Atlee
16 years ago - Atlee is born, the daughter of laborers in Strata, the hidden underground kingdom formed eons ago around the corpse of an alien deity.
10 years ago - 6-year-old Atlee develops geomorphic powers due to her family's exposure to the alien quixium. She begins learning how to use them.
2 years ago - 14-year-old Atlee saves a group of Stratans from being killed by runaway monsters by bringing them to the surface. She defeats the monsters with the help of Buddy Baker and Koriand'r. They work together to care for the Stratan refugees and find a way to return them home. Atlee elects to stay on the surface and work with Kori & Buddy to assist displaced aliens on Earth.
1 year ago - 15-year-old Atlee & Buddy Baker help Koriand'r receive financial backing from Josiah Power for her Haven Project, a refuge and school for displaced non-humans, to assist the displaced alien subjects of the Reach. They are assisted by Power's operative Cole Cash.
Atlee is actually the character that has lingered the longest in our list of characters we really want to include but just couldn't make happen. I think I was personally just resisting the idea of creating a whole underground civilization, but somehow every time we tried to adapt her into the timeline, it just felt like there were insurmountable barriers, and that was such a shame because she's such a phenomenal character. I actually went so far as to talk to Jimmy Palmiotti himself about this... while I'm not sure I adequately explained what the project even IS, he did let me know the one change he would make to her if he had a second pass at the character. He wouldn't call her Terra. She would just be Atlee. That's it. Everything else was exactly how he wanted it, and honestly, how can you argue with that?
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Atlee's Comic HistoryAtlee was originally imagined by the creative team of Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Connor & Justin Grey as a new character for their run on Power Girl, following Palmiotti & Connor's stellar Power Girl story in the pages of JSA: Classified a few years earlier. The intention was for Atlee to be a sort of secret mentor for Power Girl, introduced as a new young hero who was naive to the ways of the world who was supposedly being mentored BY Power Girl, but who possessed a quiet wisdom and purity of purpose that Karen ultimately started to learn from. Because of some weird editorial shenanigans, Atlee managed to actually make her debut a few years earlier in a single issue of Supergirl, also by Palmiotti, Connor & Grey, using Atlee's heroism as a contrast against the struggle Kara was having at the time with her purpose in the world.
This proved to be a fun predictor, because after her own four issue miniseries Atlee would go on to be a signature character for Palmiotti & Connor. She would show up in several of their series (they work together all the time, on account of being married). She was in their extremely popular Harley Quinn run, and became part of the supporting cast of their Starfire series. This really remains her main role in continuity... Basically as Jimmy and Amanda's daughter. This would be a minor role if they weren't among the most talented and beloved creators in comics, but as it is Atlee is universally loved way beyond what her small appearance footprint would otherwise imply. |
Our Atlee StoryAtlee has basically been a white whale for our project for a long time. She's one of those characters that had what felt like a core issue in her story that prevented us from using her. Her origins involve her coming from a whole community of deep earth dwellers, and that meant we'd have to include that. It felt like just way too much to ask the continuity to support, especially if they are able to dole out her extremely powerful geomorph abilities. We kept trying to find other ways to give her her powers, making her somehow an alien, or one of the DNAliens created by the Cadmus project deliberately cloned from the original Terra.
Every method seemed to undermine what was absolutely her best quality: her adorable ingenue personality combined with her unassuming, naïve wisdom. There was just no way we could get that specific balance. |
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The turning point actually came from a really strange place: from a book under Gerald Way's Young Animals imprint, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye. It created a blueprint for Carson to be included in the timeline, but in doing so it also created a second narrative entry point for an underground society, and suddenly Atlee coming from one made way more sense. We also get a lot of mileage by removing any reference to Terra... she doesn't have to use the name or be associated with the original character at all. As predicted, she just makes way more sense as a character if we just let her go by her actual name.
Once we had that, we really needed to find a place for her in the world. We could absolutely have made her Power Girl's sidekick / partner, but our Power Girl is really way more defined by her role as the JSA chairperson and her mentoring lots of young legacy heroes, which kind of undermined the special place Atlee would have with her. Instead, we zeroed in on her relationship with Starfire in her solo series. The story we're telling with Kori, with her Haven Project, is a perfect place for Atlee to thrive, and she can have the exact same role with Starfire, who gets to mentor someone who is even more of a newcomer to the Earth surface than she is, highlighting her journey as she adopts Earth as her new home. Atlee is just a phenomenal character for this exact role, and we love that we can finally finally FINALLY include her in our timeline! |