Sprout
12 years ago - Tefé Holland is born, the daughter of Alec & Abigail Holland among the Parliament of trees, a hybrid human/plant elemental.
7 years ago - 5- year-old Tefé is contacted by Anton Arcane, who attempts to claim influence over her. Her father Swamp Thing battles Arcane within the Earth for influence over her, but she ultimately rejects the rot when it proves too limited for her.
Vertigo properties are very much their own thing. Yes, they're peripherally in the same world as the rest of the DC characters, but those connections are hazy at best. Batman and Superman can obviously pop into each other's worlds at any time, but there needs to be a LOT of thought put into whether or not Morphius or John Constantine are going to appear with the Justice Society.
That said, sometimes as we develop our project we come across a Vertigo character that does something really interesting for us. We know this is a departure from their comic story, and I doubt any of us would argue that this version of the character is BETTER than the comic one, but those comics still exist. This is just a fun alternate take that we can use in our timeline. Tell us what you think!
That said, sometimes as we develop our project we come across a Vertigo character that does something really interesting for us. We know this is a departure from their comic story, and I doubt any of us would argue that this version of the character is BETTER than the comic one, but those comics still exist. This is just a fun alternate take that we can use in our timeline. Tell us what you think!
Tefé's Comic HistoryTechnically, Tefé first appeared in issue #65 of Swamp Thing, but at the time she wasn't yet a person. She was instead "Sprout", a seed of a potential new god of vegetation to take the place of Swamp Thing, who the Parliament of Trees had thought dead... which might sound confusing in any other comics, but Swamp Thing has always been it's very own world. This was a story by Rick Veitch, who took over the book after the departure of the Mad Wizard Alan Moore. I am going to have to breeze over a LOT here; one of the best parts of these classic Swamp Thing comics is their willingness to really slow-burn on details and let you get lost in it all.
Basically... In order to give Sprout life without a human host having to die, Swamp Thing and his wife Abigail planned to have it as their child. Swamp Thing possessed the body of John Constantine in order to impregnate Abby, and the comic basically depicted her pregnancy and the childhood of their infant daughter Tefé (named after the river leading to the Parliament of Trees) in real-time. Tefé was born an avatar of both the Green and the Red, an elemental of both Vegetation and Flesh, making her essentially a living god. |
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Of course, this is a Vertigo comic, so it gets way weirder. At the time of Tefé's conception, Constantine's blood was tainted by the blood of the Demon Nergal, so Tefé had a corrupted soul and grew to be completely absent any human empathy, guilty of multiple brutal murders. The series largely became about trying to get this new elemental goddess to develop a sense of morality.
This culminated in the 2000 Swamp Thing series that famously barely featured Swamp Thing, and instead featured the adventures of Tefé as a young woman traveling across the country. The book is probably best known for being among the early works of Brian K. Vaughan. In fact, after 20 issues, this series seemed to rush to conclude and was immediately replaced on the Vertigo imprint by Vaughan's groundbreaking series Y the Last Man. It was a wild series to follow, a sort of classic American road story featuring a character that was at once loveable and terrifying. Tefé wasn't meant to be a sympathetic lead; in fact, there were times you could read her as a borderline psychopath, but that was part of her charm. |
Our Tefé StoryWe're deliberately not trying to reproduce the original Swamp Thing comics, so there are a few changes that are going to affect just who and what Tefé is. Our new story doesn't actually include the stranger parts of her conception; she's simply the biological daughter of a human mother and plant god. We'd like her slow discovery of her own capacity for morality to play out against the larger backdrop of DC's world of superheroes, so we should try to tie her into the world around her a little more.
Interestingly, there's actually a strange little nugget of online weirdness that sets up some precedent for this. In a 2013 post on the blog of artist Ilias Kyriazis, he details a pitch for a new Doom Patrol series with writer Scott Lobdell that never happened. It's interesting enough, although most of the characters included seemed to be a little left of their normal characterization, Tefé included. But oddly, this alternate take on her actually presents her as someone who might fit really well into a particular corner of our world. |
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Sprout & The Teen TitansOur future team of Teen Titans is all built around re-imagining the archetypes of the classic Marv Wolfman & George Perez New Teen Titans, with the intention of creating different character dynamics that help explore what it means for the new Robin, Damian Wayne, to become a hero.
I don't imagine that our version of Tefé will have the same unlimited powers as her comic version, and will also probably have a greater sense of right and wrong, having been raised in real-time by her mother and father, who are unmistakably good people even if the world they occupy is composed by a lot of moral grey area. The fact is; she's an adolescent elemental of vegetation and flesh. She's very likely immortal. Her personal morality is going to be strange, at best. There's a great tradition of strange, dangerous women in these classic Titans comics, and if Tefé chooses to become Sprout and join the Titans, she's going to be at the core of some VERY strange stories. |