Phobia
29 years ago - Angela Hawkins is born, the daughter of Madame Rouge.
24 years ago - 5-year-old Angela watches her mother Madame Rouge & the Brotherhood of Evil battle the Doom Patrol. She is sent to live with her father in England
18 years ago - 11-year-old Angela's fear projection powers begin to manifest. Her father puts her into a Swedish boarding school, leaving her isolated.
15 years ago - 14-year-old Angela learns of the supposed death of her mother Madame Rouge. Her father dies in a mysterious accident and she is sent to a new French finishing school, unaware that the headmistress is her mother in disguise, and begins training to become an assassin, refining her powers.
9 years ago - 20 -year-old Angela fights the Teen Titans when they confront her school, but abandons the fight when she learns that the headmistress is her mother Madame Rouge in disguise.
7 years ago - 22-year-old Angela battles Hugh Dawkins. Her fear powers helping him confront his own sexuality.
4 years ago - 25-year-old Angela is brought into the Brotherhood of Evil by the Brain, who drugs her and Madame Rouge to control their reunion.
2 years ago - 27-year-old Angela is hired to assassinate Kate Spencer, but is defeated.
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Phobia's Comic HistoryPhobia debuted in New Teen Titans #14, along with several new members of the Brotherhood of Evil as the team was expanded to serve as enemies of the New Teen Titans. As is often the case when a whole bunch of characters are being added at once, They were really just a collection of costumes and corresponding superpowers, and for several characters they never really got more interesting than that.
Phobia, however, would begin to appear in lots of other stories as a stand alone villain, where her fear based-powers would actually do a lot of heavy lifting in exploring the personality of a variety of heroes. She earned her own backstory, such as it was; she developed her powers as a child, causing her parents to institutionalize her, leaving her outcast and eager to lash out at the world. If she seems a little incomplete, then you're not wrong. She's never really been a character designed to drive a plot on her own, but her position among the Brotherhood of Evil and her very specific and extremely useful powers make her a very useful character to include; we just have to figure out how. |
Our Phobia StorySimply put; we're making Phobia the daughter of Madame Rouge.
There are elements of precedent in place. We know that Madame Rouge did eventually have a daughter in cannon; Gemini, who basically had the same powers and costume. Perhaps more importantly, however, we know that as she currently exists, Phobias personality and motivation are heavily defined by the way her parents treated her. What we're doing then is adding to that relationship by making her mother a known character, and one of the most deliberately evil baddies in the DC universe, filling their relationship with deceit and twisted motivations. Then, once all the hidden truths of their relationship come to light, Phobia can step up and demonstratively choose exactly who she is. It might seem like something small, but it builds her up in ways she didn't have before. Then of course, she gets to be the same very scary, vey narratively useful character she's always been, challenging several different characters and letting us dig into their inner lives in a way that only the best villains do. |
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