The Huntress

30 years ago - Helena Bertinelli is born, daughter of Frank Bertinelli, one of the top crime bosses in Gotham.

22 years ago - 8-year-old Helena is present when a group of gunmen crash a family gathering and slaughter her entire family. She only survives because the family bodyguard, Sal, saves her, and takes her to his family's villa in Sicily where he beings teaching her to one day become an assassin and take revenge for the death of her family.

13 years ago - 17-year-old Helena escapes when the villa where she has trained with Sal's family is attacked. She goes into hiding, meeting Richard Dragon in the Swiss Alps, agreeing to become his student.

12 years ago - 18-year-old Helena collects her inheritance, including the hidden Bertinelli fortune. She attends Stockholm University under the alias Helena Rosa, intending to return to Gotham as a teacher.

8 years ago - 22-year-old Helena returns to Gotham, taking a job as a teacher. She begins working as the Huntress, Tracking the mafia family that ordered the hit on her family, and confronting the assassins who executed the hit. She comes into conflict with Batman over her methods, and has to operate under his radar.

7 years ago - 23-year-old Helena works with Oliver Queen as they track the same criminal syndicate, and she begins adapting some of his methods.

6 years ago - 24-year-old Helena has an affair with Dick Grayson while working with him on a case to apprehend Arthur Brown.

5 years ago - 25-year-old Helena & Oliver Queen have a brief affair.

4 years ago - 26-year-old Helena works with Tim Drake, discovering that he is actually one of her students. His approval of her helps strengthen her standing with Batman, who begins to include her among his operatives.

3 years ago - 27-year-old Helena is one of the main operatives in Gotham after the earthquake, working directly with Batman and Oracle. She starts working more often with the Birds of Prey despite some tension as she’s slept with both of their exes.

1 year ago - 29-year-old Helena is brought into the Birds of Prey full time.

The Huntress has had such a fascinating journey. She's one of the characters that's been most affected by most of DC's biggest continuity mix-ups, literally having her entire story completely swiped out from under her multiple times, but rather than fade into obscurity, she's actually been completely reinvented, and every time she's managed to remain a centrally important character and maintain an extremely high profile, a feat that lots of other characters have never managed to pull off

The Huntress's Comic History

This is a complicated one.

in 1977, Earth-2's Justice Society had returned to publication and was really starting to expand. The creation Power Girl, the Earth-2 spin on Supergirl, had been very popular the year before, so the creative team of All-Star Comics Paul Levitz & Joe Staton made the very understandable decision to bring in an Earth-2 Batman character. It had already been established in Earth-2 that Batman & Catwoman were much older and married, so I'm sure it followed very naturally to introduce their daughter Helena Wayne as the Huntress.

She debuted simultaneously in two books, All-Star Comics #69 and Secret Origin of Super-Heroes #17, although the latter is usually credited as her first appearance as it actually details her backstory. It's a really good origin, featuring the accidental death of Catwoman, and Bruce finally relenting in his war on crime as his grief finally drives him to retire as Batman. Helena is regularly depicted with the classic looming cowl-and-cape Batman sillhouette, and quickly became one of the main recurring members of the Justice Society, firmly establishing herself as one of the main heroes of Earth-2.

Then came 1985's Crisis of Infinite Earths, which removed the idea of the Multiverse, making the Justice Society a World War II era team, with all of it's still-active members having been de-aged somehow. There were a number of characters for whom that didn't work, however, and Huntress was one of the worst, because there was no longer a second, older Batman that could have an adult daughter. For a while there simply was no Huntress, she was removed from continuity entirely.

Then, in 1989, creators Joey Cavalieri & Joe Staton created an entirely new version of the Huntress for the new Post-Crisis DC. Helena Bertinelli was a mafia princess who had witnessed the murder of her entire family, and was herself on the run from mob hitmen, but assumed the identity of Huntress to get revenge on her family's killers. While her story clearly shared DNA with the classic Batman character origins, it was infused with the darker, more violent tone so prominent in the comics of the era, the first issue even heavily hinting that Helena was a victim of childhood sexual trauma, a story beat that has never appeared in any of the subsequent retellings of her origin. What does remain constant, however, is the idea that she is a far more violent vigilante, very willing to kill her targets, and that this has brought her into constant conflict with Batman.

After her initial series Helena had several more miniseries, including a really great four-issue run by Chuck Dixon in 1994. Huntress would regularly appear all over the various Batman family books, teaming up with the likes of Nightwing and Tim Drake. By the late 90's her profile had gotten pretty huge, going so far as actually joining the Grant Morrison penned JLA before becoming a series regular in the Birds of Prey under writer Gail Simone.

2011's New 52 continuity reset didn't include Huntress right away, but once it did it actually came from a weird place; DC revealed that their new DC continuity actually included an Earth-2. We were introduced to the Earth-2 Helena Wayne, daughter of Bruce Wayne and Selena Kyle, who was actually operating as Robin under her father. When this Helena and her friend Kara became refugees in the main reality they both adopted new superhero monikers; Robin and Supergirl became Huntress and Power Girl. Helena Wayne actually used the name Helena Bertinelli as an alias. These characters would ultimately return to their own Earth, and would participate in some pretty cool Earth-2 stories. Eventually, this version of Helena Wayne would actually take over for her father and become Batman. Not Batgirl or Batwoman; Batman. It was cool as hell.

The New 52 era of DC publishing wasn't exactly known for it's consistency, so in 2014, the Comic series Grayson depicted the adventures of Dick Grayson after he had staged his own death and became an agent of a spy organization called Spyral (get it?). In it, he meeds his handler, a spy named Helena Bertinelli. At the time, this was essentially a new take on the character, not related to the long-standing character from before the New 52, or to the current version of Huntress who was using the name as an alias.

in 2016, as part of the Rebirth imprint as DC tried to restore its all but unrecognizeble continuity back to some semblance of what readers actually wanted, this version of Helena appeared again as part of the series Batgirl and the Birds of Prey. She had now taken up the name Huntress (which at this point was technically available, since Helena Wayne was now permanently back in Earth 2). It was also revealed that she was in fact a mafia princess who had seen her family killed and was now out for vengeance... she had apparently just taken a detour to go be a spy handler for a while.

Our Huntress Story

The Huntress is one of those characters that really serves as a barometer for when you got into comics. For me, The Helena Bertinelli Huntress is the one I recognize, but older readers will always think that the Helena Wayne version is correct. I can absolutely sympathize; the Helena Wayne character is awesome. We can't use this take on the character just for continuity reasons, but we actually HAVE included a child version of Helena in our story elsewhere.

In the meantime, we're obviously leaning hard into the classic Helena Bertinelli Huntress. This is the character from which most of the actual canon Huntress content actually derives; she's part of the Batman family of characters, having slowly earned her place there, she's one of the main Birds of Prey, developing equally hard-won friendships with Barbara and Dinah.

We did work a little to figure out just how the events of her life unfolded before she first wears a cape; many versions of her story has the deaths of her family happening when she's much older, but this version, with her growing up under the tutelage of mafia assassins who are also subsequently killed, actually works much better.

Huntress's Costume

This is one of the most interesting deep-dives into a character's costume that we've done in a while, because there are some very distinct versions of the Huntress and they all seem to have corresponding costumes. The original Helena Wayne Huntress had her very distinct bathing suit, thigh-high boots, and cape ensemble, which was more or less copied by the original Helena Bertinelli costume, which basically just saw some tweaks to contemporize it. In context, these costumes were pretty solid. They obviously showed more skin than they needed to, but at least they gave her a very distinct style.

Helena's costume got a little more substantial in 1996, during the crossover story 'Contagion'. The new look was a full-body black jumpsuit with purple details. This is probably her single most iconic costume; the one she wore for almost all her highest profile stories, including her entire tenure with the JLA.

For our timeline, this is definitely the costume we're going to consider canon. There have been a few interesting ideas that were introduced later on, but personally argue that they've never actually improved on this look, and that none of them have ever been as distinctly, uniquely hers. Still, it's fun to look at some of the other variations.

In 2002, Jim Lee drew the hugely popular story arc Hush in the regular Batman series. In it he redesigned Huntress's costume, creating a look that left her very weirdly exposed. It looked very cool while Lee was drawing it, because literally everything Lee draws looks awesome, but it's hard to argue that it was anything but a downgrade. This is actually the costume Helena wore for her entire time as a member of Gail Simone's Birds of Prey, but given that this series was drawn by Ed Benes who is pretty notorious for being almost as good at complex action scenes as he is at drawing hot girl cheesecake, the costume actually weirdly fit in his art style. Notably, Gail Simone managed to explain the costume in a single panel.

In 2011, With the introduction of the New 52 Helena Wayne, we got both a glimpse of her original Robin Costume, as well as a very well-thought-out take on a Huntress Costume. Like a lot of the art in the new 52 era, It was a pretty competent design, if a little unimaginative. We only saw a little of her Batman Costume, but it's actually a really cool way to wrap up this version of the character.

Later, when the Spyral agent version of Helena took up the name Huntress, she started in out wearing a very innovative new hood-and coat look, which eventually evolved into her current costume, which looks very cool, but I still don't think they've managed to top her 90's look.

A Quick Look at Live Action Huntresses

There have been a couple of live-action versions of Huntress; A superpowered version of the Helena Wayne Huntress, now called Helena Kyle, was featured on the severely underrated 2002 TV series Birds of Prey, played by Ashley Scott, while the Bertinelli Huntress appeared in a few seasons of Arrow played by Jessica De Gow.

The reason we're bringing this up, however, is so we can talk about Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 2020's Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Not only is this movie amazing, and not only does Mary absolutely crush this role, but she also LOOKS really cool, too. If you suggested to me that this is actually what Helena Bertinelli wore when she first started as Huntress, not adapting to her more deliberately theatrical costume until after she works with Green Arrow... I mean that isn't the worst suggestion I've heard.

Huntress's Future

We didn't include Huntress's time in the Justice League in our timeline. She was put in by Grant Morrison because they were deliberately building their lineup to mirror the Greek pantheon of gods, and she was their Artemis. We were never trying to build a similar allegory, so for us she remains a decidedly down-to-earth hero. Looking to her future, however, as she continues to distance herself from her extremely violent beginnings and gains more acceptance by the Batman family in general and the superhero community at large, it does seem inevitable that she will someday earn her place among them.

In the meantime, however, she's still considered quite a loose canon. The fact that Barbara and Dinah had come to trust her enough to make her their partner is a big deal (especially given the fact that she's had affairs with both of their main love interests). The rest of the Bat-family continues to keep her at a distance, but they also all universally know that if they need someone to hold their own in a fight, she can always be counted on.

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