Tomorrow Woman

8 years ago - Tomorrow Woman is first created by Professor Ivo, a new android designed to more perfectly mimic a human, giving her a unique four-lobed brain. In her moments of consciousness, she believes she is journalism student and radio DJ Clara Kendall.

5 years ago - Tomorrow Woman's personality matrix becomes too complex for Professor Ivo to manage alone. He contracts T.O. Morrow asking him to consult on the project.

4 years ago - Tomorrow Woman is brought fully online by Professor Ivo & T.O. Morrow. She believes herself to be Clara Kendall, and lives her life as a 22-year-old radio DJ who discovers her unique powers and becomes a superhero.

3 years ago - Tomorrow Woman successfully infiltrates the Watchtower. She achieves independence and chooses to sacrifice herself to save the team, and the world.

Tomorrow Woman is a very cool character; she has an original and yet classic look, and her advanced telepathy and telekinesis powers mesh very well into the Justice League. So why have so few people heard of her? Because with a few small exceptions, she really only ever appeared in one comic ever. It just so happens that that one comic was VERY good, and that makes this character even cooler. We're going to include her story, and just want to make sure we give it as much room to breathe as we can.

Tomorrow Woman's Comic History

Tomorrow Woman was a one-off character from issue #5 of Grant Morrison's 1997 JLA, one of my all-time favorite comic series. This was the first issue after the introductory story, and began a trope within the series of Morrison revisiting classic Justice League villains and story arcs and reimagining them for modern comics. In this case, the story centered on classic mad scientists who created Amazo and the Red Tornado. In this case they created a secret android that was so perfect that she completely passed herself off as not just human, but as a brand new hero that earned the trust and respect of the League. The intention was to eventually have her betray and kill the League, but by the end of the issue she had managed to truly overcome her programming, and sacrifice herself to save the League, and the entire world. It really is an amazing comic, and for a single-issue character, Tomorrow Woman really was a great character.

She's made some appearances elsewhere. The 1999 Hourman series included a sequence where Hourman used his ability to bring people back for one hour to temporarily revive Tomorrow Woman. It's a weird and kind of hard to follow comic, but it includes these panels which are amazing and make me adore the character even more.

The character returned again in the 2008 weekly series Trinity. While this story gives us her human name Clara Kendall, it's also absolutely impossible to understand. As far as her comic appearances are concerned, the only one we're going to use is her original story in the pages of the JLA, but we also have further plans of her own for her.

Our Tomorrow Woman Story

We really did try to find ways to get more Tomorrow Woman in our timeline. for a long time, she was actually a part of a superhero version of the Elite; we proposed that Tomorrow Woman's four-lobed brain was actually achieved by copying a real person. That Professor Ivo had in fact kidnapped a real life college student, Clara Kendall, and had used her as the basis for Tomorrow Woman. We then said that Tomorrow Woman died fighting a Daemonite "Temporal War-Beast" (patent-pending)... and that in the moment of her death all her knowledge, as well as the war-beasts temporal cognition, transfered into an unsuspecting Clara. The goal here was to make her work in out version of the Elite kind of like Void from the Wildcats.

As you can see, it's all pretty spotty... but those were the lengths we were willing to go to get more Tomorrow Woman. The reality, though, is that part of what makes her so great is that both she and her story are so thoroughly self contained. She's told entirely in a single issue, and that's really kind of incredible given how complete she feels.

So in the end, all we could really do is just try to give that singular story as much love and development as we could. Sometimes less really is more.

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