Queen Bee

36 years ago - Zazzala is hatched, a new Queen. She is brought to Earth as a new planet to start a new Hive. Her drone attendees kill the newborn princess of Bialya and put Zazzala in her place.

35 years ago - 1-year-old Zazzala's drone retainers are killed by Damian Darhk who steals her ship and technology, unknowingly leaving her stranded and alone.

26 years ago - 10-year-old Zazzala's phermone abilities manifest. She can't control her adopted mother, so she kills her.

20 years ago - 16-year-old Zazzala's debutante celebration names her the official Crown Princess of Bialya.

15 years ago - 21-year-old Zazzala engineers the death of her adopted father, becoming the Queen of Bialya. She uses her phermone abilities to exert control of her population.

11 years ago - 25-year-old Zazzala's expanding control over her surrounding countries becomes so overt it attracts the attention of the Justice League. She exert control over them, but is stopped by the female members of the League. Exposed as an alien, Zazzala escapes to space, searching for her birth hive.

10 years ago - 26-year-old Zazzala finds her former hive decimated after the death of their queen. She begins rebuilding.

1 year ago - 35-year-old Zazzala is contacted by Lex Luthor using the technology left behind when she fled Earth. She returns, having undergone metamorphosis into a full-grown queen. She agrees to assist the Injustice Gang in exchange for full access to Earth's population to serve as drones. She is again stranded on Earth after the battle of Mageddon. She finds the remains of her own technology among the abandoned H.I.V.E. facilities and begins to rebuild, using their resources to help Gorilla Grodd build the Legion of Doom.

Queen Bee is an interesting case study in the different ways a character can undergo change across the history of DC. While she's a well-known character NOW, she was definitely a lower-tier character for much of her early existence. This means that she saw a complete redesign after the Crisis of Infinite Earths, which gives us two totally different takes on the character, neither of which ever really did much.

Then we see two MORE takes on the character, each an evolution of the ones that came before, each vast improvements on the concept, and each happening in totally different mediums. It makes her a fun exercise for our project to work out exactly what we want her to be.

Queen Bee's Comic History

Queen Zazzala of the Bee World of Korll debuted in issue #23 of Justice League of America in 1963. It followed a pretty familiar story format for the Justice League; where certain members go to stop some crimes in progress by the villains cronies, fall under control of the baddie who then uses some form of coersion to get them to perform a task, and then in the end they oursmart the villain and return to their headquarters for Snapper Carr to say something insufferable.

In this case, Queen Bee was just as advertised; the Queen of a Bee-like alien race that was looking for a hidden immortality elixer. This basic story shape was used for a lot of these classic Justice League enemies, and notably doesn't really give them much space to actually do anything, so while Queen Bee would go on to appear in a few more Justice League stories, or to show up in the odd anthology story here or there, she mostly dissappeared into the history of DC, without having really made that lasting an effect.

After the Crisis of Infinite Earths in 1985 lots of classic DC characters were brought out of a grab bag of character concepts to be heavily re-imagined in entirely new roles. The post-crisis take on Queen Bee was so drastically different she shared absolutely nothing with the original character beyond her name. Appearing in the various Justice League series published in the late 80's, the new Queen Bee was the Queen of a middle eastern country called Bialya, and was basically just a earthbound criminal threat. This version of the character had basically no impact and was gone even faster than the original version, although she does make a return to relevance that we'll get to.

With neither versions of the character ever really making that much of a mark, you essentially didn't see references to Queen Bee again until Morrisons' JLA in 1999. The series already heavily featured massive revisions of classic League villains, and as some of the biggest new characters were coming together in the build up to Morrison's climactic battle we were suddenly introduced to a fully re-imagined take on the original alien Queen Bee. Pushing the concept all the way to 11, we meet a far more alien, far more powerful take on Zazzala, now leading massive fleets of her drone warriors, and able to control huge swaths of the population to build her huge hive-like structures. She was immediately a huge success, eventually connected with the remains of the Titan-villains H.I.V.E. and appearing all over DC's landscape for the rest of the decade before the New 52. There have been versions of the character that have appeared since, but none that have been quite as impressive as this take on this now-classic League Villain.

Our Queen Bee Story

As we said earlier, the earthborn version of Zazzala from the post-crisis era of the Justice League did see a brief return to prominence. The animated Young Justice series used this take on the character as one of it's most consistently recurring villains both in the show itself and in it's spinoff media. This series was made entirely after the introduction of Morrison's incredibly successful souped-up alien queen, so I could't tell you why they chose to go this way, but this is a great example of just how much ground you can make up narrativelyby having a solid design for a character and giving them appropriate narrative weight. A character that seemed pretty passive and forgettable in the comics was now way more menacing; using her pheremone powers to control the men around her and ultimately her entire country.

Before this animated version of the character, we probably would have ignored the earthborn version of Queen Bee entirely, but since she exists and works so well here, we wanted to find a way to make our version of the character be a mix of both versions.

To do this, we invented the idea that Zazzala is essentially a foundling alien Queen. Her species actually plants new queens on new planets to use her pheremone powers to control the population and build a new hive, but her drone retainers were actually killed by Damien Darhk, leaving her all alone. She grew up as a princess on Earth, and it is in this form that she originally comes up against the Justice League and is forced to flee the planet.

Having found her original hive and metamorphizing into a full-grown Queen, we next see her as she is called to Earth by Luthor to be part of his Injustice Gang in the build up to the battle of Mageddon.

It's in spots like this where we really see how much building this timeline does for us, because we aren't beholden to one version of the character. We can allow for the fact that she can grow from one form into another, and give us a whole new style of baddie. Coming up she's going to be a great villian in some upcoming story as the new head of H.I.V.E. I wonder who she should go up against?

Related Characters