For a lot of similar characters there's generally a pretty obvious stand out choice, but for Katana they all have their share of pros and cons, so it's a little harder to settle on a single look. Katana has gone through a lot of different costume changes over the years. This means that, after working with the Outsiders, Tatsu would choose to step up and become a hero on an even grander scale. She's an incredibly prominent character of international origin, and it seems like it would be a huge missed oppprtunity not to include her here. The answer, to us, was to make her be Japan's representative in the Global Guardians. It never really tracked that she would be working with a secret American covert ops organization, but we did want to use her in another team enviornment. This was absolutely a defining relationship for both characters, and we wanted to make sure we included it.Īfter this iteration of the Outsiders ends in our timeline we had some choices to make about what to do with her next. Of course, the next step of to have her become part of the Outsiders, but within that group one major element of her story that we need to make sure we establish is her relationship with Halo as her surrogate mother. Once we have Katana's origin in place, she can pretty much immediately assume her role as an assassin targeting Yakuza as part of her mission of Vengance. She is a fairly self-contained character and all we really have to do is to get her particular origin right, which is fun because it is immediately infuses our world with this classic feeling of old-world tragic melodrama. Getting Katana right is a pretty easy task. although I don't know if they've ever really made a fully formed case for what she's actually doing on that team. In the aftermath of this movie she was added to the 2016 Rebirth relaunch of the Suicide Squad, and has remained a member of the team for more issues than she's appeared anywhere else. While she was included in a five-issue story called "The Dragon's Hoard" in the classic Ostrander Suicide Squad series, there really wasn't any precident for her being a member of the Squad when she was added (kind of as an afterthought) to the 2016 Suicide Squad movie, played by a tragically underutilized Karen Fukuhara. She's occurred often enough in the Birds of Prey that you could safely consider her a member of the team. Unlike a lot of the other main Outsiders characters she's also made a lot of appearances in other series, as her overall design and persona are clearly just very cool. She wasn't a founding member of the 2003 Judd Winick redesign of the team, but joined them in issue #34 after the one year later timeskip, which I believe makes her the character that has appeared in more iterations of the Outsiders than any other. The bulk of Katana's appearances are in all of the various Outsiders series over the years. Her husband and children were killed, leaving her with the sword and a vendetta against the Yakuza. She married Maseo and had two children before Takeo, who had become a gangster, attacked them with a mystic, soul-sealing sword. While training under her teacher, Tadashi, she was courted by two brothers, Maseo & Takeo. She could pretty easily have been a much less compelling character and instead have just been a series of cringy tropes (In fact, there are certainly moments in her original appearances that don't exactly hold up) but thankfully she was granted a cool, very personal story that gave her purpose outside of her cultural identity. Katana's whole story and costume are pretty obviously the result in the increased interest in Japanese culture in the early 80s after the release of the NBC miniseries Shogun. They debuted in DC Sampler #1 in 1983, but of course their actual story begain in Batman and the Outsiders #1. Katana was one of the original characters invented to join the Outsiders, a new team for Batman to lead.
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