Titania (DC Comics)

Titania is a fictional character, a comic book faerie published by DC Comics. She first appeared in The Sandman (vol. 2) #19 (September 1990), and was created by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. She is inspired by and implied to be the same Titania as the faerie queen in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Publication history

As part of his comic The Sandman, writer Neil Gaiman planned a small arc involving William Shakespeare entering a deal with the Dream King to write plays that would live on after him. Having introduced Shakespeare, Gaiman then decided to tell the story of the first play that the writer wrote for Dream in payment of the bargain. He turned to his favourite of Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream creating analogs of the play's main otherworldly characters and inventing the fiction that Shakespeare wrote the play to Dream's instructions to ensure that humans never forgot Faerie and its rulers, Lord Auberon and Lady Titania. Having created her, Gaiman used Titania as a recurring character throughout the series, and when he was asked part way through his run on The Sandman to write a script to introduce DC's magical characters to a new audience, he gave her a guest role in the resultant mini-series, The Books of Magic.

One ambiguous scene written by Gaiman was interpreted by some to suggest that Titania was the mother of protagonist Timothy Hunter, which ensured that the character would return when the mini-series became an ongoing series. Chosen as Gaiman's replacement, John Ney Rieber discovered that a gaming guide to the DC universe had made this assumption, and worried that a key part of the Tim Hunter character - that he was a normal teenage boy - might be lost if this was true.