Tundra
48 years ago - Nastasia Korolevna is born in the mystic realm of Yav. Her mother is a shaman of the World Tree.
34 years ago - 14-year-old Nastasia, training with her father to become a knight and protector, is selected as a bride by the frost giants. She fights them, earning her freedom and winning mastery of the cold.
27 years ago - 21-year-old Nastasia meets Mikola Rostov, an adventurer lost in Yav. She accompanies him on his adventures, helping to keep him alive.
21 years ago - 27-year-old Nastasia marries Mikola Rostov when he is stricken with Lycanthropy. Their wedding includes a battle between them that lasts for hours.
18 years ago - 30-year-old Nastasia travels with Mikola Rostov back to the mortal realm. She will often stand up in the protection of people, who give her the name Tundra.
14 years ago - 34-year-old Nastasia is selected as a member of the government-sanctioned organization The People's Heroes.
12 years ago -36-year-old Nastasia & The People's Heroes are unable to stop Ben Turner from assassinating a Russian Pakhan for the League of Assassins.
11 years ago - 37-year-old Nastasia is called back to the realm of Yav, which is being breached by invaders. She allies herself with Diana Prince & Barbara Ann Minerva, unearthing Amazon artifacts, revealing ancient interactions between the Amazons and the Polianitsy.
8 years ago - 40-year-old Nastasia and The People's Heroes attempt to stop Ivan Illyich Gort from defecting. She attempts to keep the encounter non-lethal, but when Anatoli Knyazev kills Ivan, she abandons the team and returns to Yav.
When we're looking for characters that might serve in the Russian national team, our main goal is to find characters who we know are from that country, but also someone who actually gives us something to work with. Some sort of cool story or look we can adapt. Sometimes, even though a character is TECHNICALLY canon to DC lore, they're so obscure that we are basically left to make up our own.
Tundra's StoryTundra is absolutely a character that appears in DC comics. She has been in exactly four comics total. The first is her introductory issue. In Justice League Quarterly #17 from 1994, we see a story about the Global Guardians in which several of their members are lost. At the end, they are introduced to four new characters, each of them presented in images on a computer screen that gives their name, costume, and country of origin. That's the image you see here. No further explanation is given, and that's all we see of her. She next appeared in two issues of Wonder Woman, #174 &175 from 2001. In this Wonder Woman gathers a large army of all the active female heroes in the world to fight an army of all the female villains. She appears in two crowd scenes, including the big splash page at the end of the first issue, and then is show being defeated in the second issue's big battle scene. The last is a single panel out of Doomsday Clock, where she's clearly part of the Russian People's Heroes. That's the image at the top of this page. At no point does she say, or do, anything at all. That's all we know about Tundra.
So why are we including her? I think it's specifically because of what we imagined we COULD do with her. There is a Slavic folklore tradition of warrior women called the Polianitsy, sort of a recurring feature in Russian folk poems and medieval romances. We decided to build on that tradition, remembering characters like Tora Olafsdotter who come from mystic people hidden in the Frozen North. We've built an idea that we feel fits cleanly into the world of DC, and uses themes of the Polianitsy to build her world. She becomes a warrior and ice magic wielder that totally works as an encounter for an early Wonder Woman story, as well as an inclusion in our Russian superteam. I have such a clear notion of her, I hope to commission an artist to create a version of this character as she exists in my head. |
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