Queen Clea
1911 - Clea is born, the only child of the regents of Venturia, a sub-nation of Atlantis and home of the Atlantean sorceresses.
1928 - 17-year-old Clea murders her parents, the regents of Venturia, establishing herself as the new ruler.
1934 - 23-year-old Clea declares herself Queen, bringing the sorceresses of Venturia under her control.
1937 - 26-year-old Clea and the sorceresses of Venturia lead a coup against the throne of Atlantis, claiming it for her own and imprisoning the young Princess Eeras. She outlaws both science and religion, enslaving dissenters and pitting them against each other in gladiatorial combat as she takes the outlying Atlantean kingdoms.
1940 - 29-year-old Clea's Atlantean forces attack an American submarine. Steve Trevor & Hippolyta investigate, and discover the ongoing coup for the Atlantean throne. Hippolyta frees the imprisoned Princess Eeras and helps her retake the Atlantean Throne. She is placed under house arrest as an imprisoned royal.
1943 - 32-year-old Clea finds a way to steal the Trident of Poseidon. She begins attacking Naval vessels, enslaving soldiers and building her own army to assault Atlantis. Hippolyta is able to stop her along with the Justice Society. Clea dies, & the entire Atlantean nation of Venturia is lost, along with the Trident of Posiedon.
Queen Clea is an interesting inclusion in our project, because she's actually the first character we've ever created, removed, and then put BACK in again. Our first take on Clea was an attempt at a villain for the modern Wonder Woman. She was part of a rogue state of Atlanteans, and wound up also serving as an enemy for Aquaman. We originally thought that tieing her into modern-day Atlantis and to both heroes made her a compelling inclusion, but in the end it was just too complicated with too little payoff, so she was taken out of our timeline.
It was some time later that this take on the character came together for us, and hopefully you can see why we gravitated toward this idea.
It was some time later that this take on the character came together for us, and hopefully you can see why we gravitated toward this idea.
Queen Clea's Comic HistoryQueen Clea appeared for the first time in issue #8 of the classic William Moulton Marston Wonder Woman in 1944, making her part of the original tales of the character. She was a queen of one of the warring nations of Atlantis, which was a whole subterranean continent under the Atlantic Ocean. This predates the whole concept of a shared continuity, so even though Aquaman had been around for a few years there was nothing weird about Wonder Woman's version of Atlantis being completely different.
Clea was a part of Marston's vast world-building. By herself, she wasn't exactly a formidable opponent like Giganta or Cheetah, but she was the crux of some classic Wonder Woman stories full of enslaved men & kingdoms of warrior women. This is the stuff that really made Marston's stories tick. She made a total of four golden age appearances, including as a member of the very first team-up of supervillains ever; Villainy Incorporated. |
No one has ever really managed to recapture the particular feminist/bondage erotica slant of Marston's classic Wonder Woman stories, so characters like Queen Clea didn't fit in anywhere else. She made one more appearance in the mid seventies in an issue of Justice League, but other than reprints or references to Villainy Incorporated, that was pretty much it.
In 2002, Phil Jimenez introduced a new version of Villainy Inc during his run on Wonder Woman. At this point it was canon that Hippolyta had been Wonder Woman back in the 40's, so this new story established that Clea was an enemy of hers. It was a short story, less than ten issues, but actually accounts for the bulk of Clea's total appearances. Her only other appearance was in Allan Heinberg's redesign of Wonder Woman's mythology in 2006 in the post-infinite crisis series as part of a group of vintage villains. |
Our Queen Clea StoryJimenez's 2002 story and the introduction of the idea that Clea was actually Hippolyta's enemy rather than Diana's is definitely something we should have considered from the beginning. The entire premise of Hippolyta's turn as Wonder Woman in the past works really well, but it's made way more natural by giving her classic villains like this.
If anything, the thing that slowed us down was the fact that she comes from a completely different take on Atlantis than the one understood to exist in DC, which is kind of a big deal. The solution was actually in the fact that her whole story happens before any of the social upheaval in Atlantis that leads to Ocean Master's coup. He's empowered by religious zealots who persecute Atlantean magic users, so it actually works really well to suggest that Atlantis had recently undergone an earlier coup by magic-wielders. We also get to include an earlier appearance of the Trident of Poseidon, which is pretty cool. It does get a LITTLE weird that Clea needs to be a water-breather if we want her to actually be from Atlantis as we now know it, but her people's use of Atlantean magic can explain her ability to breath on the surface. In the end she's a great addition to our story that makes the world more interesting. |