Sandra Knight
1919 - Sandra Knight is born in Virginia. The daughter of US Senator Henry Knight.
1921 - 5-year-old Sandra first meets her governess, Ms Pankhurst, who in addition to traditional subjects teaches her boxing, wrestling, jujitsu and savate learned as a suffragette in London.
1932 - 13-year-old Sandra first meets Professor Llewelyn Desmond, a friend of her father, who allows her to frequent his labs where she learns to make her own inventions.
1938 - 19-year-old Sandra saves her father from home-invading assassins, getting a taste for adventure. She invents her own espionage equipment, including Professor Davis’s Darklight Projectors, and uses deliberately distracting pinup costume as Phantom Lady.
1942 - 23-year-old Sandra has a brief affair with Will Everett when the Freedom Fighters work with the Justice Society.
1943 - 24-year-old Sandra and Iron Munro begin their romance as they serve together on the Freedom Fighters.
1945 - 26-year-old Sandra sacrificed herself to save Iron Munro from an temporal explosion while taking out Vandal Savage's Secret Laboratories with the Freedom Fighters.
57 years ago - 26-year-old Sandra Knight reenters the time stream, reappearing in Cold War West Germany. She returns to Virginia, taking over the trusts of her family fortune and spending time acclimatizing herself to the future.
55 years ago - 28-year-old Sandra begins working as an operative for Argus.
46 years ago - 37-year-old Sandra helps establish the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres, a finishing school & clandestine training program for young women.
35 years ago - 48-year-old Sandra retires as a government operative & becomes the headmistress of the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres.
31 years ago - 52-year-old Sandra first has Amanda Waller as a student in the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres.
23 years ago - 60-year-old Sandra helps found Checkmate, a secret, extra-governmental spy organization. She reconnects with Iron Munro when he consults with the organization. Amanda Waller becomes one of her best operatives.
19 years ago - 64-year-old Sandra intervenes in the incarceration of Bones after he turns himself in. Seeing his intention to redeem himself, she helps him apply for suspended sentencing to work as an asset for the DEO.
16 years ago - 67-year-old Sandra befriends Dee Tyler, a new student at Université Notre Dame Des Ombres. Seeing her isolation and recognizing her peculiar intellect, she reveals her secret workshop and encourages her to use it.
15 years ago - 68-year-old Sandra gives private training in espionage & unarmed combat to Dee Tyler, but insists that she continue to pursue her private engineering work.
14 years ago - 69-year-old Sandra Knight asks Iron Munro to join Amanda Waller's new government-controlled Freedom Fighters when Waller leaves Checkmate to become tactical director of Argus.
13 years ago - 70-year-old Sandra Knight steps down as operational head of Checkmate when their international funding is reduced in response to the global profile of Kobra suddenly dropping.
11 years ago - 72-year-old Sandra Knight is targeted by Kobra by planting an assassin among the students of Université Notre Dame Des Ombres. They are found out and stopped by an undercover Jimmy Olsen.
8 years ago - 75-year-old Sandra Knight discovers Dee Tyler's new holographic technology. Learning of her intention to find her father’s killers and recognizing so much of herself in her friend, Sandra helps Dee develop her own Phantom Lady persona.
7 years ago - 76-year-old Sandra Knight is taken hostage in the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres by Weiss, the Kobra assassin that killed Dee Tyler's father. Dee uses her hologram technology to trick Weiss into believing Sandra has escaped and defeated him as her classic Phantom Lady persona. Dee chooses not to kill him, thanking Sandra for helping her navigate her vengeance without losing herself.
6 years ago - 77-year-old Sandra orchestrates a congressional oversight hearing over the Quarac Bombing, resulting in 41-year-old Amanda Waller loses her position as tactical director of Argus. She supports Bones as the new director of the DEO and recommends that he brings Dee Tyler into the Freedom Fighters.
now - 83-year-old Sandra Knight meets Kate Spencer. She influences Director Bones to bring her into the Freedom Fighters.
Following the history of Phantom Lady is deceptively complex. Her role in the history of DC seems to be simple enough, but to understand all the influences that go into this character you really do need to look into her publication history outside of DC, and that is just an absolute iceberg. I legitimately tried to keep a running record of her appearances, and eventually I just ran out of steam. It's THAT deep.
This presents a particular challenge in trying to tell her story. Sandra Knight has a very well-established narrative arc in DC, and we have gone on to use her even more, so our focus should really be on that, but her non-DC appearances are at least passively relevant, and trying to summarize so much content is HARD. Wish me luck...
This presents a particular challenge in trying to tell her story. Sandra Knight has a very well-established narrative arc in DC, and we have gone on to use her even more, so our focus should really be on that, but her non-DC appearances are at least passively relevant, and trying to summarize so much content is HARD. Wish me luck...
Sandra Knight's Comic HistoryPhantom Lady debuted, along with lots of the other classic Quality Comics characters, in issue #1 of Police Comics in 1942. The debutant daughter of a senator, Sandra Knight was a pretty classic comic book hero, finding a mysterious, possibly criminal situation and diving into it in her flashy costume, using a surprising amount of stealth and her neat black flashlight letting her make darkness a weapon. She showed up in the first 23 issues of Police Comics (including a five issue crossover with the Spider Widow in Feature Comics) but essentially stopped appearing within that first year.
The Phantom Lady features were created for Quality Comics by the Eisner & Iger Studio. This was their business model, to create features for hire for other companies to publish. Apparently, a few years later, Jerry Iger seemed to just decide that he was the owner of the character, not Quality Comics, and licensed her to Fox Features Comics. This is a key moment in the character's history, essentially splitting her history into two separate paths. |
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For our purposes, the Fox Features version of Phantom Lady is really only relevant because of her thematic influence on the eventual DC character, but we should at least briefly talk about her. She got her own self-titled series in 1947, where she quickly became one of the best examples of Fox's "good girl" comics... basically comics that featured scantily clad, busty ladies. These ranged in overall quality quite a bit, but these were done by Matt Baker. a classic artist of the era known for his good girl art (also the first known African American comic artist). As problematic as this style of comic might be, it IS art, and one could even go so far as to suggest that there is a feminist value in pinup art inasmuch as its often also a depiction of women owning their strength and sexuality? This is a larger debate, of course, but Phantom Lady is absolutely at the center of it as one of the most prominent pinup character superheroes of her era.
This of course also means that she was a target for backlash. Phantom Lady #17 (pictured here) was particularly singled out in the debates that eventually led to the creation of the Comic Code. The character was cleaned up to meet the Code standards, and as one might expect, lost a lot of her popularity. She did, however, continue to appear; the somewhat fuzzy nature of her rights allowing other companies to use her in the decades to come. She appeared in comics by Ajax-Farrell, Bell Comics, AC Comics, Dynamite... even Image. To this day, the blue-costumed pinup version of Phantom Lady is generally considered to be available for public domain use. |
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It's right in the middle of all of this that DC came into the picture. They actually bought the catalog of Quality Comics characters back in the 50s, but had at that point only used the Blackhawks and Plastic Man. in 1973, issue #107 of Justice League of America told one of their crossover stories taking them to another Earth. This time it was Earth-X, an earth where the Nazis had won WWII, and we're introduced to a new team of heroes, the Freedom Fighters, built from classic, unused Quality Comics characters.
Sandra's appearance here is really interesting. Since the question of ownership of Phantom Lady between Quality and Fox was never resolved, there's nothing specifically saying that Sandra was included in the catalog of characters DC purchased, but also nothing saying it DIDN'T. DC was, in essence, just one more comic publisher making their version of this long-standing "public domain" character, just with a slightly more plausible excuse. |
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To differentiate their version of the character, DC's Sandra was deliberately set up as a reappearance of the original yellow-costumed Quality character, rather than an interpretation of the blue-costumed Fox version... but they also clearly intended to reference the the shape of the Fox costume, which at that point was probably the most well-known thing about the character.
The Freedom Fighters had their own series for a time, and also showed up in Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron (where he suggested that they were actually originally from Earth 2, and then transitioned to Earth X). The Crisis of Infinite Earths wiped away the concept of the multiverse, meaning that Sandra Knight and the rest of the Freedom Fighters were now all World War II era characters. This transition worked out better for some characters than others, but Sandra actually came through it more or less intact. She's an older woman in the modern day, but played roles in many series over the years that establish her as a firmly established part of the DC timeline. |
Our Sandra Knight StoryAll that said, I'd say that Phantom Lady's basic role in the structure of our story is pretty self-explanatory. She's the daughter of a US Senator who decided to create a deliberately sexy costume for herself to fight crime pre-World War II, using a darklight device as a weapon, and then becomes a member of the Freedom Fighters during the war, and regularly gets painted on the side of allied planes. That's easy.
There's a few things we can do in this era to refine her character a little. When reading a description of her character on the DC Wiki, I misread a sentence stating that she uses gadgets controlling light to just say that she uses gadgets, period, and something about that just immediately felt like it opened the character up. She does a surprising amount of sneaking in the classic Quality comics. She's an espionage character. More than just her Darklight projectors, she should make all sorts of spy gadgets for herself. We invented teachers that can impart all sorts of skills that the incredibly capable young Sandra Knight could use to become a freelance spy and superhero, blending the two into a really unique character that could operate during wartime. |
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Of course, setting her up as an expert spy makes even more sense given some of the roles she fills in modern times. In the comic, her role as the Dean of a college that teaches espionage skills was a part of the backstory for her successor, Dee Tyler, but it really sets up the idea of Sandra becoming an elder stateswoman in the world of international espionage. We made her one of the only survivors of the Freedom Fighters, gave her a small temporal event to move her between the timelines, and then gave her an absolutely fantastic long life as one of the most vital characters in the world of spies and covert organizations. She worked for Argus, has a long history of antagonism with Amanda Waller, helped recruit Director Bones, helped found Checkmate, created and became the headmistress for the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres... and perhaps most importantly, she befriended Dee Tyler as a young woman, helping her foster her engineering genius and to become a new, modern Phantom Lady.
The character of Phantom Lady is an unbelievably important character in the history of comics in general... but I think we've really doubled down to make Sandra Knight herself a hugely important part of our timeline in particular. None of this means she's any less of a classic pinup figure, it just really leans into the idea that you can do that and still be an awesome character. |