Laurel Gand / Andromeda

Here are some thoughts on Laurel Gand / Andromeda from a couple years back when she was the topic of the mailing in Apa-LSH. Back in probably late 1989, Mary and I were visiting friends Arnie Starky and James Ricklef on a Saturday evening and this was about the time we were coming up on the publication of Legion #4 and #5 and we told Arnie and James in strictest confidence about the changes that were going to occur in the Legion timeline. As a big fan of Supergirl, Arnie immediately observed that the new timeline would need someone to fill that historical role, something that I think had not at all occurred to any of us (heaven knows we were juggling plenty of monumental concepts already, trying to improvise this storyline literally between one page and another of issue #4).  With that Arnie, James, Mary and I started kicking around ideas for who this new Supergirl might be. I don’t remember if we came up with it that evening or in the next day or two, but since Laurel Kent was going to be absent from our new timeline (all Kryptonian elements were not to be used in future “Legion” issues), the use of the “Laurel” name seemed logical. And we wanted the character to have some familial bond with the hero taking over the Superboy role in the new timeline, Mon-El / Lar Gand / Valor, and thus Laurel Gand was created. I think it was the next day, a Sunday, that we called Keith and told him the idea and my recollection is that he immediately loved it. And you’ll note she shows up in the first possible issue she could have, #6 – I suspect Keith had penciled much of the issue, since Laurel comes in fairly deep in #6. Keith warned us about the thong he’d put her in, which didn’t seem like a big deal to us – this version of the Legion was pushing the limits of comics at the time in terms of language, themes and violence, and was showing lots of skin in lots of situations, so this seemed consistent with the tone of the book. It proved to be somewhat of a jolt for some readers, especially those who logically associated Laurel with Supergirl. But as new editor Michael Eury explained in a letters page answer, as much as Laurel may have shared in common with Supergirl, she was an original character. And if there was any confusion on that point, the skimpy costume would certainly serve as a reminder. Keith really kind of charted her personality with how he used her in #6-7 and we quickly built on his lead.  Laurel immediately developed as a character who was passionate, sometimes too impulsive for her own good, monumentally noble and heroic and really proud to be a Legionnaire. It quickly fell to us to lay in some background for the character when, as a fill-in issue, we were asked to do her origin -- or rather we suggested it.  They needed a fill-in for #8 and decided all the readers who’d picked up the Legion with the new 5YL series would want to know the group’s origin, so that was our assignment – retell the origin. For me, it felt important to avoid just telling the story once again of three kids on a space cruiser stopping an assassination attempt – I didn’t want to contradict any earlier depictions nor create a bunch of elements to the origin that future creators would either have to adhere to or violate themselves.  So we figured out a way to tell the story from an angle that hadn’t been told before and that was unlikely to crimp future re-tellings of the origin – we looked at events through the eyes of Brande’s assistant Marla Latham.  The actual assassination attempt and everything going on in the heads of the founding members all happen off-panel. (Yes, we could have used this issue to really get into the heads of the three founders and establish their personalities for the readers, but keep in mind that two of the three founders weren’t going to be 5YL members and I didn’t see much use in getting into the head of the third, Rokk, since his unassuming heroism didn’t need thought balloons to explain – his words and actions spoke for themselves.) So that origin issue got written in a banzai effort over Thanksgiving weekend – and remember that I was still working full-time for Variety and Mary was working nearly full-time as a nurse at that time, so this was a big push on our part.  But  a little while later they came back to us and said they were now going to need a second fill-in, so we were going to have to take that elegant one-issue script we’d killed ourselves to write up and break it up and stretch it out over two issues. We were asked to do it by now actually showing the assassination attempt itself, undoing the exact reason for the approach we’d taken in the first place. Needless to say, I was really not enthused about undoing the work that had so much pushed us to the limit over our Thanksgiving weekend, especially to rework and stretch out a story we thought had been crafted very nicely as a one-issue tale. (And yes, I’m being really unfair to our wonderful editor, who was surely suggesting this approach in an effort to make this extra fill-in as easy as possible for us and also allow all work that had been done on #8 to still get used in some form.) So right there on the phone, in a minor panic, I started searching my mind for some idea, any alternate story we could tell to let our script for #8 stand as is. And what occurred to me was the origin of Laurel. To sweeten the deal, I figured we could make it kind of a “part two” of #8’s Legion origin story by making one of Laurel’s first Legion missions the capture of the individual responsible for that assassination attempt on Brande. And I feel as if that ended up being the right call – two interesting, fast-paced, information-crammed single-issue stories with some connection rather than a two-issue interruption to re-tell one of the most over-familiar stories in the Legion canon. We tried to work in as many similarities to Supergirl’s origin as we could, while keeping Laurel’s story true to her character and to the universe we were writing about in the 5YL Legion. There was a little tension because I’d put a bunch of visual references to the original early ’60s Supergirl Legion initiation into our script and Keith told the editor to just skip sending the artist those references so the story wouldn’t look too dated. I wasn’t very pleased to have worked as hard as I did to look up and include several references, hoping this story would give us some nice updated versions of the original story’s visuals, and then have all my efforts go for naught. But in retrospect, I have to say Keith was right and it was smart not to put those old images into the artist’s mind. I think we’d already established a lot of bad blood between Laurel and the Khunds and then this strory tied her origin into a Khundish invasion of the Daxam system in which Laurel’s parent were killed and she ended up being the hero who repelled the invaders and saved Daxam. And all of this was a huge blow to the pride of the macho, sexist Khund warriors -- that a pre-teen girl emerged as the great hero who engineered their defeat -- so ever since, they’ve been determined to avenge that humiliation. For her part, Laurel, of course, must live with the fact that the Khunds killed her parents, though in a first in the history of all comic-book characters everywhere, Laurel is not bloodthirsty for revenge, more regarding the Khunds as a World War II veteran might regard the Nazis – there are a lot of reasons to hate them, but if you’re an actual good guy, you fight those feelings because you’re striving to make the world a better place, and that means acting on principle, not on dark emotions.