First Appearance: Wonder Woman 131 (1998)
Creators: John Byrne
Abilities: Immortality, mind control, time and size alteration, and teleportation.
Backstory: Dark Angel has long tormented any humans foolish enough to summon her with dread and doom, but the mythical bringer of disaster began her comic life as an evil spy in Spy Smasher comics during the Golden Age. Decades later, incarnations of the villain bearing the name in the modern era have served as a mystical antagonist to an array of DC heroes, but she is most notably tied to (and responsible for much of the convoluted history of) Wonder Girl.
During the modern era, the wandering evil spirit Dark Angel was called forth by Wonder Woman’s first recurring villain, Baroness Paula Von Gunther. She then possessed Von Gunther and attacked the then-acting Wonder Woman, Hippolyta, who battled the malicious villain on several occasions. Eventually Dark Angel appeared on Themyscira intending to kidnap her daughter, Diana, but accidentally kidnapped Diana’s magical double, brought to life with Themyscirian sorcery, instead.
Dark Angel forced the double to live endless lifetimes characterized by suffering— each one ending in brutal tragedy, with her life being restarted and erased from the world’s memory, hoping that the painful cumulative effect of her daughters suffering would drive Hippolyta insane. Instead, the double was able to grow stronger, and finally became the independent entity now known as Donna Troy.
In the Return of Donna Troy mini-series, Donna discovered that Dark Angel was in fact her counterpart from Earth 7, and was saved from the burning apartment by the Anti-Monitor, and raised her to be his harbinger. When the Multiverse was reconfigured in one single Universe, Dark Angel (who had somehow escaped the compression of every Donna Troy into one single being in the new Earth), sought to kill Donna and make her relive the lives of the other alternate Donnas as a way to avoid the merging. When Dark Angel was defeated, Donna became the true sum of every Donna Troy that ever existed on every Earth, a living key to the lost Multiverse. During Infinite Crisis, a new Dark Angel would appear, again serving the Anti-Monitor.
