Cleo Selwyn was the daughter of Alexander Selwyn and Isobel Selwyn in Titan Comics' Blade Runner 2019 and Blade Runner 2039, set in the world of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. She carried a rare FOXO3 mutation that the Tyrell Corporation wanted for replicant longevity, and after her human mother died of cancer a Nexus-7 copy of Isobel took her out of Los Angeles rather than let Tyrell have her. Former blade runner Aahna "Ash" Ashina raised her off-world as the boy trader called the Rabbit, and as an adult Cleo came home from Arcadia as a schoolteacher and mother to find the replicant who had raised her.
Biography
Childhood And The Escape
Cleo was about four years old in November 2019, the daughter of a Canaan Corporation billionaire whose Santa Barbara estate held an artificial lion cub made for her. The year before, her mother had died of cancer, and Eldon Tyrell had given Selwyn a Nexus-7 replacement in her image. Cleo was told only that her mother had come home after a short illness. For her fourth birthday she received the lion as a pet. In November she went with Isobel and their chauffeur Arkady to the birthday party of young Lydia Tyrell, and after supper the three of them vanished.
After the party Isobel hurried Cleo through the rain toward a door marked 575, late for a meeting that was supposed to take them out of the city. Three strangers offered help and then tried to take the child, and Isobel beat them off before a man named Malak led mother and daughter underground. There they met a fixer called the Lung, who prepared them for a run south with an escort known as the Bones. Isobel cut and dyed her hair blonde and dressed Cleo in plain clothes. The Bones then took them across the southern border, and a boatman called the Heart rowed them to the island sanctuary of El Santuario.
El Santuario
On the beach of El Santuario, Cleo played in the sand with the replicant she believed was her mother until Ash arrived and said it was time to go home. The sanctuary's leader showed Ash private letters between Eldon Tyrell and Alexander Selwyn. Selwyn had agreed to give the Tyrell Corporation custody of Cleo forever in exchange for a Nexus prototype of his dead wife that could be replaced whenever the old model wore out. Cleo carried a rare mutation of the FOXO3 gene, a key to replicant longevity, and the experiments Tyrell planned would have killed her.
A Tyrell transport landed in a rainstorm with Selwyn and armed soldiers behind it, and the unarmed replicants of the sanctuary were cut down as they tried to protect the child. Isobel was wounded shielding Cleo, then stayed behind to hold off the soldiers while Ash flew the girl away. Back in Los Angeles, with hours left before her spine implant shut down, Ash refused to hand Cleo to the police or to Tyrell. She asked where else they could go, and Cleo pointed at the sky. Ash gave up the cure she had been offered, her badge, and her city, and took the child off-world.
The Rabbit
By 2026 Cleo was eleven and living in the mining colonies as a boy named Ian Kady, while Ash worked as a shift supervisor under the name Darja Kady. Among the dredgers of the ice she traded as the Rabbit, a child who refused to deal with everyone at once and who had learned to keep her real name hidden. At home in their cramped cabin Ash waited in a wheelchair, and Cleo told her she had come to hate the game they had started when she was four. Later, on a gantry above the ice, Cleo told a replicant miner named Padraic who she really was.
When raiders stormed the Heidecker-Vostro mining ship, the crew sealed every section and left Cleo on the far side of a locked door. A dredger grabbed her, and the raider leader shot the man dead, then turned the gun on the girl until Padraic stepped in front of her and insisted she was human, a child, and his friend. Cleo left the wreck holding Padraic's hand, and their leader Pellam later demanded transit ciphers so the stolen ship could pass as a resupply vessel. She refused at first, then offered a valid gate cipher for Ramanuja in exchange for being dropped wherever she chose once they were through.
Escape Off-World
On Ramanuja, Cleo stayed with Padraic while Pellam's combat models had the serial numbers cut from their eyes, and she said she meant to see him through the work. Padraic refused the surgery himself, wanting to see the life he had left at its fullest, and Cleo told him she owed him for saving her. A broker called the Hartawan received them and looked at the worn brochure for Arcadia that Ash had once read to her as a bedtime story. He warned that fugitives from a mining colony would not be welcomed into paradise and that the next transport left in a week.
As the crowd boarded the transport, Ash spotted Cleo, now a red-haired girl in a pale jumpsuit, and the blade runner Hythe drew a gun on Ash. Padraic tackled Hythe and was shot for it, and Cleo ran into the arms of a woman who looked like her mother, calling her mama. This Isobel was a new model who carried her predecessor's memories, and she shot Hythe down before the hunter could fire again. Over Padraic's body Cleo apologized to the friend who had protected her. Ash held her on the landing pad, told her to go to Arcadia with Isobel, and sent her on.
Confronting Her Father
Cleo and Isobel delayed their trip to Arcadia so they could follow Ash back to Earth and learn the truth from her father. They arrived at the Santa Barbara estate as Selwyn shut down the spinal brace his people had designed, leaving Ash helpless on the sand. Cleo stepped from a spinner with Isobel, greeted him with a calm hello, and asked whether he had promised her to Tyrell for his experiments. He admitted it, saying Tyrell had promised to save the world and give him back his wife, and he swore they could be a family again.
As he spoke of a new start, Cleo went first to her father and then to the injured Ash, unwilling to leave for Arcadia without seeing both of them clearly. Isobel embraced Selwyn, told him he had loved her too much, and snapped his neck. One of the remaining Hythe copies killed another and bargained for the house and to be forgotten, handing over the brace control so Ash could walk again. They later shared a last meal of noodles at a street counter in the rain. Cleo begged her to come to Arcadia, but Ash said she belonged in the city and walked away into the crowds.
Return To Los Angeles
Cleo spent the rest of her childhood in Isobel's care on Arcadia, and as an adult she married, had one son, and found work as a schoolteacher, with Isobel living in the same home. In 2039 Isobel disappeared, and Cleo believed she had gone back to Earth. She followed, walked through the rainy crowds of Los Angeles, and took a cab whose driver introduced himself as Walter. When he asked her name she told him to call her Cleo, then checked into a hotel under the alias Ms. Calhoun, her mother's maiden name.
Cleo found Ash at the noodle bar they had visited years before and told her that Isobel was gone. Ash took her to the hotel and told her not to leave the room, then went back into the city. Luv, the new replicant blade runner working for Niander Wallace, traced the Calhoun alias, rang the door with a gun drawn, and said she had questions. Ash walked in, warned Luv that killing humans would wreck Wallace's experiment, and offered a disk she claimed held Selwyn's research. Ash told Cleo the disk was blank, and they fled by spinner past the Sepulveda Sea Wall and swam to Hermosa Beach.
The Road To San Francisco
At the hidden camp she shared with Freysa Sadeghpour, Cleo shaved her head and said she thought Isobel had gone to San Francisco, where the original Isobel had family with money. Ash and Freysa argued over Selwyn's research, which had come close to replicant fertility, then Cleo and Ash set off north in a ground truck. Cleo thanked Ash for looking out for her and for Isobel, and worried that Luv would follow them. Ash doubted that Luv had contacts in the city and did not want to talk about the chance that Isobel would not be there. The replicant Lexi had stowed away in the back of the truck.
A tire blew on the road north, and Ash went looking for a nearby town. Raiders opened fire on the truck, and when their man Francis checked the back Lexi shot him through the head. Every raider died in the fight that followed, but Cleo had been hit, and she asked weakly whether they had killed them all. Ash held her in the cab and told her to stay, then a farmer named Mack took them in and treated the wound without damage to her vitals. When Cleo woke wanting to resume the search, Ash went on alone and left her in Lexi's care.
Final Fate
Isobel later reached the farm and explained that Wallace's people had tracked her to Arcadia, so she had quietly led them away from Cleo. Ash concluded that mother and daughter would only be safe if Wallace died, then changed course after the retired blade runner Gaff advised her to bring Wallace what he wanted. Under questioning by Ash, Freysa, Isobel and Cleo, the replicant copy of Ash named Rash revealed that Wallace believed he was close to replicant fertility and that Isobel was the missing piece. Ash then traded Selwyn's research to Wallace in exchange for his promise to leave Cleo and Isobel alone.
After the bargain, Ash found Cleo and Isobel in a crowded street and told Cleo it was done and that they had to get out of the city. She warned that Wallace might send men after them, and Rash promised to protect the pair, wanting off the planet herself. Cleo hugged Ash, said she loved her too, and told her it would be Ash's turn to visit next time. Ash said goodbye in the rain, quietly calling Cleo Rabbit as the younger woman disappeared into the crowd. Cleo left Earth for the colonies with Isobel and Rash, alive so long as Wallace kept his word.
Personality And Traits
From childhood Cleo showed a will that did not match her size, pointing at the sky when Ash asked for a way out and later crossing back to Earth against Ash's old hope that they never meet again. She told Padraic her real name when secrecy was the rule that kept her alive, and she delayed Arcadia to confront the father who had sold her. The disguises wore on her: the boy's clothes of Ian Kady, the Rabbit's trading name, and the hotel alias borrowed from her mother's family. Each mask bought time, and each one made her more determined to live under her own name.
As an adult she built an ordinary life as a schoolteacher and mother, then threw that safety away the moment Isobel vanished. She shaved her head for the road north, just as she had once changed clothes on Ramanuja, treating appearance as another tool rather than a truth. She trusted Ash with her life and with her mother's, and she questioned Luv on sight and refused to leave the hotel with a stranger who knew her real identity. The girl who had hated fake names grew into a woman who used them only long enough to reach the people she loved.
Relationships
Ash Ashina
Ash first met Cleo as the missing child of a paid case and became the closest thing the girl had to a second mother. She took Cleo off-world, lived with her as Darja and Ian Kady, and sent her to Arcadia when hiding together became impossible. Cleo came back for Isobel and found Ash first, trusting the same noodle bar they had shared after Selwyn's death. Ash held her when she was shot, traded Selwyn's research so Wallace would leave her alone, and said goodbye in the rain under the old nickname Rabbit. Cleo asked her to visit next time, a promise Ash did not expect to keep.
Isobel Selwyn
Cleo knew two Isobels and loved both as her mother, never treating the copies as less than the woman who had tucked her in. The first Nexus-7 raised her after the real Isobel's death, fled Los Angeles with her, and stayed behind at El Santuario so Ash could get the child away. The later copy found Cleo on Ramanuja, killed Hythe, snapped Selwyn's neck, and raised Cleo on Arcadia through the rest of her childhood and into her marriage. When that Isobel vanished in 2039, Cleo left her husband and son to follow her back to Earth, then left with her again once Ash had bought them time.
Alexander Selwyn
Alexander Selwyn was Cleo's father, a Canaan Corporation billionaire who traded his daughter's future for a replaceable copy of his dead wife. He hired Ash to find the pair, then came to El Santuario with Tyrell soldiers when he wanted the girl back. Years later he sent Hythe after them and admitted, when Cleo asked him to his face, that he had promised her to Eldon Tyrell for experiments that would have killed her. He said he regretted it and asked to be a family again. Isobel answered that plea by breaking his neck on the Santa Barbara sand.
Padraic
Padraic was a Nexus-8 miner who kept a written record of his life and who befriended the child trader called the Rabbit. He stepped in front of a raider's gun to save Cleo, followed her to Ramanuja, and refused to have his serial number cut from his eye. Cleo stayed beside him through the other replicants' surgery because she owed him her life. He tackled Hythe on the Ramanuja landing so Cleo could reach her mother, and Hythe shot him dead. Cleo apologized over his body to the friend who had never treated her as a prize or a disguise.
Behind The Scenes
Cleo was created for Titan Comics by writers Michael Green, a co-writer of the Blade Runner 2049 screenplay, and Mike Johnson, with artist Andrés Guinaldo designing her and drawing both series in which she appears. Marco Lesko handled colors, and she first appeared in Blade Runner 2019 #1 in July 2019 as the missing four-year-old at the center of Ash's case. Johnson later co-wrote Blade Runner 2039 with Mellow Brown, bringing Cleo back as an adult schoolteacher whose search for Isobel pulls Ash into conflict with Luv and Niander Wallace. The comics are original stories set in the world of the films, and Cleo herself did not appear in those films.
Guinaldo's adult design first showed Cleo in a white coat and hat on the rainy streets of 2039 Los Angeles, then with a shaved head on the road to San Francisco. The shaved cut echoed the boyish disguise she wore as the Rabbit, a nickname Ash used again in their last goodbye. Covers included work by Stanley "Artgerm" Lau, Peach Momoko, and Veronica Fish, and later 2039 issues placed Cleo beside Ash as the story turned toward their reunion. Published with Alcon Publishing, the two twelve-issue series carried her from a four-year-old fugitive in 2019 to a mother leaving Earth again two decades later.
Appearances
- Blade Runner 2019 #1 to #8 and #12 (Titan Comics, 2019 to 2021)
- Blade Runner 2039 #2 to #6, #9 and #12 (Titan Comics, 2022 to 2024)
Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore | Blade Runner Characters
