Birds of Prey Redesign Starling

Let me just say this: Ev Crawford was not put together well as a character. From the get go, they were aiming for her to be a replacement for the Birds of Prey members we'd lost, but the fact that she took Zinda's irreverent hellraising, Huntress' trigger happy vigilantism and religiousness, and Oracle's gadgetry, strategy, networking, and resources, all meant that she wasn't just filling in an empty spot, she was filling in every empty spot. And they tried to retroactively slide her in as this old friend of Dinah's, which just made it worse. She was a constant reminder of all the great characters we couldn't have anymore.

And then they made her a bad guy and wrote her out entirely.

But I think she deserves a second shot. She just needs to not be an amalgam of other characters, and have her own voice and personality. To that end, it was really hard recreating her as a unique character. They had written her as so many things that there wasn't anything that stood out as needing to be kept. What really helped provide inspiration, oddly enough, was the Wikipedia page for actual Starling birds.

Inspired by the real life starling's tendency to mimic noises it hears in its environment and adopt them into its own songs, I see Ev Crawford as a chameleon human being, so eager to be accepted by others that she becomes them, and is no longer even sure of what her own personality is. She's led a wild, rocky life, and to her oldest friends can be a pretty unreliable person. When she and Dinah met as preteens, Dinah saw Ev as a free spirited counter to her mother's strict military structure, and the two hit it off. But as an adult, Dinah sees the harsh results of Ev's wild, aimless lifestyle.

Rather paranoid because of the enemies she's made both in law enforcement and in criminal circles, Ev comes and goes unexpectedly, returning most often to Dinah, her oldest acquaintance and one of the last who lets her stay around. It's tempting for Dinah to leave her behind, as most of the trouble she's in she caused herself, but Dinah is fiercely loyal and cannot bring herself to abandon a friend. When Ev shows up, Dinah embraces her with open arms.

The idea is for Ev to be pretty sympathetic, even while she serves as something of a shoulder devil in her early appearances. She wouldn't be an official member of the team, and wouldn't always be present either, drifting in and out of stories as she needs to, but eventually I would plan on her getting her life together, and when she does, the Birds would be where she belongs.

Her outfit was hard to design, considering it's more or less undecided what exactly she is (superhero, vigilante, grifter, whatever?) but I opted to keep (and emphasize) the shoulder holster and tattoo sleeve. She does carry a gun, but Dinah prevents her from using it while in her presence. I did give her essentially superhero pants. Everyone else in the team has boots, be they stylish or combat, so I figured Ev could be different. The pants here are designed like the leggings of a full body superhero suit, and colored after real life starlings (including the iridescent colors you get when you see their feathers in just the right light).

The tattoo sleeve also tells a story. The idea is that her earliest tattoos start at the hand, and represent her outlook at the time. Young adult Ev had bright, vivid colors, and had oscillating ways of looking at the world (the mix of scientific and religious imagery, with Dr. Fate's Ankh and a representation of Rama Kushna). She took a more violent turn and starting having monsters and weapons depicted. She's calmed a bit in her latest batches, using more self reflective imagery (like the uprooted tree), and duller, more earth tone colors. The completed line begins and ends with the starling, with a different color palette.