She was originally introduced as the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, and made her way back
from being dead not once, but twice.
Let’s take a look at all the incarnations of the Huntress.
Like a lot of the most confusing pieces of the DC Universe, the Huntress has her roots
in Earth-2.
In her case, though, it's not just a simple story of crossing dimensions.
More than anyone else, she shows how an attempt to solve a storytelling problem that didn't
really matter gave DC the chance to take their characters in some very unexpected directions.
It starts in the 1960s, when DC decided they needed to explain why there were new characters
with the same names as a few of the old ones.
The extremely simple solution was to dive headfirst into the idea of parallel worlds.
In the pages of Flash, a parallel world called Earth-2 was created as a home for all of the
original versions of the DC superheroes.
Of course, the idea of Earth-2 also created a few new problems, like how some of the Earth-2
heroes existed as fictional comic book characters on Earth-1.
Barry Allen, for example, chose to name himself "The Flash" because he'd read the same comics
about the original Flash, Jay Garrick, that were published in the real world.
Apparently nobody ever read the ones about how Batman and Superman were really Bruce
Wayne and Clark Kent.
One of the most interesting things about Earth-2 was that DC now had versions of its most popular
characters that could change in ways the ones in the main stories never could.
Earth-2 Superman was happily married to Lois Lane, while his Earth-1 counterpart was still
refusing to settle down as he waged his never-ending battle against evil.
The same went for the Batman family.
Dick Grayson grew up, keeping his identity as Robin into adulthood, and Bruce Wayne retired
from crime-fighting and married Selina Kyle, better known as Catwoman.
Earth-2's Batman and Catwoman would even die after their retirement, prompting an elderly
Joker to go on a rampage after being denied a final clash with his arch-nemesis.
Long before that, however, Bruce and Selina had a child together.
Her name was Helena Wayne, and as you might expect, it wasn't long before she joined the
family business.
As a crimefighter, she took the name Huntress and wore a costume that combined Batman's
pointy-eared look with Catwoman's traditional purple.
What might be surprising, though, is that she wasn't the kind of prominent character
you'd expect Batman and Catwoman's daughter to become.
While she starred in a few stories and 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 world's version of her dad.
Of course, meeting up with the alternate reality daughter you fathered with a supervillain
is always going to be a little weird, but, you know.
It's the DC Universe.
You get used to stuff like that.
By the mid '80s, DC's Multiverse had expanded well beyond Earth-2 into a whole roster of
alternate worlds built around different ideas.
"One where the Nazis won World War II, one where Kennedy was never assassinated…”
“Oh yeah, one where all of us are evil.”
“Been there, it sucks."
In 1985, they tried to clean it all up with a 12-issue event called Crisis on Infinite
Earths.
The ads for the series claimed that "worlds will live, worlds will die, and the DC Universe
will never be the same," and while comic books have often featured some taglines that went
way over the top, this one actually lived up to it.
The main effect of the story was that the Multiverse of parallel worlds was obliterated
and streamlined into a single unified timeline.
As a result, there was no more Earth-2 Batman, because there was no more Earth-2 to be the
Batman of.
If Earth-2 didn't exist, then neither did Helena Wayne.
It's worth noting that Huntress was one of the few characters to survive the initial
destruction of her home dimension, finding herself stranded alongside her Earth's Robin
on a strange world with no record of her existence.
With nothing left for her in the universe, she joined Robin on a final, fatal mission.
The final indignity?
The story specifically states that her body and Robin's were never recovered after their
deaths.
Here's the thing about superhero comics: nothing ever really goes away, especially when it's
tied to a character as prominent as Batman.
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 mobster
families in the years before Batman arrived, and organized crime was mostly replaced by
evil clowns and mad scientists 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 as the only survivor.
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.
You don't really get to be a vigilante in Gotham City without attracting some attention
from the vigilante in Gotham City.
Sure enough, the new Huntress soon encountered Batman.
The big sticking point between the two characters comes from the way they deal with their enemies.
Most versions of Batman famously have a code against killing.
"You finally learned to do what is necessary."
"I won't kill you."
The Huntress, on the other hand, has no problem at all sending her opponents off to their
final reward.
Still, Batman didn't set out to take the Huntress down.
After all, if there's one person who understands the intense trauma of watching your family
get gunned down in front of you, and the anger that can lead you to put on a costume and
wage war against all criminals by night, it's that guy.
Still, he didn't approve of her methods, but the solution he came up with for this particular
problem wasn't the one that anyone expected.
He let her join the Justice League.
Batman's hope was that membership in the JLA, surrounded by paragons of virtue like Superman
and Wonder Woman, would be a good influence on the Huntress and show her a different way
of fighting crime.
It did not work.
When Batman found her getting ready to execute a helpless supervillain at the climax of one
of the League's biggest crises, he booted her out of the league in disappointment.
Helena Bertinelli's relationship with the rest of the Batman family is a little 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, had the sort of relationship you'd expect from a super-smart teenage overachiever
and a world-weary teacher.
Her relationship with Dick Grayson, better known as Nightwing, is… a little more mature.
When he first encountered the Huntress, they had immediate chemistry, and they quickly
found themselves in a team-up with benefits.
An actual relationship didn't blossom out of that encounter, though, partly 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 going to be a dealbreaker.
Even more than Batman himself, Helena Bertinelli's most complicated relationship within the Dark
Knight's group of assorted sidekicks was with Barbara Gordon.
And before you start wondering, it actually had very little to do with Barbara's on-again,
off-again relationship with Dick Grayson.
Instead, the biggest source of conflict came from what was essentially the superheroic
equivalent of copyright infringement.
It happened in No Man's Land, a year-long crossover event where a devastating earthquake
left Gotham City broken and abandoned by the government.
After unsuccessfully campaigning to save the city, Bruce Wayne was left dejected and depressed,
and even contemplated abandoning the city himself, while supervillains carved Gotham
into their own little Fury Road territories.
While Batman was gone, a mysterious new Bat-person appeared, who eventually turned out to be
the Huntress, using Batman's identity and iconography to give hope to the remaining
citizens.
When Batman returned, he gave her his approval to continue acting as the ersatz Bagirl, which
didn't sit well with Barbara.
Babs had been forced to give up being Batgirl after being paralyzed by the Joker, and was
infuriated by the idea of Batman giving away something that she still thought of as a big
part of her identity without even telling her who was under the mask.
Eventually, around the same time that she was fired from the JLA, Huntress gave up the
Batgirl identity voluntarily, but No Man's Land also provided her with a measure of redemption
for what Batman had seen as her failings.
When the Joker launched a horrifying attempt to murder every baby born in Gotham during
the No Man's Land year, Huntress made a heroic last stand to protect the kids.
She wound up fighting a small army of Joker impostors, and was shot by the real Joker
multiple times in the process.
Perhaps surprisingly, she survived the experience.
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 founded a team of her own called the Birds of Prey, coordinating missions
with other superheroines as her operatives.
Having felt aimless for years after her experiences in No Man's Land, the Huntress joined up alongside
Oracle and Black Canary.
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 sending her
on missions designed to teach her lessons and push her 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.
In 2002, the WB launched a Birds of Prey TV show, loosely and that's the key word there
based on comic of the same name.
"Who the hell are you?"
"I’m the Huntress.
And you're the prey."
The show focused on two heroines.
The first was Barbara Gordon, played by Dina Meyer, who had been Batgirl until she was
shot by the Joker, and had reinvented herself as Oracle.
The second, as though things weren't complicated enough already, was Helena Kyle, played by
Ashley Scott.
Like the original Earth-2 Huntress, she was the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, heavily
implied to be the versions seen on the big screen in Batman Returns.
Unlike Helena Wayne, however, this version never knew her father, with Catwoman keeping
her birth a secret from Batman.
Still, after Batman's apparent death, she took the identity of the Huntress and carried
on his legacy alongside Barbara, protecting a younger version of Black Canary, Dinah Lance.
The show only lasted a single 13-episode season before it was canceled.
It did have some interesting ideas, however, including casting a version of Harley Quinn
as the main villain of the series, marking one of the first times she'd stepped out of
the Joker's shadow.
"Very witty, Quinzel"
"Oh, please, it’s Harley.
Harley Quinn.
And quite soon, this city, or what’s left of it, will be mine."
It wasn't entirely forgotten, either 17 years after the last episode aired, and only weeks
before the Huntress made it to the big screen in the Birds of Prey movie, Ashley Scott returned
to the role for a cameo in CW's Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover.
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