The H.I.V.E. Mistress
57 years ago - Regina Kane is born.
39 years ago - 18-year-old Regina Kane goes to college.
35 years ago - 22-year-old Regina Kane begins her graduate work.
32 years ago - 25-year-old Regina Kane begins her doctoral work.
29 years ago - 28-year-old Regina Kane earns her doctorate, and begins collecting funding for her own private labs.
26 years ago - 31-year-old Regina Kane merges her labs with H.I.V.E., bringing several of her assistants and followers with her.
23 years ago - 34-year-old Regina Kane becomes the concubine to Damien Darhk, taking his name.
17 years ago - 40-year-old Regina Darhk kills Damien Darhk, usurping control over H.I.V.E. to use it more directly, amassing her own power base.
14 years ago - 43-year-old Regina Darhk creates the H.I.V.E. Academy as a way to train some of the subjects of the experiments of H.I.V.E. members.
10 years ago - 47-year-old Regina Darhk moves to steal Atlantean magical archives. Tempest discovers the plan, and her H.I.V.E. Academy fights the Teen Titans, who disassemble her organization. She initiates a final defense, and her inner circle all commit suicide rather than be captured. She dies in the destruction of her headquarters.
The exact nature of H.I.V.E.tends to be pretty fluid as it appears in comics, because it gets used for different purposes in different stories. Four our purposes, however, we want a more defined narrative structure for them, and that means latching onto specific characters who give it that structure. One of the characters we used was Damien Darhk, but the H.I.V.E. Mistress has actually made more appearances, and really lets us turn H.I.V.E. into the saturday morning cartoon villains we really need them to be.
The H.I.V.E. Mistress's Comic HistoryH.I.V.E., the organization, appeared for the first time in issue #1 of Marv Wolfman & George Perez's New Teen Titans in 1980, and would go on to be a regularly recurring villainous organization in all Titans books, and sometimes in other series, even including Superman. Their backstory and history was always a little loosely defined, but the basic story was that an unknown 'H.I.V.E. Master' assembled seven similarly-unnamed 'criminal scientists' to take over the world.
The H.I.V.E. Mistress was featured as the leader of H.I.V.E. during a storyline featured in that same series. She was the widow of the original H.I.V.E. master, and spoke regularly about him. She was depicted as this beautiful, peaceful-looking woman who spoke as through she was a loving maternal figure. She spoke about ordering her men to sacrifice themselves while committing horrible crimes, but always sounded like she was very sorry about the whole thing. In the end of the storyarc, she died along with all the rest of that incarnation of H.I.V.E. when they self-destructed their headquarters in an effort to finally defeat the Titans. |
Our H.I.V.E. Mistress StoryWe essentially used the version of the mistress as she appears in this single story arc as the main leader of H.I.V.E. when they first confront the Titans, but also mixed her into the story of the founding of the organization by a) making her deceased husband, the founder of H.I.V.E., Damien Darhk, and b) actually having her kill him. It works really well, to make her the catalyst for the transition of H.I.V.E. from an objectivist scientific think tank full of mad/evil scientists to something more cult-like with world domination goals.
We also had to completely invent her actual name and backstory. The wife of Slade Wilson, Adeline Kane, has some minor connections to H.I.V.E, and she's actually the headmistress of the H.I.V.E. academy in the animated Teen Titans cartoon, but we needed her to be a completely separate character, so we went with the name Regina. It might seem odd to have two different characters with the same last name, but it's not like that same last name doesn't also occur with three out of five bat-women. |