Jennifer Pierce
15 years ago - Jennifer Pierce is born, the second daughter of Jefferson Pierce & Lynn Stewart, just as her dad becomes Black Lightning. Her mom takes her and her sister and moves back to Cleveland.
8 years ago - 7-year-old Jennifer's older sister Anissa Pierce manifests her own powers.
4 years ago - 11-year-old Jennifer's father Jefferson Pierce becomes the Secretary of Education.
3 years ago - 12-year-old Jennifer's metagene activates. she makes a deal with her father Jefferson Pierce that she won't become a superhero until she finishes high school, just like her sister Anissa Pierce.
Jennifer Pierce is, through no fault of her own, not quite as successful a character as her sister. She's the result of some cart-before-the-horse character design, forced into existence to fulfill a desire of the writer rather than out of any organic need of the story. This is exactly the sort of character we're trying to navigate around. Still, there's some good to be done here just by finding out what about her DOES work, so we're going to see what we can do here.
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Jennifer Pierce's Comic HistoryJennifer Pierce appeared for the first time in issue #12 of Justice Society of America Vol 3, which was the post Infinite Crisis relaunch of the incredibly popular series JSA. the creative team was largely the same, but the series seemed to have changed its focus into bringing as many characters from the Kingdom Come elseworlds miniseries into mainstream continuity as they could. This has never really worked well, since that series is great as a standalone piece of art, but doesn't really mesh into the regular DC story as some writers would like it to. In Jennifer's case, there was already a design in place; a character called 'Lightning' that appeared in Kingdom Come along with a host of other young original characters. To bring Lightning into modern continuity, Geoff Johns essentially just stole the origins of another character that had been introduced five years earlier: Anissa Pierce, Black Lightning's daughter.
Jennifer Pierce, unlike her sister, wasn't a unique character with her own powers and who was pursuing her own ambition as a superhero; she was a victim of her powers that generated a weird electrical field, explaining the bizarre and out-of-place look that she was inheriting from the Kingdom Come design. |
Our Jennifer Pierce StoryGiven how completely derivative Jennifer Pierce was, as created in the pages of Justice Society of America, I would just as soon not use her in our new timeline. We could just as easily have left Anissa, who is a far more original character, as an only child. But then there were these DC Nation shorts, which depicted Anissa and Jennifer as a pair of sisters with their own powers, and they were fantastic. More importantly, as the sisters showed up together on shows like DC Superhero Girls, there's a certain magic in showing a pair of sisters working together and loving each other that both comics and our timeline can totally use. So we're going to add Jennifer just so we can build on that energy between these sisters.
We need to make some changes, of course. First of all, rather than giving Jennifer what amounts to an exact replica of her dad's powers when Anissa's are so unique, I'd much rather give her something cool all her own... perhaps like the ability to temporarily turn her body into a small bolt of lightning or something. Also, while she's still years from fulfilling her end of the deal with her dad that will allow her to suit up, I imagine she needs a much better look than the one grandfathered in for her from Kingdom Come. In the meantime, though, she's simply a 15-year-old girl with superpowers and a dad considered one of the best superheroes of all time. |
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