Monday, October 10, 2011

Lady Vic


Lady Elaine Marsh-Morton, a.k.a. “Lady Vic” is a fictional character in the DC Comics universe. She is an English noblewoman who works secretly as an assassin, bounty hunter, and mercenary. She is employed on a semi-regular basis by Roland Desmond, a.k.a. Blockbuster, and appears most frequently as an antagonist of Nightwing (Dick Grayson).
Her sobriquet “Lady Vic” is short for "Lady Victim," referring to any of her possible targets.

Lady Elaine is descended from a long line of British soldiers and mercenaries, and a genuine English aristocrat. The money she earns from her secret career helps prevent foreclosure on her impoverished family estate.
She completes an assignment for Blüdhaven gang boss Antonio “Angel” Marin[1] and returns to Blüdhaven to collect her fee, and is upset to find Marin missing. She tracks down Marin’s lawyer, and threatened to kill his young daughter if she wasn’t paid – a threat she definitely would have carried out, if Nightwing had not intervened. Dudley Soames informs her that Marin had been replaced by Blockbuster, and offers to pay her fee, with a retainer to continue working for him.
Elaine is one of Blockbuster’s hirelings tasked with tracking down Oracle. When Blockbuster was dying of heart failure, Elaine is entrusted with locating Gorilla City in Africa, and finding a replacement heart.
Lady Vic is sent to eliminate Tarantula, Blockbuster's latest ally, when Tarantula had disobeyed his orders. Tarantula defeats Lady Vic, shooting her in the stomach.

Elaine is a highly skilled martial artist and athlete, and equally skilled with firearms. She has a sentimental preference for a collection of antique weapons handed down by her ancestors, souvenirs of their colonial exploits: a matched pair of Katara (कटार), a Japanese katana, a Thuggee strangling cloth, a Maasai javelin, and a Webley revolver.
Of the mercenaries regularly employed by Blockbuster, Elaine is one of the most skilled, certainly more skilled than Brutale, Stallion, or Electrocutioner, though not on the level of opponents such as Nightwing or Batman. When Blockbuster decided to test Shrike’s abilities by pitting him against all of his regular assassins at once, Elaine lasted the longest, and was the only one to actually inflict a wound on him before being knocked out.
Lady Vic also has qualities of determination and ruthlessness that set her apart from the others. Possibly this is because she desperately needs the money she earns, for the sake of her family’s continued standing and honor. As mentioned above, she was more than willing to kill a young girl to get paid; during the Hunt for Oracle storyline, when Black Canary escaped from a plane in which she was being held prisoner, Lady Vic astonished her by leaping into the sky after her, without a parachute.

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