Zealot

690 - Zannah is born in an alternate dimension on the planet Khera, part of a secretive order of female warriors called the Coda.

702 - Zannah begins her initiate training with the Coda.

714 - Zannah is chosen to vie for control of the Coda, learning their fighting art in its entirety.

729 - Zannah achieves true mastery and wins dominance of the order, becoming Lady Zannah, Majestrix of the Coda

800 - Lady Zannah's home planet of Khera is decimated by an invading armada of body-possessing aliens, the Daemonites, led by the warlord Helspont. Her people flee to space, beginning a war that spans millennia.

1084 - Lady Zannah, one of the only surviving Coda, crash-lands on Earth. She chooses to remain, beginning to build a new Coda from among the humans. She goes by the name Zealot.

1204 - Zealot, in exchange for sparing the girl children of Constantinople to become members of the Coda, agrees to win the sacking of the city and ending the Fourth Crusade.

1720 - Zealot and the Coda of Earth begin to find Helspont and the Daemonites infiltrating positions of power on Earth. They hunt them, and the Coda is believed to be an elite assassin guild.

30 years ago - Zealot gives birth to her daughter Kanesha.

11 years ago - Zealot first meets Jenny Sparks & Jack Marlowe when they are lost in her dimension. They join her ongoing battle with the Daemonites.

5 years ago - Zealot & Jenny Sparks see Jack Marlowe's android body almost destroyed as he attempts to traverse the bleed closing off Zealot's dimension.

4 years ago - Zealot initiates a doomsday virus that obliterates the Daemonites from Earth, but also kills forty percent of the Coda. She is challenged for leadership by her daughter Kanesha, and though she clearly wins the battle, she concedes victory, choosing exile from Earth. Jenny Sparks goes with her as they hunt for new access to the bleed.

3 years ago - Zealot & Jenny Sparks are able to return to Jenny's home dimension thanks to a Rogue Voidship. They wrest control of the ship from Manchester Black, and Zealot joins Jenny's Stormwatch, protecting Earth and the barriers between dimensions.

2 years ago - Zealot & Stormwatch track the warlord Helspont back to her home dimension, where he is preparing to stage an invasion. They consult with J’onn J’onzz, and together they dismantle the Daemonite armada, stranding Helspont in a dead dimension.

1 year ago - Zealot and Stormwatch make themselves public when they join the battle against Mageddon

When we made the decision that we were going to build a Stormwatch team in an effort to put an idealized take on the Wildstorm catalog of characters into our timeline, we tried our best to take a broader view of that catalog and look for characters that would make sense on the team even if they weren't canonically Stormwatch or Authority members. Zealot immediately jumped at us. Of all the members of the WildC.A.T.s with their stylized coolness, Zealot is the one who most feels like she could be transposed into a Justice League - level team, and that's absolutely what Stormwatch should feel like. We found a fun way to preserve as much of her classic characterization as possible, and I think you'll like it!

Zealot's Comic History

When Jim Lee created his debut Image series WildC.A.T.S, he was coming off his unprecedentedly successful X-Men run, and that DNA is all over his new creator-owned team. They were a team of alien hybrids fighting a war against an invading race malevolent body-stealers, but honestly the initial appeal of the book was the art. Each character looked awesome, and while the WildC.A.T.s have been around forever, that initial lineup of characters is iconic.

Zealot was one of those founders, combining Jim's signature Psylocke-ninja character with a more Wonder Woman energy, creating a character who was clearly the ultimate weapon-wielding warrior. She's actually a pure-blooded Kherubim who crashed on Earth thousands of years ago and the founder of the Coda, an ancient order of warrior women. As the story of the WildC.A.T.s evolved through multiple series we saw her story expand wildly, revealing a seemingly endless lifetime of lovers and adventures, of lost children and betrayal. Even as Wildstorm adjusted it's focus to center more on the Authority, it was still understood that the Kherubim were still there, their deep complex lore humming away, with Zealot achieving an almost mythic status.

Zealot was largely absent from DC post New 52, but there was a remarkably fun WildC.A.T.s miniseries by Matthew Rosenberg set right smack in the DC universe, and of course Zealot was included in Kelly Thompson's Birds of Prey, which is probably where most modern readers actually know her from.

Our Zealot Story

One thing we really wanted to do with our take on Stormwatch is to make it really feel like a full expression of everything Wildstorm was. to us, that meant we also wanted to look at the WildC.A.T.s and see if there was anything there we could possibly also adapt, and Zealot just immediately sprung at us almost fully formed as a character who would fit perfectly, but also had already made some real strides into being included in DC canon, making her an ideal candidate for us to look at.

Starting with the 2023 DC WildC.A.T.s series, Zealot was depicted with a costume that evoked space-samurai, and that was the same costume she wore in Birds of Prey. Not a bad costume, but as a kid that grew up in the 90s, her original design is absolutely iconic. Admittedly it was probably pretty unrealistic, but I'd argue that she should be using the same logic you'd see with Wonder Woman, in that her outfit is clearly armor and a battle suit... but we can have leeway to allow it to also look... well like this.

The swords with the spiked guards are iconic, but I also love that she's just as comfortable carrying guns. This is admittedly a very 90s look but it's also incredible.

Her look established, it's really in her story where we wanted to roll up our sleeves. This is often a circumstance we run into, where to do a character justice we really need to make these huge, sweeping changes to the world, like adding a Kherubim / Daemonite conflict across human history... but that's just way more than we want to do to our timeline. We do have some ideas about stuff to do with the Daemonites, but it isn't this. Still, are you really doing Zealot if you don't give her that monster of a backstory?

The fact that we're considering adding her to Stormwatch actually presents us with a surprisingly elegant solution. Jenny Sparks whole deal is that she is an adventurer between dimensions. She can encounter Zealot while stranded in an alternate, dying dimension, join her battle while stranded there... and then have Zealot join her back in our dimension after she's exiled from Earth. This lets us have everything we want from her, while actually making her story go even HARDER, because its all happening in one of Jenny's alternate dimensions.

We were all more than a little blown away by just how perfectly Zealot folded into our Stormwatch team. The Authority classically has a few characters in it that are meant to be overwhelmingly skilled fighters, but none of them have ever had as much backstory and character development as Zealot, and she just instantly feels like the superior choice.

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