A Case of Comet Queen

I feel it is time to finally tackle one of the biggest sore spots in the Legion.  Created by Keith Giffen and Paul Levitz, Grava of Extal was first introduced in LSH #304 as an Academy member and received a good bit of supporting play.  She was given a proper origin:  a young fan of the Legion, she sought to replicate the incident that gave Star Boy his powers but the incident created a much deeper, physical change, giving her the ability to fly, survive in outer space, partial invulnerability to high speed flight damage and the ability to emit noxious gases.

Most people however seem to take issue with her personality as opposed to anything.  Grava was a fan-girl so she was quite exuberant at times, but she was also given a highly stylized vocabulary, that was like a 1000 year later valley girl.  She was prone to annoy her other Academy members, including Lamprey. It was this personality that became a love-hate thing for the character and many readers.

Comet Queen had a few stories highlighting her abilities but nothing major.

I have to agree with Timber Wolf though.  Her powers are a bit of a snore. Once again, we have another character whose powers is to disrupt the sight of of others.  Sort of the redundancy between having both Shadow Lass and Projectra.  And most battle cruisers would still have sensors so unless her black clouds of smoke somehow mask her heat signature, her powers won't do much good.  But it also makes it difficult for her teammates as well.

Also, the ability to put someone to sleep via inhalation doesn't work against enemies that
1. don't need to breathe or
2. wear some type of environmental protection already i.e. Mano or Zymyr

However, she does show a lot of fire in battle and doesn't back down easily when the rest of her teammates are knocked out.

She looks like a bad ass here.

She does however appear to be highly maneuverable and was seen once flying around missiles so effortlessly to cause them to crash into one another.  I believe an opportunity was missed in exploring her speed.  Her upper limits were never defined.  If she could keep pace with some of the faster members like Wildfire, that would add to her usefulness.

But I think there can be even more to her powers. Just how invulnerable is she?  For Dawnstar and Comet Queen, I don't like the idea that they have conditional invulnerability because it's been shown inconsistently with Dawnstar.  One idea would be to make Comet Queen a bit more similar to Cannonball and use her powers more as a projectile.  I'm not quite sold on that though.

Another idea is to explore her gas powers further.  Part of the phenomenon of comets is not just the cases that come off it, but the effects produced on the gases as the comets near the sun.  Comets have been discovered to generate x-rays.  Stolen from wikipedia:  X-rays are thought to be generated by the interaction between comets and the solar wind: when highly charged ions fly through a cometary atmosphere, they collide with cometary atoms and molecules, "ripping off" one or more electrons from the comet. This ripping off leads to the emission of X-rays and far ultraviolet photons. How ironic the threat she issued in the pic above.  

So she might have some access to the EM spectrum.  That opens some possibilities, but we also have the ion tail which is comprised of ionized gases.  Ionized gases are the fourth state of matter know as plasma.  Now, I'm not looking to turn her into a Starfire power clone because 1. they look very similar and 2. depending on who is in the Legion, having another energy blaster could just be redundant and not very interesting.   Perhaps she could have some type of plasma manipulation power to create constructs like Argent could or form and throw plasma balls.  I really like the idea of throwing plasma balls as it would give her some type of offensive power and would not be duplicating many other characters like Havok or Hellstrike who shoot plasma blasts. The balls don't have to be highly destructive but can be strong enough to stun or knockout opponents without high defenses. The Legion still needs medium powered members too. 

Unfortunately, Comet Queen had a tough time during the Retroboot period.  She was attacked by Saturn Queen who mindwiped her.  The Legion tried to help her and she returned to the Academy to work out her issues.  She was then among the newbies who graduated to full members during volume 7, though she misses out halfway during the run when she attacks Brainiac 5, presumably due to some post-hypnotic suggestion by Saturn Queen (one would think with telepaths on the team they would have discovered something but no).  This storyline is left unresolved and since they never show her getting out of HQ when it is destroyed by the Fatal Five, her fate is unknown.

I think showing Comet Queen as a bit more capable fighter, and not a traitor 😠 would actually improve her overall and create the nice layer to the valley girl persona that despite looking like a ditz, she can throwdown if she needs to.  Developing her speed and gas powers further would make her much more useful, especially when they have need of a team who can get their quicker that others can with their flight rings.  If readers have no problem with Dream Girl being a vamp, but also highly intelligent and a good hand to hand fighter, why can't Grava have multiple layers of personality too?