Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #525: Artemis Crock

I’ve been doing this for quite some time now, and some weeks, it’s harder to find a character to cover than others.  I mean, I’ve done over 500 of these things, and every so often, I’ll start to work on one of these and realize I already covered the character a while back.  Today’s entry is one where I might have thought I did only to discover I actually haven’t even though I probably should.

Probably because I covered a DC character named Artemis once before.

Artemis Crock is maybe something that only DC Comics has really done:  the legacy villain.  Legacy heroes?  Sure, there’s plenty of them, but there are only so many legacy villains, and I think Roy Thomas is responsible for most of ’em.  Thomas, working with artist Todd McFarlane (yes, that guy) created the first Artemis story in the pages of Infinity Inc in January of 1987.  Infinity Inc was a team of legacy heroes, so it only makes sense that a bunch of legacy villains would come after them.  Artemis was the daughter of two such villains.  Her father was the Sportsmaster, a bad guy who used a lot of sports equipment, and her mother was the first Tigress, but sometimes she was the Huntress, and Artemis often went by Tigress herself.

Here’s the thing:  as a bad guy, Artemis in the comics is mostly one of those baddies that works with teams of other baddies like the Injustice Society.  I don’t think there are any particularly Artemis-heavy stories that showed her to be all that interesting in her own right, and that may in part be due to the fact that I found very few pics of her in Google Images, and they didn’t even have the same hair color.  She did the villain thing, threatened various members of the Justice Society or Infinity Inc, and that’s probably about all there is to it.

But take Artemis outside the comics, and she suddenly gets a whole lot more interesting.  Most prominently, a good guy version of Artemis, often going by her real name, was the archer character on the animated series Young Justice, as voiced by actress Stephanie Lemelin.

This Artemis, still the daughter of the Sportsmaster, was also Cheshire’s sister, Wally West’s true love, and would only adopt the Tigress identity when she faked going bad to go deep undercover for the Team.  Like every other main character in Young Justice, she was a deep character that was used well in a show that keeps getting canceled on cliffhangers.

Now, there was an Artemis on the CW series Supergirl, but she had a better showcase on another CW series set in a different universe, the utterly charming live action Stargirl series where she was played by actress Stella Smith.

This Artemis was a highly-aggressive high school athlete whose parents were founding members of the Injustice Society, but in her case, they were played as more comedic villains compared to the other members of the Injustice Society.  This Artemis would try to join Stargirl’s nascent JSA, have a bit of a rough time of it due to her tendency to have a hard time sitting still and not throwing punches, but would eventually succeed after her parents, both more or less reformed, were killed by the Icicle, causing her to move into Stargirl’s own home as a new foster sister or something along those lines.

See, those are interesting characters.  They also seem to be much more interesting than the character that inspired them.  Make of that what you will.