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Joe-Singleton — Laurel-evolution
Published: 2010-09-21 21:01:15 +0000 UTC; Views: 8723; Favourites: 79; Downloads: 519
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Description
Laurel Kent, later Laurel Gand thanks to the editorial hurricane that overthrew DC history in the 1980s, was the first Legion trainee I even encountered. Copying a Mike Grell panel of her face was one of the first attempts I ever made at drawing a beautiful woman. She made an impression.I didn't mind when they made her a Daxamite and a relative of Mon-El, I liked Mon-El so I could live with that, but when they made her a robot, they crossed the god-damn line!
so, anyway, I did a new costume for her in my Artistic License column, along with all the other costumes and variations I could include and here they are.
In her incarnation as Laurel Gand, she was also intended to sub for Supergirl, hence her power upgrade and blondeness. Me, I have a thing for beautiful brunettes.
For her costume update, I borrowed the Kingdom Come Superman S.
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Comments: 27
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The poncho costume makes it look like she's naked underneath it! The Mon-El costume reminds me of "What if Power Girl was a Daxamite in the post-Crisis DCU?"
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The poncho costume makes it look like she's naked underneath it! The Mon-El costume reminds me of "What if Power Girl was a Daxamite in the post-Crisis DCU?"
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Nice!
I think subconsciously my own version of Supergirl was likely influenced by Laurel as well... I too have always had a thing for heroic brunettes
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Really hated her poncho costume, though.
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I did hate the poncho costume... it was different and to this day remains unique- but I did like the character look, the hair and face design of that period.
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For a girl who started out in one of the sexiest costumes every to come from Grell pseudo-fetish wear, to go to the unsexy red blanket, ugh.
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Okay, you definitely got me there. She was by far the least clothed character in comics there for a while, and she managed to make the Grell sexy Saturn Girl costume (which I couldn't wear on my best day) look conservative, but it made sense- invulnerability meant no need for a serious costume, so why not be skimpy as anything?
And then the poncho. I admit it, while I liked the hairscut and the face design... yeah. Nobody looks good wearing a blanket with a hole cut in it.
CAPE. UR DOIN IT WRONG.
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For me, sexy isn't always about the amount of skin, Grell's costume just worked on Laurel. Just from a design, standpoint, it was better than her later costumes.
Funny thing is, Saturn Girl's pink bikini was a fan design, intro'ed by Dave Cockrum in the comics, and based on a bikini available at the time, made famous...or infamous...by Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat.
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No argument from me- believe me, i have worked plenty of sexy and it is seldom about the amount of skin I show (I am not a fan of showing off my midriff... it just ain't pretty.
Wow! I completely did not know that about the Saturn Girl costumne! Your Legion-Fu is strong!
So you gonna grab a set of the DCU Legionnaires sets tomorrow from Matty.com?
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I remember seeing it in an old issue. Saturn Girl's pink bikini was designed by a fan, K. Haven Metzger.
Yes, I am a mountain of trivia. No, I looked that name up on the web, not out of my head. Didn't even know about any Legionnaires sets coming out.
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[link]
Tomorrow morning. I am SO there!
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Damn, damn, damn.They got Timber Wolf and Ultra Boy, my two favorite male Legionnaires. Dammit!
Oh, as a fellow Legion fan, let me invite you to take a look at my web comic, Ad Astra, which evolved out of my frustration over not being able to break into comics and my frustration over the never-ending editorial meddling with the Legion.
[link]
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They will be selling the individual toys out of China for a while yet (broken up from the set) but me, I'ma plunk down a couple hundred and grab the set... Wildfire! Collossal Boy! TENZIL!
I'll be checking out your comic... thanks for the link!
~S
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I think Legion fans will like Ad Astra. Been doing it since 2007, coming up on 4th anniversary, soon. You will certainly recognize the various homage characters. I'm probably more "chatty" than "actiony", but there's a bit of action from time to time.
I got sick of the endless reboots, mostly forced on Legion fans by changes to the 20th/21st century books. Crisis was bad enough, with the elimination of Superboy and Supergirl. The tortured explanations to correct the timeline, then, should have been enough warning to keep them from trying it again. Then, every time an editor got a "big idea", it wound up having "unintended" (but easily predictable)consequences for the Legion.
Fast-forward a few years and reboots later and this frustrated fanboy decided to take an old idea for a Legion concept and rework it. Though I wasn't as happy with the cartoon series as I'd hoped to be, it did spark the inspiration to switch to a more cartoon style of art, making it a bit easier to keep me on schedule. If I'd been in charge of the project, I'd have spun the series off from the JLU episode where Supergirl stays with the Legion. Always liked Supergirl better in the Legion and they worked it beautifully, with the idea that she was more comfortable in their time period, because it was more similar to what she'd grown up with. Perfect. Of course, they dumped that and had to change the title just before the series started, whee!
There's about 400 strips of Ad Astra, since I only post twice a week, when I'm on schedule. It starts with a "history lesson" to bring the readers into the future. It's based in a universe I created for my old HeroBlog site, which is still around, but hasn't been active for awhile. The blog writer, Amp, has been kidnapped by aliens from the Dimension R9.345 or something. It's one of the hazards of being a superhero.
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I plan to work my way through Ad Astra- thanks for the link! And I understand... I started actually being a productive writer again, got involved with a writing sim only to find out after six months that the moderator was a control freak but wasn't really wanting for the sim to continue, thus why he was working so hard to sabotage it. Interesting experience that.
As for the many Legion reboots, I actually may be one of the only folks who enjoyed the 'trenchcoat' Legion, but yeah, eventually that tire got retreaded so many times it didn't even fit the wheel anymore and I just forgot about the Legion and spent my time with my memories of what once was, because they couldn't take a steaming dump on that.
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Yeah, I go back through my Legion comics every few months and read some old issues. not too long ago, I had worked my way back up to the Great Darkness Saga and I was amazed at how much of the lead-in stuff I had forgotten. For years, I'd only re-read the TPB of that arc.
With Ad Astra, I am the editor-in-chief and everything else, so there's nobody who can reboot me, but me, and I won't do that. To me, it's bad storytelling.
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NO KIDDING.
I think that was part of the charm of the Trenchcoat Legion- yes, it was a reboot but it actually grew out of traditional continuity and it was a reassembling of that which was and making it almost the same, just slightly different. And those differences weren't jarring and hugely negative to my eye, so much as interesting. And looking for how things fit back together was like a treasure hunt for longtime fans.
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Yes, what (WHY?) did they do to poor Laurel Kent...
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Well, at first she was just a throwaway character. Clark's descendant who looks like Lois or one of a thousand other brunette characters in DC comics.
Then they had that stupid Manhunters thing, and after that, they adapted her (first name, anyway) into a replacement for Supergirl in the Legion.
I actually liked Andromeda, until they made her a Nazi FROM SPACE.
Wouldn't mind a bit if they brought brunette Laurel back and called her Andromeda, bring it full circle.
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They might.
I haven't collected since about the Manhunters saga.
That was one of the (many) reasons I stopped collecting. It was stupid, and didn't make sense, due to the earlier storylines.
And they do kinda look like an army of all Lois clones don't they?
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I can understand your frustration with DC been doing high superhero body counts since Infinite Crisis, but who knows since DC been doing a lot revisiting of the past like Grant Morrison's work on Knight & Squire, maybe DC will restore Laurel Kent's background to the current DC timeline especially since Paul Levitz is writing Legion of Super-Heroes again.
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Although I think this is a truly lovely gathering of Laurels, and I agree about DC's editorial hurricane making things confusing, I'm afraid I have to demur a bit with your character history.
Not about Laurel Kent being retconned into a Manhunter robot for a DC pre-Crisis crossover — which did indeed cross the goddamn line into stupid trashing, especially after she'd just been shot with a Kryptonite bullet a few months earlier in an LSH annual.
But, rather, about Laurel Gand being a redoing of that character. They only shared s first name, actually. Kent was an Earth-born 30th Century descendant of Kal-el (and should have stayed that way), who shared only invulnerability with him. She was never a Legionnaire, but was in the Academy.
Gand was from Daxam, and a cousin in the 30th Century to Lar Gand or Mon-el. (Styled at first after him, as in number 3 above.) She had all of Lar's powers and was a Legionnaire.
Gand was implicitly filling the place, not of Laurel Kent, but of Supergirl, after both she and Superboy were eradicated from the Legion's backstory in 1989, on the insistence of the Superman editors. Which retcon tied the Legion in knots, not unraveled for nearly 20 years, only with the recent "retroboot" and restoration of Kal-el to the Legion.
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Sure, I know all that. I'm not saying they were intended to be the same character, altered, but they got the name from Laurel Kent and invented a descendant for Lar Gand (what, did he have wife and kids on Daxam before he went and got himself locked in the Phantom Zone for 1000 years?) and gave her Laurel's first name. And Laurel Kent was nowhere to be seen, after that.
Millennium (the series/X-over) came after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Zero Hour seems to have wiped her L.K from the timeline.
The funny thing is, Crisis was meant to "clean up" the DC universe, and only made it murkier. John Byrne's reboot of Superman was supposed to streamline the character, and then his books became more about the supporting cast that the guy whose name is in the title. And now, they've even added Superboy (young Kal-El) back into the mix, undoing a lot of what Byrne did. Although he's said if he'd known DC was going to require him to make 10 years pass in the gap between Man of Steel #6 and Superman #1, he would have kept Superboy around, so he could tell those coming-of-age stories.
My one and only problem with Laurel existing is that I'm enough of a science fiction fan to recoil from the idea of a human and a Kryptonian producing offspring. All that interbreeding with aliens is fantasy nonsense, not science fiction. Unless they have to go through a bunch of botched attempts and lots and lots of genetic engineering. And, at that point, whose kid is it, anyway (genetically speaking)? I guess Star Trek burned me out on the idea, what with every intelligent species being interfertile with every other intelligent species, regardless of radically different metabolisms and blood chemistry. We can't mate with chimps and they're so close to us, some people want to put them in our genus, homo. If you can mate with it, it's human. Of course, DC has an ancient race that's indistinguishable from homo sapiens that might've seeded all the worlds where you find our type of life, etc, etc, but they haven't taken that path. Not enough sci-fi writers, in comics, these days. Lotta fantasy types, though.
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On closely re-reading your comments, I realized you noted many of the same facts after all. I mainly wanted to note that they never created a successor or practical replacement to Laurel Kent, thus wasting a characterization, although they did for Supergirl. The use of that lovely first name for Ms. Gand was merely a coincidence.
... Thanks for letting me ramble. Ye GADS, how I wish we could edit or withdraw comments, even if for only an hour. I waited two years to join dA out of being reluctant to put up with that frustration.
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