Thorn

62 years ago - Rose Forrest is born.

59 years ago - 3-year-old Rose's parents are killed. She is place in an orphanage that regularly abuses it's kids.

53 years ago - 9-year-old Rose's second personality Thorn manifests to protect her from her abusers.

48 years ago - 14-year-old Rose is adopted by police detective Phil Canton in Metropolis.

44 years ago - 18-year-old Rose Canton begins working for her father Phil Canton as he becomes a private investigator.

38 years ago - 24-year-old Rose's father is killed by Victor Swann and the 100 as they take over Metropolis's underworld. She is placed in a sanitarium.

37 years ago - 25-year-old Rose is used by Ernst Morden in one of his experiments. Only her hidden Thorn personality is empowered. She escapes and begins a campaign of vengeance against Victor Swann & the 100.

34 years ago - 28-year-old Rose is stopped from killing a target by Laurel Drake, but she is able to escape custody and get her target.

32 years ago - 30-year-old Rose Canton believes that she has killed Victor Swann, the last of the original 100. She flees to South America, Her Thorn personality going dormant.

29 years ago - 33-year-old Rose Canton meets Alan Scott in Buenos Ares. They become insperable.

26 years ago - 36-year-old Rose Canton has an affair with Alan Scott, and does not reveal to him that she is pregnant. She gives birth to twin children, Jennifer-Lynn Hayden & Todd James Rice, but the trauma of childbirth triggers her alternate identity & she doesn't survive. Her children, who know the identity of the mother but not their father, are adopted by different American families.

Plenty of characters have been reimagined in different eras of DC cannon. Because of the way DC has treated it's different eras, making them concurrent worlds in a multiverse vs all existing in the same continuous timeline, some interesting things happen to the central narrative of some of those characters, and Thorn is probably one of my favorites. She has very clearly distinct iterations on her core concept that have been, I would argue, really well executed, but always on a fairly small, easily observable scale, giving us a great window into the distintion between these eras.

The result is that, while clearly Thorn is one character concept that's been repeated several times, there's actually some pretty distinct seperate characters here, and we get to first observe what makes each take on the character so different, and then reassemble them into one take on the character that will wind up being very useful for our timeline.

Thorn's Comic History

The original Thorn is a Flash villain from 1947 in issue #89. She's evidentally an invention of Carmine Infantino, although the issue is written by a pre-Wonder Woman Robert Kanigher, and drawn by Joe Kubert in a style that seems insane and yet absolutely stunning. We meet new villain Thorn practically without explanation, just a nature-themed villainess and crime boss who hurls poisoned thorns and then dissapears, suddenly replaced by the blonde, angellic-looking Rose Canton, who is trying to find her runaway sister. We learn pretty quickly that Rose and Thorn are in fact actually the same person, trading places Jekyll & Hyde style in some strange whirlwind effect, although we never quite see why. Instead, we are told that the two sisters were working as assistants to a botanist in the jungle, and Thorn went feral somehow... but then how is that true when they're actually the same person?

Thorn appeared in one more issue late in the Flash run, and then would essentially vanish, not appearing again in the Golden Age. She WOULD return in the seventies in the resurgance of All-Star Comics as they told Earth-Two stories, but first a whole new version of Thorn was introduced.

Rose & Thorn was a new backup story that ran in the pages of Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane, a series that doesn't get enough credit for the worldbuilding it contributed to the larger DC mythology. The series had already established that a dangerous crime gang the 100 operated in Metropolis. They were responsible for the death of police detective Phillip Forrest, and his daughter, demure, blonde Rhosyn Forrest, started to sleepwalk, going through a hidden doorway in her bedroom to an abandoned costume store where she donned the red wig and green costume of her alter-ego, Thorn, who would fight the 100 in a series of extremely satisfying kung-fu montages, two-handed Kirk-punches and all. She even had a utility belt full of clever gadgets, thorn throwing-weapons, smoke grenades, bombs, and the like, all part of her compaign of vengance against her father's murderers.

This is by far the most prolific iteration of the character, and for good reason. It's a very clean little concept, letting the creators (Kanigher again) indulge in some very era-appropriate vigilante action while also playing with some (I would argue) relatively tasteful cheesecake. Her backup stories in Lois Lane ran for 26 issues, and she also would appear pretty frequently in other corners of the Superman family of books. Then in 1978 over in the Justice Society comics taking place in Earth 2, the original Thorn returned. As the book's spinoff series Infinity Inc told the story of the next generation of Earth 2 heroes, we discovered that she was actually the mother of Jade & Obsidian.

The Crisis of Infinite Earths did a number on characters like this who had two different versions existing on two different Earths. Technically, it was understood that the original Golden Age character must still exist, since her children were still around. The Silver Age Rhosyn version of the character made a few small appearances in series like Booster Gold, but while she still existed, she really didn't have a role to play. This changed in 2004, when Gail Simone created a full reintroduction to the character in her own miniseries Rose & Thorn, and even crossed over into her run on Birds of Prey. This take on the character leaned much more heavily into ideas of multiple personalities and on the abusive trauma that led to the creation of her alternate identities. This new spin had exactly the same amount of violence and gratuitous sexuality as the seventies version, but was now happening in the early 2000s, and therefore was considerably more over-the top. You could also argue that, when viewed from a moden lense, Gail could sometimes be a little over-reliant on using trauma as a plot device, but she was also one of the only real advocates for addressing trauma to female characters in comics, so the fact that she included it in her stories so often should really be seen as a step forward.

This version of Thorn is technically just a re-imagining of the Silver Age Rhosyn, but it's hard to see her as anything other than a completely unique, original character with a short but pronounced set of appearances.

Thorn's Costume

Every version of Thorn has worn some pretty revealing costumes, and that's more or less in keeping with her story. She's supposed to be a suppressed alternate identity, and so it does work if part of that involves her expressing some of her suppressed sexuality... but make no mistake, this is all just an excuse to draw some cheesecake, particularly when Ed Benes is involved. Even the 2000s costume, which is pretty obviously just a stones throw from stripper gear, can actually look pretty awesome and intimidating, but that's pretty clearly not what Benes was going for.

While we are very much in favor of the idea that Thorn is very unhinged in her seuxality, and for that to be expressed in her costume, It's safe to say that we would be erring more in the direction of her 70's costume. Still, there are quite a few ideas from the 2000s costume that work quite well; the introduction of her signature sickles, the removal of the idea that she's actually a short-haired blonde wearing a wig, and the introduction of her changing eye color, with blue eyes for Rose and green eyes for Thorn.

I should say we all really do like Rose Canton's Golden Age costume, but it's pretty clearly designed for a villain which is not quite what we're going for, so we're going to just set that aside.

Our Thorn Story

This is a real toychest of a character to play with, because even with a relatively low number of appearances, there are some really interesting takes on the character for us to pick apart and also some very specific story needs we want our version of Thorn to fulfill. First of all, we should decide up front... this is one character. Regular DC cannon treats the Golden & Silver age Thorns as two different characters with two different roles to play, but we're going to condense this all down into one person.

So what do we need from her? She needs to be the mother of Jade & Obsidian, which informs a lot about WHEN her story happens, getting pushed back in continuity enough so that she can be there to meet Alan Scott when he returns to Earth and lives in South America. There really isn't a lot that we need to take from the Golden Age Thorn other than this, so as long as we have their relationship feel organic, and her tragic death after secretly giving birth to her children be part of the story, that big contribution to the rest of the timeline feels pretty solid.

Once that's established, we need to really focus on her personal story. We do really like both the classic Robert Kanigher take on the character, AND the reimagined Gail Simone version, so we'll basically be cherry picking between them to build our own idea. We find her to just be more interesting when Thorn is a full alternate personality that manifests to protect her meeker Rose personality, so we're going to use that rather than the sleepwalking angle. We also really like the idea of the Thorn personality being wildly unpredictable and dangerous, and to that end we've invented the idea that she was actually taken from a sanitarium after the death of her father and used as an experiment by a not-The-Brain-yet Earnst Morden. Thorn would of course manifest during the experiment, meaning that she is the one whose strength was intensified, so the experiement would seem a failure when inspecting Rose.

From there, her story is probably much closer to the original Silver Age character as she stages a campaign of vengance against the 100. Since in our timeline, the 100 are a centuries-old cult of scientists that have been transitioning to a criminal organization, she becomes a major catalyst of this, killing all the original members save for Victor Swann, leaving in her wake the street level criminal organization they were building before she retires, hiding in South America. There's something kind of nice and poetic in the idea that in those days in hiding, she gets to connect with Alan Scott, and find a certain amount of peace. This story has been assembled from a lot of disparate pieces, but i think we actually came up with something that works really well.

Allies & Teams

Jade