Another one of the Female Furies.
For Lashina, I felt I had a tight edge to walk – I wanted to keep what is, quite honestly, the BDSM flavor of her outfit, but de-objectify it a bit. Those rings around the tits were cute, Jack, but kinda blatant. I took it down to one simple signifier: she’s got a collar with a ring on it. Also she whips people with the steel ribbons she’s tied up in but that’s nothing new.
Big Barda: looks like Lanie Kazan, acts like Roz Kirby. And kicks all the ass. As with my previous redesign of Orion, I tried to take Jack Kirby’s original design and strip it down to an essential. Barda’s fish-scaled armor has turned into hex-scaled armor, and the hexagon theme of her belt in some of Jack’s drawings has been extended to the red bands on her limbs. The panties-over-leggings look is gone because the ‘circus strong man’ resonance it conjured up in the fifties is long since gone for modern people like me.
The floating bits on her powered-up Power Rod are held there by gravity manipulation, and can be extended very rapidly. Not that she needs it to kick your ass. But it comes in handy when she’s beating apocalypse-sized gods down to size.
A team book: “Big Barda and the Furies”. Or possibly just “The Furies”. It would concern the adventures of the much-neglected lady asskickers from Kirby’s “New Gods”.
I would want to look over all the various additions folks have made to the team over the years to pick my final set of characters. But they would all have costumes like the ones for the original set: fully clothed and armored, rather than the skimpy cutouts of most lady supers.
Artist: Not me. Someone who is faster than me. Someone with enough animation training to keep them simple and active, and enough sense to not draw them all as identical Hustler pinups.
The introductory issues would focus on how BAD ASS they are, in the manner of XTREME 90s Image books. Their morals would be set up as ambiguous – they were originally Darkseid’s elite fighters, and while Barda dragged them to the side of light in their original appearance, they seem to have bounced back and forth over the years. I’d have them mostly be heros, albeit fractious and conflicted ones.
Story arcs:
One of the Furies reverts to Apokalypse programming and has to be stopped. Probably a good intro arc, it touches on their history and establishes a general theme for the series – conflict between what they were raised to be and what they are now.
A trans fangirl Fury wanna-be is rejected due to (a) being a mere human rather than a New God and (b) being “male” in their eyes. She goes off and Batmans herself into something that can compete at their level. Dunno if she gets in after that. She might not want to any more.
Standalone issues where Much Ass Is Kicked. Whatever baddie is fun to draw, really.
Various arcs of cosmic/paradimensional adventures. About half their adventures should be on Earth, half out in space/the future/whatevs.
At some point during a future adventure one of them strikes up a relationship with one of the LSH. I want to say Braniac-7 because GREEN SKINNED BISHI CYBORG YUM. Complete with very female-gazey drawings thereof. But whatever works in current Continuity.
The Wikipedia page on them notes that at one point they appeared on Earth in the guise of hookers, with Granny Goodness as their madam. This is exactly the opposite of how I’d treat them. Ugh.
Mr. Miracle appears now and then – he IS Barda’s husband. She pretty much always saves his bacon, not the other way around. (Rescuing him from some scheme always works for a filler issue!) His costume is super objectifying, he is a lithe acrobat with a prominently displayed crotch!
If I ever want to do a superhero story I could probably file the serial numbers off this and have fun. Not sure if “playing with Jack’s toys” isn’t half the fun here though.
Anyway. I should go back home and get to packing for APE.