Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Heroes Case File #208: Halo

I’m not sure DC has had a more, let’s say diverse superhero team than the Outsiders. They didn’t have a common origin or even purpose beyond being a group Batman put together to do the sorts of things the Justice League couldn’t or wouldn’t do. The team membership ranged from rookies from other countries, third string DC heroes, and whatever other strays the Dark Knight could pick up along the way.

And then there was the strangest of the bunch, Halo.

So, how to explain Halo…

Halo was a young, amnesiac blonde girl who popped up during the initial mission that founded the Outsiders in Geo-Force’s fictional country of Markovia. She seemed like a typical, sweet young teenage girl who had absolutely no recollection of her time before she met and joined Batman’s new team. They called her “Halo” because her powers took the form of various colored auras…or, you know, halos…each of which had a different effect.

What were those powers? Well, red auras made shields, orange allowed flight, yellow shot energy blasts, and green made illusions. Indigo acted as a tractor beam while violet healed Halo even if she was dead. And white just made a bright, blinding flash. Presumably the color blue did something, but if it did, Wikipedia doesn’t say.

Now, eventually, someone recognized the blonde teenager who didn’t wear a mask. Her real name, she was told, was Violet Harper. She was a runaway and her parents missed her.

Except that didn’t feel right.

And it turned out it wasn’t. Violet Harper was actually evil. And dead. Mostly dead. She was a violent sociopath while she was still alive, but then some even more violent sociopaths killed her. How was she alive again? Simple. She wasn’t. Her body had been reanimated by an alien lifeform called the Aurakle, an energy-based being that wanted to experience life as a human.

What that means is that Halo isn’t always a young blonde teenager. While Halo often reverts back to the Violet Harper body, she’s been known to inhabit other bodies as well, including at one time the evil ex-wife of an Outsider named Technocrat. But it also means other universes have shown different Halos.

Like this one from the *JLA: The Nail* series.

And for the new season of the Young Justice animated series, Halo takes the dead body of a Muslim teenage refugee from the fictional country of Quarc. Her name here is Gabrielle Daou.