Phillip Sylvain
59 years ago - Phillip Sylvian is born.
51 years ago - 8-year-old Sylvian meets Susan Linden, the odd girl next door. They become inseparable friends.
45 years ago - 14-year-old Sylvian builds his garden lab with help from Susan Linden.
42 years ago - 17-year-old Sylvian helps Susan Linden run away from home to escape her father.
41 years ago - 18-year-old Sylvian goes to college to study botany.
37 years ago - 22-year-old Sylvian begins grad school.
34 years ago - 25-year-old Sylvian earns his masters & doctorate simultaneously for his work in Adaptive Plant Morphology, his work revolutionizing the field..
32 years ago - 27-year-old Sylvian has Jason Woodrue as a student.
30 years ago - 29-year-old Sylvian reconnects with Susan Linden-Thorne when she leaves her husband. He hires her as the lab assistant for his new private labs.
28 years ago - 31-year-old Sylvian finds Susan Linden-Thorne after she is shot. Unable to save her, he merges her biology and memories with his plant hybrids, allowing him to grow a new body for her. He agrees to help her use her new abilities as Black Orchid.
18 years ago - 41-year-old Sylvian is killed by Tobias Whale's men when they burn his laboratories.
Black Orchid is a character that's been a part of the DC mythology for some time, but there's really only one story she's appeared in that is utterly foundational to the character, and it's really fascinating just how much that story takes that character apart and puts her back together in such a short time... and a big part of what makes that brief but elegant story is the introduction of Sylvian.
Phillip Sylvian's StoryWhen Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean created their first work with DC. they were clearly working off a template created by their contemporary Alan Moore over in Swamp Thing, quickly deconstruction their titular hero as a way to recontextualize her story, but doing so in a world that can include some real tragedy, as well as some really touching acts of love. All of this is perhaps best exemplified with the introduction of Black Orchid's sort of lover, sort of father, Phillip Sylvian.
We meet Sylvian, a contemporary of other plant hybridization specialists like Alec Holland, as he delicately helps one of his newly awakened plant clones come to understand who she is. We discover that the original Black Orchid was a hybrid clone of Susan Linden, a woman he has selflessly loved his entire life, whose genetic material he used after her death so that she could live on. There are so many ways the relationship between Phillip and the original Susan or any of the hybrid clones could have been unbalanced or problematic, but Gaiman manages to create something really uncomplicated and sweet. He is, very simply, a good person. We are changing very little about Sylvian in our timeline. Because of the relative ages involved, he's actually not going to be a contemporary of Alec Holland and fellow student of Jason Woodrue, but instead will be the man responsible for developing the Plant Hybridization theories that lead to Woodrue's work, and then later to Holland and Pamela Isley. Other than that, his story is pretty much identical; He's a good guy, who uses his scientific expertise and his chaste love for this woman who has lived a life running from men trying to hurt her to help create a hero who stood up for women like herself. |
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