DC Comics tried a massive reboot…well, more than once, but this time, I am talking about the New 52. The central idea was more of a soft reboot. Some characters were being treated like they were brand new, but others like Batman and the Green Lantern just continued what they were doing before like nothing happened. Part of the point was to put out something to try and attract a digital readership, and one way to try and gather new readers is to try and create a mystery of some kind.
Enter..Pandora!
Pandora first appeared in the final issue of the Flashpoint mini-series in October of 2011. The Flash had changed history, then tried to change it back, because time travel never works out right. I mean, Ryan and Watson are still arguing over how the time travel worked in Avengers: Endgame. Those guys may need to get out more. Or less. One of those. Regardless, Pandora was there on a two-page splash showing the Flash more or less resetting reality to make the New 52. Who was this mysterious hooded figure?
Um, they didn’t say.
But she did appear, for at least one panel, in each first issue of the New 52, and as the title implies, there were 52 new #1s popping up. And she…um was there.
Eventually it did come out. She was Pandora. As in the woman with the box in the old Greek myth who let the evils of the world out, but there was always hope in the box. It turned out she was part of a trio called the “Trinity of Sin,” three people whom a council of wizards called the Circle of Eternity. One of them was maybe the wizard Shazam. Anyway, the three were cursed to wander the Earth but never be a part of it. Pandora, who may have been punished too harshly according to the guy who may have been Shazam, of course let the bad things out a box. The bad things were later revealed the be the “Seven Deadly Sins” that Shazam watches over.
The other two were the Phantom Stranger, here implied to be Judas Iscariot, and a supernatural version of the Question said to be so awful that his face and identity were erased from history.
As it is, Pandora hung around, even got her own short-lived series at one point and helped the Justice League Dark defeat an enemy called Blight, said to be the embodiment of all that was dark and evil in humanity.
Except, well…the New 52 was kinda, well, unpopular. It wasn’t hard to see why. It was a darker take on the DC Universe, something that would have fit in better with, say, Marvel in the 90s. Heck, a lot of the talent that came in wrote and drew stuff for Marvel in the 90s were involved. DC Comics are usually a lot more hopeful and idealistic. Antiheroes just don’t seem to fit in there. Heck, that could extend to more recent movies where the best-loved of the DCEC were the ones that weren’t dark and gloomy. On the comics end, the company eventually did another rebranding, going back to something closer to what it usually does. Retitled “DC Rebirth,” there was a big special issue for the new way of doing things that was in many ways just going back to an old way of doing things. But how best to symbolize that? Well, there were two things they could and did do. One was to bring back the original Wally West.
The other was to kill Pandora.
Now, if I want to upset Watson, I’ll just point out that it appeared that Dr. Manhattan killed Pandora, but I just did anyway so it doesn’t matter.
Anyway, that was Pandora, a character suggested as a big deal until the powers-that-be just decided to just blow her up.
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