Tomorrow Woman
27 years ago - Clara Kendall is born with a mutated 4-lobed brain.
9 years ago - 18-year-old Clara goes to college to study journalism.
8 years ago - 19-year-old Clara is kidnapped by Professor Ivo, who uses her as a baseline to duplicate her biology & build his Tomorrow Woman android. Her memory is wiped and she is returned to school.
7 years ago - 20-year-old Clara begins her internship at a local radio station.
5 years ago - 22-year-old Clara Kendall graduates & becomes a regular DJ. Professor Ivo contacts T.O. Morrow to work on the Tomorrow Woman android.
3 years ago - The Tomorrow Woman android successfully infiltrates the Watchtower. She achieves independence and chooses to sacrifice herself to save the team while fighting a Daemonite Temporal War-Beast. In her last moment, her awareness briefly touches all of time. The android's consciousness is uploaded into 24-year-old Clara Kendall's mind in her moment of death. She is found by Vera Black at the behest of Rip Hunter, who helps her understand her new trans-temporal awareness. She joins the Elite.
2 years ago - 25-year-old Clara Kendall gets her own show in a much larger city.
Tomorrow Woman is a very cool character; she has an original and yet classic look, and her advanced telepathy and telekinesis powers mesh very well into the Justice League. So why have so few people heard of her? Because with a few small exceptions, she really only ever appeared in one comic ever. It just so happens that that one comic was VERY good, and that makes this character even cooler. We're going to include her story, but we're actually going to use her for even more than that.
Tomorrow Woman's Comic HistoryTomorrow Woman was a one-off character from issue #5 of Grant Morrison's 1997 JLA, one of my all-time favorite comic series. This was the first issue after the introductory story, and began a trope within the series of Morrison revisiting classic Justice League villains and story arcs and reimagining them for modern comics. In this case, the story centered on classic mad scientists who created Amazo and the Red Tornado. In this case they created a secret android that was so perfect that she completely passed herself off as not just human, but as a brand new hero that earned the trust and respect of the League. The intention was to eventually have her betray and kill the League, but by the end of the issue she had managed to truly overcome her programming, and sacrifice herself to save the League, and the entire world. It really is an amazing comic, and for a single-issue character, Tomorrow Woman really was a great character.
She's made some appearances elsewhere. The 1999 Hourman series included a sequence where Hourman used his ability to bring people back for one hour to temporarily revive Tomorrow Woman. It's a weird and kind of hard to follow comic, but it includes these panels which are amazing and make me adore the character even more. The character returned again in the 2008 weekly series Trinity. While this story gives us her human name Clara Kendall, it's also absolutely impossible to understand. As far as her comic appearances are concerned, the only one we're going to use is her original story in the pages of the JLA, but we also have further plans of her own for her. |
Our Tomorrow Woman StoryTomorrow Woman is an absolutely perfect fit for our original version of the Elite, a team built to emulate the energy and style of WIldstorm comics. In particular, she would work as a pastiche of the character Void, a member of the original Wildstorm team the WildC.A.T.S.
The first step would be to introduce the idea that Tomorrow Woman was actually built using the template of a real woman: Clara Kendall, who actually was born with a 4-lobed brain, although any possible powers she might have as a result are dormant. We'll make the incident where Tomorrow Woman sacrifices herself to be against a Daemonite "Temporal War-Beast" (patent-pending)... the goal here is to set up her future connection to the Elite's enemies, the Darmonites, and to make it possible for her to briefly, in her death, gain a version of temporal awareness when she briefly glimpses all of time. Simultaneously, in her death, she uploads her entire consciousness into the mind of the unaware Clara Kendall. This means that Clara, in a moment, knows everything about what happened to her, about her powers, and her weird and sudden connection to the world of superheroes. As she is, that character wouldn't be likely to become a hero; but when she is sought out by Rip Hunter & Vera Black, she's given a chance to live up to the memory of the Tomorrow Woman android who, in such a short time, created such an amazing example of what a hero can be. She might not be as skilled in her use of her advanced mind powers, but she also has an awareness of the influence of the Daemonites that will be invaluable to our homemade version of the Elite. |
Tomorrow Woman's FutureThis is a stretch, we know, but the fact is Tomorrow Woman really worked. She was a great character in a great, self-contained story. If nothing else, we'd absolutely be including that small story and her time in the JLA, because this is really the best case scenario for what a character can be; she's pure value added to the overall story of the League, and of DC in general.
But we love the idea of what she could be in this new team we're putting together in our heads. This new more human version of Tomorrow Woman with the heroic example of her own sacrifice to live up to feels like a great addition to that group. Will she be a good character? That really comes down to how she's written, but as a concept we think this really works; a person suddenly endowed with huge power and awareness, coming into her own in how she uses it, discovering what it means to earn the legacy of a short-lived but well-loved character. Plus we just get more Tomorrow Woman, which is awesome. |