The Engineer

29 years ago - Angela Spica is born in Queens, the youngest of seven children.

23 years ago - 6-year-old Angela Spica begins her lifelong study of dance.

11 years ago - 18-year-old Angela Spica enrolls in Columbia University on a full academic scholarship, studying bioengineering.

8 years ago - 21-year-old Angela Spica graduates with a bachelor's in bioengineering and begins her graduate work, focusing on the work of nanobiologist and former member of Stormwatch, Toshiro Mishawa.

6 years ago - 23-year-old Angela Spica is able to recover the lost data of Toshiro Mishawa. She grows a new, more advanced colony of micronanites and injects them directly into her body, replacing her blood. She breaks into the government facility of the First Strike Program to recover the original Engineer's dormant nanite colony.

5 years ago - 24-year-old Angela Spica is found by Manchester Black, her nanite technology used to help reactivate the Voidship Bunny. She joins their superhuman collective the Elite, a superhero team dedicated to making real change in the world.

4 years ago - 25-year-old Angela Spica and the Elite come into conflict with Superman. They fight on the moon, where Superman uses the vacuum of space to extract the nanites from her body and render them inert. She is taken into custody.

3 years ago - 26-year-old Angela Spica's micronanite colony is restored to her by Manchester Black. He reforms the Elite to attempt to kill Superman, but when Jenny Sparks returns through their Voidship Bunny, she sides with her, helping wrest control of Bunny from Black, killing the Hat with Paul Booker. She joins the newly reformed Stormwatch, promising to make up for the damage she caused with the Elite.

1 year ago - 28-year-old Angela Spica and Stormwatch make themselves public when they join the battle against Mageddon.

Adapting Wildstorm characters to make them full participating members of the regular DC mythology involves a little bit of careful casting. Not all comic book worlds are created equal, and not every character can transition cleanly over into a different creative space. We're not limiting ourselves to just The Authority, but I would say that of those characters The Engineer is by far the most usable character. There's very little we have to change here, so this is probably the cleanest and most obvious adaptation of a Wildstorm character we're doing.

The Engineer's Comic History

In 1999, when Warren Ellis first started his new book the Authority, spinning it out of his run on Stormwatch essentially by killing every character he hadn't created, some of the characters were actually new, based on a few very minor characters that had appeared briefly in earlier issues. The Engineer was one of these, a repurposing of a pretty high-concept character, but with a new design and form factor. The young scientist whose nanite blood allowed her to manifest a pure metallic body coating she could manipulate into all sorts of weapons, most often huge guns. The Authority had several really innovative characters, but I don't think I'm out of line when I say that this was the most successfully executed; she had a great design, an innovative power set, and best of all they both fed each other organically.

The Authority lasted for 29 issues, although their story is arguably finished in the first 12. They would continue to appear in several subsequent series, and Angela was featured in all of them. When DC rebooted it's continuity in 2011 a new version of Stormwatch was introduced essentially repurposing concepts from the Authority, and the Engineer was one of the characters they half-heartedly adapted.

Really, it's her appearance as a really well-designed Superman villain in the James Gunn movie that has cemented her as a character to watch going forward.

Our Engineer Story

The Engineer is, of the various Wildstorm characters in general and the Authority in particular, the easiest to adapt right into DC's timeline without much effort at all. Her comic origin are that she was a scientist who was working with the same nanites used by another, earlier superhero also called the Engineer, and when she perfected them, she chose to replace her blood with her nanite solution, turning her into a technological powerhouse. The hardest part of this was that we needed to invent a lot of the history of the original Engineer because there was precious little to draw from, but that's easy enough. Angela basically lands right into our project fully formed.

We did add one bit to her, though. Our timeline has both Stormwatch and the Elite, the DC team built as a pastiche of the Authority, and among the members of that team was Menagerie, a really cool character who was clearly designed after the Engineer. I like them both, but there's really no reason to include both characters, and the Engineer is obviously the superior choice. So rather than including Menagerie, we just put Angela on the Elite before she joins Stormwatch. It does actually give her a little bit more to do in the story rather than just join the team; we now know that she is someone who is really interesting in progressive change, but knows she has gone too far to get it, and is now trying to find a way to redeem herself while also trying to continue to pursue that same goal. It's a great setup for a character that I would love to see more of.

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