Susan Linden-Thorne

56 years ago - Susan Linden is born.

51 years ago - 5-year-old Susan meets Phillip Sylvian, the odd boy next door. They become inseperable friends.

45 years ago - 11-year-old Susan helps Phillip Sylvian build his garden lab, staying with him to get away from her father.

42 years ago - 13-year-old Susan runs away from home to escape her father with the help of Phillip Sylvian.

39 years ago - 17-year-old Susan starts working as a model.

34 years ago - 22-year-old Susan marries Carl Thorne after they meet in Morocco.

32 years ago - 24-year-old Susan discovers that her husband is a drug and weapon trafficer. He hurts her when she tries to confront him.

30 years ago - 26-year-old Susan leaves her husband, and reconnects with Phillip Sylvian, who hires her as the lab assistant for his new private labs.

28 years ago - 28-year-old Susan is shot by her husband Carl Thorne. Phillip Sylvian finds her and is unable to save her. He merges her biology and memories with his plant hybrids, allowing him to grow a new body for her. She uses her new abilites to get Thorne arrested, and becomes Black Orchid.

18 years ago - 38-year-old Susan attempts to stop Tobias Whale. He has her shot and burned, and sends his men to murder Phillip Sylvian & burn his greenhouses. Two of her plant hybrid clones, Flora & Suzy Black, manage to survive.

Black Orchid is a fantastic little nugget of comic coolness. It shouldn't come as much of a shock that women spent much of comics history not really having much in the way of empowering representation. While this mostly meant that the only female characters you ever saw were the girlfriends of the actual heroes, but even characters considered to be trailblazers of female representation suffered long periods where their empowerment was needlessly diminished (Wonder Woman, for example, was famously made the Justice Society's secretary.)

This is why the very existence of Black Orchid was so cool, because she never suffered a period of diminished empowerment. Her design and the way she operated as a hero were all unapologeticly feminine, and yet her status as a strong, capable character was never diminished. In every issue, a new crime story would unfold, all featuring a female character somewhere in the mix. That female would often be a victim, or a witness to some other cruelty... and that female would wind up having been Black Orchid in disguise, a strong, mysterious, empowered hero. Her powers were often left ambiguous and her identity was left a mystery, but all of that served a central idea that this was a unique character that occupied her own space within the DC mythos.

An argument might be made that it was that very mystery that allowed her to never be undermined the way so many female heroes had been, but even if that was the case, the fact remains that she should absolutely be remembered as a trailblazing character.

Of course, her origins and story were eventually told, but told in such a groundbreaking way that the wonderful mystique of her character continued. A small three-issue Black Orchid series reframed the character, giving her an origin that made her an elegant tragedies and then held our hand as we find the beauty within that sadness. The series essentially began with the main character's death, and then introduced the idea that the character had been a plant hybrid clone of a sadly abused woman.

It's really in the interplay between the ideas of this series and the more traditional, if mysterious character that she's based on that we wanted to find our own take on Black Orchid, and work to give her a place in the world.