Jean Loring

40 years ago - Jean Loring is born.

22 years ago - 18-year-old Jean begins pre-law in Calvin City.

18 years ago - 22-year-old Jean begins law school.

14 years ago - 26-year-old Jean finishes law school, passes the bar, & starts working in the Ivy Town DA's office.

11 years ago - 29-year-old Jean Becomes a trial lawyer, and first works with Ray Palmer.

9 years ago - 31-year-old Jean discovers that Ray Palmer is the Atom.

7 years ago - 33-year-old Jean marries Ray Palmer.

4 years ago - 36-year-old Jean divorces Ray Palmer.

2 years ago - 38-year-old Jean, is effected by the influence of the Heart of Darkness & attempts to murder Sue Dibny before she becomes the new host of Eclipso. She attempts to flee to space, but is confronted by the Justice League and the Shadowpact, who seperate her from the Heart of Darkness and cast it into the Paths Beyond.  Jean submits herself for full-time care.  

now - 40-year-old Jean Loring creates the Justice Foundation, an organization devoted the helping people recover from superhuman trauma.

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There's a awful lot to explore with Jean Loring, because she's a fantastic representation of so many of the particular tribulations of women as depicted in both vintage silver age comics as well as more modern ones.

She was, from the very beginning, depicted as a career woman, but it was always understood that the eventual plan was to give up her career to settle down and get married after she had "proven that she can make it as a lawyer".  This led to Ray Palmer helping her with her cases as the Atom, but only so that she would hurry up and decide to marry him.  Meanwhile, even though she was clearly meant to be a modern, self-sufficient woman, that often seemed to mean writing her as standoffish and unpleasant.

None of this is particularly WRONG, other than the fact that Jean was never really permitted to be an actual person as much as she was a puzzle Ray was trying to solve. 

It needs to be understood that Silver Age comics were very much being written for children.  The relationships between men and women as depicted in comics of the era all played romance as a ever deepening sinkhole of lies and subterfuge.  Not having been a child in the fifties and sixties, we can't really speak for exactly what those kids expected adult relationships to be, but this sort of thing couldn't possibly have helped. 

The end result was an attempt to write a modern career woman that unfortunately played right into the expectations that her career was doomed to never amount to more than a hobby.  It was a very complex idea built just to keep her in her place. It's not surprising that she was never written as much of an interesting character, and as the decades passed their marriage devolved into a narrative complication.  Ray's stories were best when he was lost in the depths of the subworld, Jean had no place in those stories.  

Which leads to the most famous depiction of the character for modern readers, when she actually killed Sue Dibny & Jack Drake in an effort to rekindle her romance with Ray.   It was a plan that was absolutely insane, and the story acknowledged this, showing her looking completely crazy as she confessed to Ray.  

Ultimately, Jean wasn't an important enough for this sort of character assassination to ever have mattered that much, but what really made this unfortunate is that the lousy understanding of the original writers, the men that wrote a competent career woman as a silly, obsessed girl, left a character that should have been so interesting as an utter vacuum of personality for a writer to later turn into a serial killer in a story that will ultimately be remembered as a low point in DC's institutionalized misogyny.

It was after all of this happened that some new, interesting ideas were introduced.  Jean started to be influenced by Eclipso while in prison, becoming the entity's new host. Suddenly, she was an interesting character with real agency.  It's an entirely new observation on women in comics that it's only as a villain that a woman is permitted this sort of characterization, as though women simply having control of their lives is something that has to be fought against.

  This idea is an old one, and there are better characters to use to make this point.  What's interesting is that Jean had experienced so many different forms of the abuse female characters suffer in comics.  This, ultimately, is her defining characteristic.  

In re-imagining the character, it becomes a pretty straightforward task of telling the same story and same events, but simply removing the convoluted ideas meant to keep her in her place.  She's a lawyer, because she's a lawyer.  You don't need to know more than that.  She works with Ray.  They are married.  Later, they divorce.  It's not a story that needs to have a series of asterisks that remind the reader that she's a girl.

Also, the introduction of the idea that Jean later becomes Eclipso's Host actually gives us an explanation for her behavior during Identity Crisis; rather than showing her simply being crazy, her ongoing descent into Eclipso's control is a perfect catalyst for that story, and it gives us a fantastic version of another classic DC character.  A tiny shift in timing, and we get a GREAT villain, and a much more sensible version of a character that has long gotten the short end of the stick.