Harbinger (DC Comics)

Harbinger
Harbinger. Art by George Pérez
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	(as Lyla) New Teen Titans vol. 1 Annual #2 (July 1983) (as Harbinger) Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 (April 1985)
Created by	Marv Wolfman George Pérez
In-story information
Alter ego	Lyla Michaels
Team affiliations	New Guardians Black Lantern Corps Suicide Squad
Abilities	Self-duplication and reintegration, energy materialization, superhuman strength, flight, and possessed an orb that recorded every bit of history in the multiverse and beyond while allowing for teleportation through space, time, dimensions, and realities.

Harbinger (Lyla Michaels) is a fictional character, a DC Comics superheroine created in the early 1980s.

An orphan whose ship sunk during a violent storm, Lyla Michaels was rescued from certain doom by the Monitor, a cosmic being locked in an eternal war against his anti-matter counterpart the Anti-Monitor. Raising Lyla as his assistant, the two monitored the multiverse's heroes and arranged for weapons and super-powered henchmen for various villains, to test heroes that the Monitor would recruit for his impending final battle against the Anti-Monitor.

When Crisis on Infinite Earths began, Lyla assumed the identity of "Harbinger" after entering a womb-like chamber which energized her and allowed her to create a series of doppelgangers in her new costume. These doppelgangers recruited a wide variety of heroes and villains to fight the Anti-Monitor's shadow demons and protect a series of vibration towers, designed to protect Earth 1 and Earth 2 from the wave of Anti-Matter destroying the DC Multiverse.

However, while recruiting the hero Arion, a shadow demon merged with one of Harbinger's duplicates, allowing the Anti-Monitor to control her once her various doubles merged into a single entity. Under the Anti-Monitor's control, Lyla killed the Monitor. Ironically, Monitor foresaw the Anti-Monitor's gambit and arranged to have his life force be the fuel to power up the vibration towers, saving Earths 1 and 2 from doom. The shock of what she did caused Lyla to revert to a version of her normal form, which then sacrificed all of her powers to save the last three alternate universe (home of the Freedom Fighters, the Charlton heroes, and the Captain Marvel family) from annihilation.

When the five remaining universes merged, Harbinger suddenly regained her power in the process of time and space merging to create a new single universe DC Universe. Afterwords, Harbinger recorded the history of the Post-Crisis DC Universe into a computer satellite. This led to the Millennium crossover, which had the satellite fall into the hands of the Manhunters, who used the data to confirm the identities of much of the Earth super-hero population as part of a greater plan to infiltrate the super-hero community. After the mini-series, Harbinger joined the New Guardians and was infected with the AIDS virus along with half the team. She reunited with fellow Monitor allies Pariah and Lady Quark during War of the Gods, after which she was offered membership with the Amazon tribe of Themyscira as the Amazons' official historian.