The Untold Truth Of Huntress

If you really want to understand the Huntress, you have to understand Earth-2, and how an attempt to solve a storytelling problem that ultimately didn't matter gave DC Comics the chance to take their characters in some very unexpected directions.

The basic idea was this: in the 1950s, DC decided they needed to explain things like how Superman and Batman could've been around since the late '30s without ever seeming to get any older, and why there were new characters like the Flash and Green Lantern who seemed to be completely unrelated to the characters with the same names who had been around during the first big superhero boom in the '40s. The solution was, of course, to dive headfirst into the idea of parallel Earths. In the pages of Flash, the idea of Earth-2 was created as a home for all of the DC Universe's original characters.

The main effect of Earth-2 was that it cleared up a few continuity headaches — like Superman being named Kal-L instead of Kal-El and working at the Daily Star instead of the Daily Planet in his first appearance, and Batman using guns during his first year of stories. Of course, it also created a few new headaches, like how some of the Earth-2 heroes existed as fictional comic book characters on Earth-1. Barry Allen chose to name himself "The Flash" because he'd read comics about the original Flash as a kid, for example, but apparently nobody ever bothered to read the ones about how Batman was Bruce Wayne and Superman was Clark Kent. Really, though, it wasn't as complicated as it sounds, and allowed for some really interesting things to happen down the line.

While the original Huntress fought crime alongside the grown-up Robin as the "New Dynamic Duo," Helena Wayne's most prominent appearances came when she took an interdimensional vacation to Earth-1 to spend some time with that dimension's version of her dad. Of course, meeting up with your alternate reality daughter who doesn't exist in your timeline is always going to be a little weird — especially when you find out that her mom is the cat-themed supervillain who tried to drown you in a jaguar cage a few weeks ago — but, you know. It's the DC Universe. You get used to stuff like that.

In addition to teaming up with "Uncle Bruce" over Christmas and clearing the Wayne family name after Batman's dad was framed for crimes, the Huntress also faced off against the Earth-1 counterpart of her own mother. That fight was particularly fraught for Helena, since it was the death of Earth-2's Catwoman that inspired her to take up crime fighting for herself. In the end, though, she declared that while the main timeline's Catwoman had the potential to reform, "until then, you're just another criminal!" Try using that one on your own family next time an argument breaks out over Thanksgiving, and let us know how it goes.

Here's the thing about superhero comics: nothing ever really goes away, especially when it's something as intrinsically tied to a major character as, say, Batman's daughter. With that in mind, it's no surprise that DC brought back the Huntress only a few years after Crisis. What is surprising is that they completely reinvented the character in almost every aspect, aside from her costume and her first name — and even the costume underwent some radical changes before too long.

Instead of being Batman's daughter, the post-Crisis Huntress was something a little closer to being DC's take on the Punisher. Helena Bertinelli was the youngest member of one of Gotham City's most prominent crime families in the years before Batman arrived and organized crime gave way to clowns trying to poison the reservoir and mad biologists shooting everyone with ice guns. When she was only eight years old, Helena's entire family was murdered in front of her by a hitman who left her alive.

Helena was taken in by her family in Sicily, who offered to train her so that she could get her revenge, something that she took to very well. When she returned to Gotham, however, she saw Batman in action, and realized that if she really wanted to strike terror into the hearts of the mobsters who had targeted her family, she should follow in his footsteps as a vigilante. With that, she took the identity of the Huntress, although that wasn't her only calling. While she was wealthy enough to live off of her family's ill-gotten gains, she actually kept a day job as a school teacher, something that would have more prominence in other versions of the character.

Helena Bertinelli's relationship with the rest of the Batman family is... complicated. We've already been through her rocky interactions with the Dark Knight himself, but his sidekicks tend to have a very different perspective on the Huntress. Tim Drake, for instance, has the sort of relationship you'd expect from a super-smart teenage overachiever and a world-weary teacher, and Dick Grayson has... well, exactly the same relationship that you'd expect from him, too.

On the off chance that you're not keyed in to the complex web of relationships that is the love lives of DC Comics characters, Nightwing is basically the most eligible bachelor in the entire universe. He's got the same dedication to physical perfection as Batman, except he's a gymnast who has dealt with his trauma in a (relatively) healthy way and is actually friendly and caring. He's a catch, is what we're getting at here.

When he first encountered the Huntress, they had immediate chemistry, and they quickly found themselves in a team-up with benefits. According to an interview with writer Devin Grayson from around the time that Nightwing/Huntress came out, the idea was that these where characters for whom physicality was a central part of their characters, which meant they were going to express themselves physically when they felt that connection. An actual relationship didn't blossom out of that encounter, though — neither of the characters were ever depicted as expecting it to, although at least part of it was because of the time that Huntress accidentally shot Batman with a crossbow in front of Nightwing. There are definitely exceptions, but using medieval weaponry on someone's beloved father figure is often going to be a dealbreaker.

After the injuries she suffered in No Man's Land, Helena Bertinelli made a full recovery, and so did her relationship with Barbara Gordon... for a while. As Oracle, Barbara had become an information broker for the superhero community, using her incredible intelligence and hacking skills to guide heroes on their missions. She also founded a team of her own called the Birds of Prey — a name that was used as the title of her comic for years before it became the official name of her team — primarily working with other heroines, sending them on missions as her operatives.

Oracle's most long-tenured partner in the Birds of Prey was Black Canary, but having felt aimless for years after her experiences in No Man's Land, the Huntress joined up as well. The camaraderie of the team seemed to be doing a lot of good for Helena, allowing her to move past the anger and desire for revenge that had driven her since she was a child. Unfortunately, it was short lived. After a few adventures with the Birds, she realized that Oracle had been specifically sending her on missions designed to teach her lessons and force her to confront her past and move towards self-improvement, treating her the same way that a teacher would handle a problem student. Infuriated at being manipulated by yet another member of the Batman family who seemed to want to mold her into what they wanted her to be, she ditched the team and left.

For a while, it seemed like she'd taken up the family business, reclaiming her spot at the head of Gotham City's crime families as the rightful heir of the Bertinellis, but it turned out that she was using her connections to achieve her goals in a different way. She'd ascended to the top of Gotham's mobs as an undercover operation, and once she had all the information needed to break their hold on the city, she handed it over to Batman.

In 2011, DC revamped their universe once again as "The New 52." It has, of course, mostly been completely undone over the past decade, but at the time, it was a clean break from everything that existed, where plenty of characters were wiped out of continuity and some were completely altered. With that in mind, Huntress fans were left with the question of just which version of the character they'd get from the new DC Universe: Helena Wayne or Helena Bertinelli? Well, as a very wise person once said, porque no los dos?

One of the big changes to the New 52 was the return of the idea of Earth-2, but with a big twist. Rather than being the home of characters like the original Green Lantern and Flash, Alan Scott and Jay Garrick, who had existed before their modern incarnations, it was a world where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman had all gotten started just like they had in the regular DC Universe... except that they were all killed shortly thereafter, paving the way for a second generation of heroes to take up their legacies. In that reality, Helena Wayne had fought alongside her father as Robin, and wound up being stranded on DC's Prime Earth — the regular continuity — where she took up the identity of the huntress.

Meanwhile, when Nightwing had his identity revealed and was apparently killed, Dick Grayson joined up with an international espionage organization called Spyral, where he encountered a woman with a very familiar sense of fashion and love of crossbows. This was Helena Bertinelli, who at the time was using the codename Matron as the head of a girls' boarding school meant to train young women as spies. Eventually, she took over leadership of Spyral, taking the codename Huntress — a very different version of Helena Bertinelli with the same crime family origin.