Foes of the Superwomen of EVA #23: Queen Bee

"The insectoid woman named Zazzala was the leader of the alien hive-world of Korll, and lived purely for the expansion of her species across the galaxy. Her drive for conquest saw her also seek out a means to grant her immortality, done mainly through her dispatching of her humanoid bee drones to loot various worlds. The only world where their efforts failed was Earth, which had been going on one year since the end of the war against the otherworldly menaces the now-defunct U.N. special agency NERV had codenamed 'Angels', along with the thwarting of the respective world-ending conspiracies of SEELE and Gendo Ikari (ironically, NERV's supreme commander) by a group of superpowered women and teen girls directly or peripherally involved with NERV. It was this group, which had banded together as a team called the Justice League, who had beaten back the drones in the first place. Zazzala, none-too-pleased by this development, came to Earth herself and issued an ultimatum to the League: locate and retrieve the vial of a supposed immortality potion for her, or she destroys the planet. Upon reluctantly finding the vial in question, Zazzala (who the press had dubbed "Queen Bee") found herself prevented from opening it thanks to the efforts of one of the League members in Green Lantern (former NERV tactical ops director Misato Katsuragi). With her momentarily caught off-guard, the League was able to drive her and her forces off-planet, keeping her empty-handed in the process.

Queen Bee would seek her revenge on the League by forming her own group in response, its membership comprised of foes of some of the League's individual members from Earth or outer space. Known as the Injustice Gang, the group consisted of Silver Banshee, Clayface, Merlyn the Archer, Gorilla Grodd, Fatality, Angle Man, Hyena, and the youngest of the recruits, the Bug-Eyed Bandit (the alter-ego of an arrogant, power-hungry teenage would-be criminal genius named Katsuhiko Jinnai). Operating out of an Earth-orbiting satellite designed to look like a giant beehive, this team proved to be short-lived following their one battle with the Justice League; the Injustice Gang name would be periodically revived by future assemblies of super-criminals in the years that followed.

Queen Bee's next battle with the League saw her manage to mentally control Earth's bee populations, forcing the League to tread carefully in facing her without risking the bees accidentally going extinct by their hands. Zazzala, as time went on, would opt to be more deliberate in her operations on Earth, first with a covert scheme where she would subvert the leadership of the middle eastern country of Bialya to her will, and then when she took over as the head of the multinational criminal organization called H.I.V.E."

*Author's Note(s)*

Another wave of foes is here, and the theme is again of the more cosmic variety. For the DC half of this wave, I decided on a version of a classic Justice League villain in Queen Bee, deliberately on what would've been the 113th birthday of her co-creator, the legendary writer Gardner Fox, who helped lay the foundation for a lot of superhero comics' most famous characters, teams, stories, and tropes. Queen Bee is another villain who no doubt would thrive in an anime aesthetic, and it wasn't long before I found a perfect character to model my take on.

Said character being, the fittingly-named (as well as fittingly-half-insectoid) Queen Diva from the El-Hazard franchise. (In case you're wondering, I first introduced myself to it with the more lighthearted alternate take on the franchise known as El-Hazard: The Wanderers.) Diva and Zazzala couldn't be more alike, so it was a no-brainer for me to base this interpretation of the former on the latter while I incorporated as much of her early comics history, including the supervillain team she formed (based on her short-lived "Anti-Justice League" from 1975's Action Comics #443, which had a considerably different lineup aside from the inclusion of Merlyn, Grodd, and Clayface). Using Diva as the basis also allowed me to fit her frequent partner-in-crime Jinnai in the mix, leading me to give him the mantle of a foe of the Ray Palmer Atom (meaning he's a semi-frequent pest of Aoi Mogami, the SWOE Atom). Aside from that, no doubt her drones would be based on Diva's usual minions from El-Hazard in the Bugrom. For the visuals (seen on my DeviantArt profile), I mainly altered the image of an animation cell I found online and recolored her outfit where appropriate; I left her skin tone as-is as a minor nod to the non-alien, Bialyan Queen Bee who debuted during the era of the Justice League International (and later gained more prominence as a frequent foe on the animated series Young Justice).