Runaway
24 years ago - Cindy Reynolds is born the daughter of Juni Reynolds, a Romani homo-magi artist.
18 years ago - 6-year-old Cindy's mother begins to teach her some basic spellcraft.
11 years ago - 13-year-old Cindy meets her father, an American-born merchant sailor when he rekindles the relationship with her mother. His drinking leads to a violent outburst that kills her mother, the trauma triggering Cindy's latent homo-magi abilities. She flees to Star City where she uses her powers to remain hidden, eventually befriending Cisco Ramon who helps her make a home there.
10 years ago - 14-year-old Cindy & Cisco Ramon meet Roy Harper and begin to follow his lead, using their powers to prevent street level crime and help the neighborhood.
9 years ago - 15-year-old Cindy Reynolds joins Roy Harper's new team the Outlaws. They try to go up against William Tockman but are systematically picked apart. Cindy reveals herself to try to save Cisco Ramon, and is killed.
The members of the infamous Detroit Era Justice League got a pretty bad shake. This era is generally not remembered fondly, but for the time, within the context of the series, these characters were all very competent executions of their concepts, even if those concepts were pretty dated and silly. Gerry Conway is very good at what he does, and for people willing to go back and actually read these comics they are absolutely worth their time.
That said, these characters had a pretty limited impact on the rest of the DC landscape, and when putting together our project is was pretty clear that they simply weren't necessary. That is, at least, until we developed our version of the team the Outlaws, and discovered an absolutely perfect role for Detroit Leaguers Cindy Reynolds and Cisco Ramon. We got to develop our versions of them, and we hope you enjoy them!
That said, these characters had a pretty limited impact on the rest of the DC landscape, and when putting together our project is was pretty clear that they simply weren't necessary. That is, at least, until we developed our version of the team the Outlaws, and discovered an absolutely perfect role for Detroit Leaguers Cindy Reynolds and Cisco Ramon. We got to develop our versions of them, and we hope you enjoy them!
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Cindy's Comic HistoryCindy Reynolds was one of the brand-new teenage hereos introduced to the Justice League in 1984 in an effort to revitalize the team's readership, since at the time all the best-selling superhero team books were made up of teenage characters. Cindy debuted with the other new characters in DC Sampler #2, which contained samples of upcoming comics ranging from Warlord to Atari Force, but of course her actual first appearance was in Justice League of America Annual #2 when writer Gerry Conway actually introduced his new team.
Cindy was, as advertised, a teenager. She had run away from home thanks to some animosity with her parents, and was using her metahuman power to turn invisible to live on the street... the street that just happened to become the new headquarters of the more streetwise new version of the League. By the end of the run she was one of the few new members to actually survive the end of the League, and returned to her parents, patching things up. She would later appear in the Martian Manhunter led Justice League Task Force, where she became a pseudo daughter for J'onn... and would appear again years later as a sometimes-member of the Birds of Prey, where her powers expanded to allow her to make other people and objects (even vehicles) invisible, and even display some precognative abilities. |
Her Name is...So let's just get this out of the way... Cindy's superhero name was, and continues to be, an ethnic slur. "Gypsy" is a commonly used slur against Romani, or Roma, people. I'm treading lightly here, because I'm not a linguist or any sort of expert in Roma culture, but according to the internet the word was actually rejected in 1971 by the first World Romani Congress because of its negative connotations of illegality and other-ness.
So right off the bat, even though you could argue that most people are pretty ignorant that the word is a slur, it's pretty important that we move away from using it, particularly as the superhero name for a character all about sneaking around. We kept the idea that Cindy is of Romani descent because we didn't want to lose that, and can even embrace some ACTUAL elements of her culture in her costuming, but we're changing her name to Runaway, which does the exact same job of illustrating her role as the team thief without disparaging an entire people. |
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Our Runaway StoryCindy's whole deal when she appeared regularly was that she had run away from home, but the comic never seemed to want to depict her home life that tragically. In the end, she just went home again without much trouble. You got the sense that she really didn't have much to run away from; and that she was really just being a melodramatic teenager. For our take on her, if she's going to be all about having run away from home, we wanted to lean into it and give her an actual angsty background, having her long absent father return to her life and kill her mother in a fit of anger.
We also made some changes to the nature of her powers. In the comics she's a "metahuman", which is essentially DC's version of Marvel's mutants. Given that her vibe (no pun intented) has always felt more distinctly magical, it is an easy change to make her homo-magi instead, and have her invisibility powers be spell-based. Finally... we're including Cindy in the first place for a very particular role. Roy Harper's street-level team of young heroes the Outlaws starts from a very good place, with characters like Cindy eager to help him... but unfortunately the team, and Cindy, meet a tragic end. |