Menagerie
25 years ago - Pamela Sonjia is born in Puerto Rico
19 years ago - 6-year-old Pamela begins to study dance.
7 years ago - 18-year-old Pamela becomes a professional dancer.
5 years ago - 20-year-old Pamela is abducted by the Daemonites, who bond her with an alien symbeast colony on their interdimentional ship.
4 years ago - 21-year-old Pamela Sonjia is freed from the Daemonites by Manchester Black and joins the Elite. She helps fight Superman who defeats her by chemically rendering her Symbeasts inert.
3 years ago - 22-year-old Pamela Sonjia's powers are re-ignited by Manchester Black hen he reactivates her connection to the Daemonite ship as he reforms the Elite in an effort to kill Superman, but that control of her is severed when Vera Black rests control of his ship from him. She helps battle Manchester, killing the Hat with Paul Booker, and joins Vera when she chooses to use the Daemonite ship to battle them in her new Elite.
Of the characters created for the Elite, Menagerie is very likely the most immediately visually striking. Her bizarre powers, coming from her symbiotic bond with a colony of alien 'symbeats' is fascinating enough, but she also has an absolutely fantastic look, monstrous but alluring, evoking something cringingly invasive. She;'s equal parts vampire and insect queen. She's able to produce all sorts of different effects using her colony of strange creatures and the end result is a character that is immediately original and exciting.
Her cool design and powers are actually a fantastic send up of several members of Wildstorm's Authority (specifically Swift and the Engineer), So she really needs to stay a member of the Elite. Since the new team is meant to be made up of victims of the Daemonites, it becomes pretty important to make her one, but given the fact that her powers come from having been an alien experiment, that's actually pretty easy to do. In fact, since her specific abilities are that she is bonded to a colony of alien creatures, we can even take that one step further and suggest that she's ALSO bonded to the Elite's living interdimentional ship, Bunny. This gives a solid explanation for her changing relationship with Manchester Black, because he's the one responsible for freeing Bunny, which suggests he's also responsible for freeing HER. When Vera severs all his controls over Bunny and enlists her in the battle against the Daemonites, it is totally believable that Paula will choose to do the exact same thing. There's also something very cool about the fact that Paula is a non-white hero who's powers have literally nothing to do with her ethnicity. We can always do with more of that. |