Titania (DC Comics)

Titania
Titania, shown in childhood through to her disguised appearance as a pure-born faerie, from The Books of Faerie
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	The Sandman #19 (September 1990)
Created by	Neil Gaiman (writer) Charles Vess (artist)
In-story information
Species	Fae
Place of origin	Earth
Team affiliations	Seelie Court
Notable aliases	Maryrose, Queen Mab
Abilities	Vast magical abilities

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

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 analogues 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 Queen Titania was the mother of the comic's main character, 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. Instead of simply denying the possibility of Titania being Tim's mother Rieber decided to use the idea as one of his ongoing storylines, while gently debunking it. This meant utilizing Titania - and her husband Auberon - as supporting characters for most of his run on the comic, which in turn meant frequent visits and explorations to Faerie. Such was the importance of Titania to Rieber's version of The Books of Magic that when its popularity caused DC to release a spin-off miniseries, they decided that a three issue mini-series about her rise to power would be most suitable - one that, ironically, reignited the possibility that she might be Tim's mother.