Jakita Wagner was a blessed child. Her father was one of the Century Babies - people born at midnight on January 1st, 1900. These people were gifted with great powers and destinies, and one of these was the African explorer, Lord Blackstock.

Blackstock was from a line of English nobles who had grown up in the jungles of Africa. His superhuman abilities made him an almost invincible protector of the wild. He fell in love with a woman from the hidden city of Opak-re. This technologically advanced, peaceful civilization resided in the heart of Africa, and had one cardinal rule when dealing with outsiders - no interbreeding. Blackstock and his beloved, a scientist named Anaykah, broke that rule in 1934.

The birth of their daughter led the leaders of Opak-Re to permanently seal the city off from the world. Before the city vanished, however, Anaykah gave her baby to Elijah Snow, a friend of Opak-Re. She warned him the baby would be special, begged him to save the child, and vanished with her city.

Snow brought the child to a kindly couple in Germany who were familiar with the raising of exceptional children, having previously done so with a child who fell to earth in a mysterious spacecraft the year before. This couple, the Wagners, named her Jakita and raised her as their daughter.

Snow maintained a presence in her life, and when she grew up he found that she was every bit as "special" as her mother had warned. She was exceptionally strong, tough and fast, and much like her father, she appeared to stop aging somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties.

When it came time to form The Planetary Organization, Jakita was chosen to be the leader of the field team that would explore the world for the strange and the unexplained. She has, "a low threshold for boredom," and has very little patience with subtlety or guile. When Snow was forced to leave Planetary to save his teammates, she attempted to lead. The death of her teammate Ambrose Chase, however, spurred her to track Snow down and bring him back around as the leader of the team.