Darkness! Dark Angel!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Dark Angel (Shevaun Haldane), originally Hell's Angel, is a fictional superheroine from the Marvel Comics imprint Marvel UK. She first appeared in Hell's Angel (July 1992); the character and the comic book were both renamed to Dark Angel with issue due to legal threats from the Hells Angels biker club.
Fictional character biography
In the Middle Ages, the sorcerers who would become the Mys-Tech Board of Directors were granted immortality by the demon Mephisto in exchange for the continued sacrifice of mortal souls. One of these men, Ranaulph Haldane, had a daughter named Shevaun in the modern period. When Shevaun was 21 years old, Mephisto killed her father for betraying him. Shevaun then saw the Angel of Death arrive for her father. The angel placed a fragment of the universe itself within Shevaun, and gave her a suit of high-tech body armor to control her new power. She fought Mys-Tech's agents and other techno-magical monsters across the Earth, in other dimensions, and in the afterlife.
She teamed up with numerous other American heroes and anti-heroes in the process, including the X-Men (particularly Wolverine and Psylocke), Hercules, Sabretooth, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, as well as the "soul fragments" of the deceased Nuke and Nighthawk of the Squadron Supreme. She also teamed up with and/or fought fellow Marvel UK characters Death's Head II, the Knights of Pendragon, the Warheads, Genetix, Wild Thing, and Motormouth and Killpower, and joined several of these heroes in the short-lived team called the Dark Guard.
Shevaun was one of the many superheros who gathered to fight Mys-Tech in a literal apocalyptic showdown. The organization had created a double of the earth, which would grant them absolute power over the original one. The heroes would fight their way to the core of Mys-Tech, losing dozens of their own to death and destruction. Shevaun not only had to fight, she had to maintain her wildly fluctuating and painful powers to help the cosmos on a level few of her companions understood. In the end, only a small number of heroes were left alive and even a smaller number made it to the devices that could reverse time. Sevaun joined with the group, which included Professor X, Doctor Strange, Albion of the Knights of Pendragon, Death's Head and Motormouth (the last out of pure need more than anything else) and managed to reverse time just enough so that none of the heroes died and the earth wasn't in real danger. The Counter-Earth was blocked off from Mys-Tech. Only the heroes who made it to the end actually remembered all the chaos and death that had gone on before.
Dark Angel later reappeared as one of British intelligence agency MI:13's reserve agents, battling against an army of vampires on the moon. The caption accompanying her reintroduction stated that she was "back from space"
