Lobo's Daughter Has An Unexpectedly Familiar DC Origin

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Teen Titans #25, by Adam Glass, Robson Rocha, Daniel Henriques, Sunny Gho and Rob Leigh, on sale now.

Even though Lobo was billed as the Last Czarian for years, DC's foul-mouthed intergalactic bounty hunter, has been shown to have a few children running around DC's cosmos. While most of those kids haven't left a lasting impression, Lobo's daughter, Crush, is defying that trend in a major way.

Since she debuted a few months ago, Crush has already joined Damian Wayne's new team of Teen Titans, where she's used her raw super-strength and stamina to hold her own against classic Titans foes like Brother Blood and Gizmo.

While her history has been a mystery for the past few months, Crush finally revealed her secret origin (as much as she knows about it, anyway) in Teen Titans #25. Although she already made a few offhand comments about being abandoned by Lobo and looking for her foster parents' killer, she hadn’t filled her teammates, or readers, in on her oddly familiar origin until now.

As she tracks down her parents' killer with her teammate Djinn, a 4,000-year-old teenage genie, Crush reveals that she fell to Earth as an infant named Xiomara who was protected by a giant sentient chain she called Obelus. After she crashed outside of the utopian community and arts festival Burning Man, David and Lisa Rojas found her and took the alien baby in as their own.

While the Rojas struggled with substance abuse, they still tried to give Crush a loving environment to grow up in. As Crush grew into adolescence, her parents drifted between jobs and locations as their struggles with addiction continued. After her parents stole a stash of drugs from a dealer named Ezikiel, Crush's family went on the run, with Obelus serving as an early warning system that kept them one step ahead of their pursuers.

Although Crush grew up believing that her birth parents were superheroes who had sent her to Earth for protection, she discovered her true heritage one day when she saw Lobo fighting Superman on TV. After Crush confronted the Rojas about this revelation and stormed off, Ezikiel killed her parents and stole Obelus. In the years since then, she lived off the grid until Robin recruited her for his new more aggressive Teen Titans.

While Crush's origin stands on its own perfectly well, it draws on and subverts elements of both Superman and Batman's origins. Both Crush and Superman are aliens who were found by curious couples after their spaceships crashed to Earth. When Superman's rocket landed near Smallville, Jon and Martha Kent gave Superman a loving home and an idyllic childhood on their Kansas farm. After Crush's parents found her, they still cared for her, but they raised her outside the bounds of the law, which helped foster a fierce anti-authoritarian streak in the young alien.

Like Crush, a handful of DC characters have raised by criminal parents who were gunned down in a subversion of Thomas and Martha Wayne's demise in Batman's origin. While this turned characters like characters like Prometheus and the Wrath into villains, Crush has taken on a more altruistic path, since her parents instilled some degree of morality in her.

As soon as she was old enough to understand that she was different from everyone else, Crush explicitly said that she wanted to be a superhero. And while she's still acting on her frustrations and has set out to avenge her parents' deaths, she's never fully lost that impulse.

In the same way that the Rojas overcame their worst impulses to raise Crush right, Crush is overcoming her violent impulses to be the hero that she always wanted to be. During her brief tenure with the Titans, she's been a fine member of the team. Even though she's still has some rough edges, she spares Ezikiel's life, reunites with Obelus and cements a new friendship with Djinn in this story alone.

While the identity of Crush's mother and the story of how she fell to Earth are still mysteries, it's clear that Crush is the hero that she is today because of the caring parents who raised her, in spite of their own problems.

CBR

Teen Titans: Lobo's Daughter Crush Has An Unexpectedly Familiar Origin