want her is definitely a stretch, but we absolutely think that this is what an idealized version of a modern Phantom Lady looks like... an evolution of her powers, an actually functional application of her status as a pinup, and a celebration of her legacy in her relationship with the original heroine.
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