Zoe Torres
14 years ago - Zoe Torres is born. Her mother, Michelle Torres, keeps her a secret from her father Floyd Lawton.
8 years ago - 6-year-old Zoe Torres' mother Michelle Torres writes a letter to Genevieve Lawton to let her know, on her deathbed, that she has a granddaughter. Floyd Lawton tracks her down and meets Zoe. Wanting to keep her away from him and out of his life, he nonetheless goes to war with a local crime lord to keep her safe, ultimately putting his family's entire fortune into a trust for her and giving himself up to Black Lightning in exchange for his protection of her.
1 year ago - 13-year-old Zoe runs away from her mother's protection, and is found by agents of Kobra, who intend to use her to force her father to do several jobs for them. Floyd Lawton tracks and kills her kidnappers with the help of Thomas Blake. She is the first to recognize their clear chemistry.
Zoe's StoryZoe appeared for the first time in a five-issue Deadshot miniseries from 2005 by Christos Gage. He was aleady a very well-established character with a long history with the Suicide Squad, and had a very well-conceived and hard-earned personality as a man with a death wish, so the innovation of the series was quite brilliant; what happened when you gave a man with a death wish something to live for? It's an exciting but also tragic read, and really represented a turning point for the character. All of the subsequent appearances of Deadshot would always revolve heavily around his relationship with his daughter.
In the original concept, It was clear that the intention was for Floyd to remain deliberarely estranged from his daughter as an expression of his own self-loathing, and that really works with how he's classically presented in the Suicide Squad. Modern versions of the character seem to want to bring them together more in an ongoing effort to make the members of the Squad more sympathetic and heroic. A certain amount of that is probably inevitable, but It's really hard to argue with how intensely compelling this relationship is as it was originally imagined. |