Squire
21 years ago - Beryl Hutchinson is born to a working class single mother.
11 years ago - 10-year-old Beryl starts building her own machine lab.
8 years ago - 13-year-old Beryl saves Cyril Sheldrake's life and helps him start to rebuild, inspiring him to become the new Knight while she starts training as Squire.
4 years ago - 17-year-old Beryl joins the Global Guardians with Cyril.
Squire is a very fun character, which is remarkable given how her creation happened largely by accident. Knight and Squire were an old spin-off of Batman and Robin, just a toss off idea from the wacky old Batman comics of the fifties. A new version of them appeared in the lineup of Grant Morrison's Ultramarine Corp in a single image during his JLA run, with the new Squire suddenly being depicted as a female sidekick. This team was fleshed out in a arc of JLA Classified drawn by Ed Macguinness, and suddenly the twosome looked absolutely awesome.
As their story was fleshed out, They developed a fascinating backstory. The son of the original Knight, Cyril almost lost everything when his father died. Beryl was a working class girl that found the despondent aristocrat and dragged him up by his bootstraps. It's such a cool dynamic, to see a partnership between two characters built on that sort of shared experience creating a fresh and .engaging dynamic between them |
There's also something decidedly British about the class disparity between the two of them. As American readers, we don't immediately grasp the distinction between the son of an Earl and a girl with a working class single mother, but we at least understand that there's something about that difference that makes them even more engaging.
There's a lot to be said about Beryl's characterization, too. There's a long standing tradition of self-taught geniuses in comics; not the least of which is Spider-man. The idea that she's a girl that built her own machine shop in her mom's garage is a very fundamentally comic-book device, and it's immediately likeable. The fact that she's an expert with communications gives her a very singular specialty in the DC universe, and the idea of that specialty is very forward thinking: it was introduced in the JLA Classified arc in 2005, and there was no was they could have known that communications technology was going to drive almost all technological innovation for the next decade. Suddenly Beryl has some of the most advanced specializations in all of comics. She's a remarkably fun character. In the comics, Cyril had died and she's taken over as the new Knight, but we really like the dynamic of Cyril and Beryl as our Knight and Squire, and plan to keep this particular duo together. |