The original Wonder Girl, Donna Troy, has a several confusing origin stories, but one story reconciled all of them and made her DC Comics’ ultimate multiversal hero. Donna Troy’s origins are something of a joke among DC readers and creators, with the iconic hero technically being created due to an error in communication and each continuity shakeup in the mainstream DC universe making her true origin more complicated, nearly overshadowing her beloved role as a founding member of the Teen Titans alongside her nixed love interest, Nightwing. Although Donna Troy’s background has been rewritten yet again by Flashpoint, her 2005 retcon in the post-crisis DC universe is easily the best version of her origin, as it uses the multiverse itself to honor all of her stories.
The first iteration of Wonder Girl is, fascinatingly, Diana Prince herself. In the Silver Age of comics, DC published stories about Clark Kent during his childhood, where he’d go on adventures as Superboy. In Wonder Woman’s case, she’d interact with past versions of herself, with a teenage version of Diana Prince being Wonder Girl and a toddler version of her being Wonder Tot. All three protagonists were Diana Prince, but it was easy for readers to mistakenly believe that they were each different people.
When the Teen Titans were created, miscommunication between two DC Comics creative teams led to Wonder Girl (who was written to be Diana Prince’s younger sister) being one of their founding members. When the inconsistency became apparent, Wonder Girl received the name Donna Troy and several origin stories, making her true background increasingly convoluted until issue 4 of the 2005 miniseries DC Special: The Return of Donna Troy (by Phil Jimenez, Chuck Kim, and José Luis García-López) cleared up her origin in the best possible way. The series concludes with Donna Troy being a multiversal anomaly and the combination of every version of herself in the multiverse, making all of her different backgrounds canonical.
The Diana Prince version of Wonder Girl was sometimes referred to as Wonder Woman’s sister, which she functionally was in the older Silver Age stories, but many of her new origins keep this detail. In some Donna Troy origins, she is the literal sister of Diana Prince (along with Nubia, Wonder Woman’s other sister) created from clay like her older sister. In other origins, which depict her as an ordinary human, given similar powers to Wonder Woman by the Amazons or the Greek Titans, she is a figurative sister, forming a close bond with Diana Price akin to an adopted younger sibling. While The Return of Donna Troy makes Donna a conduit for the multiverse itself, it also establishes that she began as Diana Prince’s biological younger sister (having been similarly created by Hippolyta), preserving this key element while simultaneously canonizing her myriad of origin stories.
In the post-Flashpoint DC universe, Donna Troy’s origin was rewritten yet again, with her being created by the Amazon witch Derinoe as a duplicate of Diana Prince (intended to kill her), but defying this sinister purpose with the help of the rest of the Amazons, who gave her false memories of one of her Silver Age origins (that of a human orphan who became Wonder Woman’s adopted sister). As a younger duplicate of Diana Prince, Donna Troy is her sister once more, and while her origin has been rewritten once again, she may still be a conduit for the multiverse. The Return of Donna Troy made every Wonder Girl origin story canon while giving Donna a unique connection to the multiverse, using metafiction to reconcile her confusing backgrounds in the best possible way.
