#Katana dc reference series

The line that Katana traverses between her fighting skills and her emotional nature provides nuance to her character that is often lost. The relationship that Katana has with Halo provides a very human look into her experiences as a superhero, bringing her beyond the spectacle of violence that she is commonly associated with. Katana's nurturing side shows that she is way more than just a feared warrior, but a human being who empathizes with Halo's condition. Related: The Boys & Umbrella Academy Called Out For Silent Asian Trope With Katana being Halo's legal guardian, she has a second opportunity to be a maternal figure, thereby helping her heal from the murder of her children years before. Despite being an adult woman, Halo has no memories of her past life, and is taken under Katana's wing as she learns to navigate the world. While grief has informed much of Katana's life as a superhero, Ridley provides a powerful counter to this in his expansion on the friendship between Katana and her Outsiders teammate, Halo. In other words, the issue finally gives readers a Katana who is cognizant of her own history, including how she has been stereotyped in the past.

By taking core aspects of Katana's character and unveiling Katana's side of her story, Ridley provides an image of the character shaped not by other people's perceptions, but by her own thoughts, feelings, dreams, and regrets. This is the ethos of John Ridley's take on Katana in The Other History of the DC Universe #3. Related: DC Announces New One-Shot Celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month What makes characters believable is not so much the circumstances they are written in, but their psychological experience of it. That is, despite the fact that comics are a sequential art form with or without text, characters can come across as tangible people if rendered with enough emotional depth. One of the greatest achievements of comics as an art form is its capacity for transmitting three dimensional characters on a two dimensional surface. Katana's real tragedy is not her sad backstory, but her rich emotional life that has been left unexplored until now. This treatment extends beyond the scope of superhero comics and can be seen with other Asian female characters in popular media. In her own entry of The Other History of the DC Universe, Katana fully comes into her own as a character who deserves more than the reductive treatment that characterizes much of her publication history. In many of Katana's comic appearances prior to The Other History of the DC Universe, she existed entirely in an exotic lexicon of rage, grief, and cultural difference. Narrating her way through both her publication history and late twentieth century American history, Ridley's Katana is given space to not only speak her truth, but provide a powerful counter to limiting depictions of her character over the years. Related: Heroes of Color Will Finally Tell THEIR Side of DC's History As a series, The Other History of the DC Universe is centered on uplifting the stories of heroes from underrepresented groups, and mixes art from previous issues in their publication history with revised text written by Ridley. The issue is instrumental in removing Katana from the exotic tropes she has been written with for decades, instilling both a sense of personhood for her as well as a unique perspective of the DC Universe as a whole.

#Katana dc reference series

In the ongoing series, The Other History of the DC Universe, writer John Ridley rendered Katana in a groundbreaking human approach in issue three of the series (written by John Ridley, layouts by Giuseppe Camuncoli, finishes by Andrea Cucchi, colors José Villarrubia, letters by Steve Wands). Debuting in 1983, Katana was one of the first Asian female superheroes in DC Comics, but only recently has she received a deep dive into her mythos as a character.