'Cause she's awesome:

Indeed she is!

Ayla is second only to Tasmia as my favorite female Legionnaire. She's bold, brassy, and bisexual. What's not to love?

I was always less than impressed by that Who's Who entry. It always looked as though Ayla needs a hip replacement.

ME TOO! It's a disappointment compared to all the other Who's Who entries. Especially because it's Ayla and not a part of history.

I like how it tried to incorporate the explosion, the classic age and Light Lass era.

Ayla, along with Tinya and Tasmia, is one of my favorite Legion ladies! Go Ayla, first Legionnaire to break the ironclad 'the first person I date will be the one I marry' rule!

Also, joining Star Boy and Sensor Girl and Tyroc in the elite group of Legionnaires who have totally changed their powers!

and ... short shorts!

Some of my favourite Ayla moments were in the TMK/5YG run.

She has a real love for the Legion, it's history and it's craft, not to mention Vi.

In a nice touch that's Brin's claw behind Ayla in the poster, showing the relationship they once had.

The outfit in the Lightle picture is pretty cool. I don't recall her ever wearing that.

It's the uniform they tried to get the team to wear during the TMK/5YG run. Possibly in the Khundian war, as that would have been around the same time?

I can't hate the Who's Who pic because it's June Brigman and Power Pack cemented my love for her art forever

Ayla as Light Lass was along with Jeckie one of my least favourite characters in the Legion. It always struck me that she had a potentially awesome power, but was only ever written as a damsel in distress. She makes a much better Lightning Lass IMO, and 5YL really did amazing things for her character and her importance to the team.

Ah Power Pack. There was something a little magical about the start of that series.

I can;t say I'm a huge fan of the constantly doe eyed Ayla following Brin around. She even asks herself why she loves him. I always thought the moment shared by Brin and Imra on the asteroid was far too tame to damage a relationship as much as it did.

I think I’m one of the few that liked her Anti-gravity powers. They showed her using it really well in three-boot throwing around boulders like superman!

Even better but only in for a second was Alan Davis’s Superboy’s Legion version of her with Light powers instead of Anti-Gravity. Makes sense too if you think of it as concentrated Lightning!

I didn't get far in the threeboot (about an issue). Would she use her power, throw the boulder and then turn her power back off when she wanted it to drop?

Right. She almost had super strength the way it was used.

I'll need to look that up. I do have at least some of the issues now, picked up cheaply.

Here's one from a memorable back up story drawn by Norm Breyfogle. Not only does it show you exactly where the Brin/Ayla relationship stands, but in Breyfogle's art, you see a number of different power effects for Ayla.

Another favourite

That doesn't make sense - think what would happen if you threw an expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam™) boulder. It wouldn't go very far before the air resistance killed any momentum.

PS: *cough*. Okay, I just flatted the colouring - I'll fix that later when I get the time, but jus'for fun... (not actually the only 21CL Spark sketch I've got )

SW6 Gossamer had to wait for the wind to shift direction before her power let her "blow away" some droids.

But Threeboot Light Lass in issue 4 was able to use her powers to literally make the floor soar up into the sky. Chameleon had to hold onto Brainiac 5 and Saturn Girl to prevent them from being cast off into the atmosphere.

Yeah, she didn't just 'make things light,' she gave them negative weight so that they flew up into the sky, and even seemed to give them more negative weight than they had positive weight, as parts of buildings were tearing themselves off and 'falling up,' and, being that this was Colu, I'm gonna assume these buildings were up to code...

It wasn't mentioned in the comic, but I would assume that these items would have eventually ignited from air friction, and been leaving blazing trails behind them until they rocketed up into space, in a reverse version of 'burning up on re-entry.'

(That is, unless her power had a range limit or time limit, and they regained their normal weight after getting X distance away from her, or X seconds or minutes later...)

Still, in the Threeboot, her power was explicitly listed as 'anti-gravity' and not just 'makes stuff lighter.'

The bit later in the Shooter & Manapul era where she and Thom, with a ton of mechanical help, rebalance the gravitational forces *of the entire solar system,* was pretty darn awesome.

Anti-gravity is an awesome power. Using it, she should totally be able to fly under her own power (transforming her 'falling' momentum into forward motion the same way the rest of us do, by leaning slightly...).

Threeboot had it's faults but that was not one of them. She was kick ass in that. Brainy, I felt, thought she and Star Boy were two of the most powerful on the team because they both controlled gravity. One of the most powerful things in the universe.

thothkins lifts cup of tea, to put gravity in it's place.

I shall dig out my pitiful few threeboot issues for a look. I've always gone along with Ayla's powers being similar in source to Thom's.

The Threeboot had it's warts, but Ayla and Nura, in particular, really got a nice upgrade. Jeckie, too, although it came with too much unlikable characterization change, IMO.

I do like that, no matter the continuity, Ayla has never been one of the Legion ladies who got 'updated' by making her a martial artist. One size does not fit all, and not everyone has to get the Psylocke treatment to be badass.

Ayla is one of the few Legion ladies who doesn't need to get physical at all to take down an opponent.

I do dislike the Light Lass moniker though. It makes me think she should be throwing photons and lasers around instead of cancelling the effects of gravity

It never occurred to me to think of it differently until that Superboy mini. I was so used to connecting her with those powers. Light Lass? Yeah, she'll make things lighter. What else would she do?

That's exactly what Alan Davis did to her in Superboy's Legion. Gave her light powers. Not anti-gravity.

Ayla's power was treated with awesome respect in the threeboot!

Outside of the old Adventure comics when everyone got a chance to showcase their powers if they were featured in a story, I really honestly can't think of a time classic Ayla did a single useful thing with her anti-gravity powers. Oh actually, I lie...when Computo possessed Danielle Foccart and took over the headquarters she levitated Jo and Tinya out of danger but that really bugged me at the time because she was moving them as if she had telekinesis. Going back to the lightning powers was the best thing that could have happened to her, I think a lot of old-school Legion writers never had the interest and/or the imagination to do anything with her as Light Lass.

I vaguely recall a 'girls night out' issue where Ayla and two others run into some crooks while visiting a restaurant or night club or something, and Ayla sends one of the thugs into the ceiling, and then back to the ground, and then back to the ceiling, and basically dribbles him like a basketball.

And that's pretty much it.

While her powers were potentially awesome, I do think that writers have an easier time working around her lightning powers, and I'd rather have her with a powerset that the writers are comfortable with. In a team as big as the Legion, characters with powersets that the writers don't feel like dealing with, end up getting the Chemical King / Tyroc treatment and never seen again...

Yeah, "blasts stuff with lightning" requires a lot less thought on the writers' part than the Light Lass powers.

If her abilities really involve "anti-gravity/dark energy/theoretical type stuff that drives the expansion of the universe" as opposed to just "cancels gravity" then that puts her powers on a whole new level. For one thing, it makes her and Thom's powers act together in interesting ways. If she makes massive bodies repel each other, then he might actually increase the effectiveness of her abilities by making objects more massive.

That's a very neat thought, EDE. More mass would logically lead to more gravitational pull, making Ayla and Thom's powers (assuming one affects mass, and the other gravity) synergize interestingly. I love anything that can make members of a team capable of feats that they couldn't achieve individually, as it really helps to show off both teamwork, and character, that they are willing to develop tactics that require pooling their abilities to pull off, and have thought enough about how their abilities work to even conceive of such stunts.

(That said, both have been portrayed someone inconsistently. Ayla's powers were to 'make things super-light' up until they went away, IIRC, until the Threeboot, when she flat out manipulated gravity, and Thom's powers were to 'draw mass from the stars to make things super-heavy,' until, IIRC, the Threeboot, and the Justice Society visit, when 'classic Thom' was also was re-envisioned as a gravity manipulator.)

I wonder if 'gives mass to things' Thom could shut down a Bgtzln villain cold, by adding back mass to them and causing them to become solid and tangible, no matter how hard they tried to phase?

If Ayla's power had ever been defined as subtracting mass from something (the opposite of Thom's original 'adding mass to targets'), she might also have been able to gradually 'phase' people, making them not only super-light, but also super-vulnerable, with even durable people like Blok becoming wispy and fragile, before becoming completely intangible. (Or perhaps even shrinking as their mass decreased!) Subtracting mass from a bulkhead, she might be able to make it as weak as tissue paper, and tear her way right through it with her bare hands (and giving someone who has no idea what she's doing the notion that she has incredible super-strength!).

But that's a pretty different sort of power than anything she was ever shown using...

Garth, Ayla, and Mekt seem to be living Telsa coils.

As everyone knows who saw The Sorcerer's Apprentice with Nicholas Cage, the "thunder" from Tesla coils can be "tuned" to create music.

So after the Legion dissolves, maybe Lightning Lad, Lightning Lass, Lightning Lord and Storm Boy go off and form a band?

A cover of OMD's Tesla Girls being their first single

DnA, from Legion Worlds onward, always referred to Thom's powers as gravity-related. He even started showing *reduced* gravity powers in the Robotica arc (when he buffered Warworld's effect on the Earth when they brought it over) & TL #19.

The term they used in Legion Worlds 4 was "portable black hole generator". They also showed him repelling or lifting objects several times - in LW 4 itself, he used several Robotican drones as projectiles and shot them out in all directions around him. The scene Reboot mentions in TL 19 was probably him lifting a heavy weight above his head. In issue 33 (? the 2nd part of the Singularity story) he also lifts Singularity's lead ship.

The Ayla Postcard

This great Ayla pic was on our Onmicom. It's by Emiliano Urich

That was one of her better costumes. It would have been better with a different color scheme (maybe the Shazam colors?) IMHO.

On a side note when she first got her gravity powers the very first thing she did was lift the team's whole clubhouse up. Her power wasn't depicted as being very useful after that for the most part though. While I liked the idea of gravity nullifying powers her getting the lightning powers back made her the only female on the team with non-defensive abilities at the time.

I like how the side of her face away from the lightning is shaded.

Sometimes artists seem to forget that fire and lightning powers generate shadows, as they (I assume) draw the faces and bodies before adding in the special effects, and then don't remember to shade the bodies and faces after putting a big honking light-source on their fist...

Nice healthy build on her there, too. Not all wasp-waisted or unrealistically buxom.

I've been thinking a lot about Ayla lately, having recently re-read Baxter #6.

It used to be a favorite issue of mine, but it doesn't hold up that well. Levitz doesn't dig deep enough into Ayla as a character the way he did with some of the other Legionnaires. The whole gender-bender thing is brusquely dismissed as "silly", but I think it's fertile soil, along with her bisexuality. I'd like to write a series of "Untold Ayla Stories" fanfics, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to make sense of whatever it was that happened between her and Pol. Another challenge for me would be that I despise the chip-on-the-shoulder version of her lover Vi.

Oh, and Levitz claiming that he never consciously intended for Ayla and Vi to become a lesbian couple? YEAH, RIGHT! *smirk*

Levitz & Lightle show Ayla as a powerhouse in the team!

And in the "complaint" department...

Ayla remains the ONLY major Legionnaire not to have a SINGLE HeroCLix figure made , despite there being ones for lesser characters such as Earthman, Chameleon Girl, etc, and despite several other characters (such as her brother Garth) having 3 or more figures.

travesty!

Her power set & personality were some of Waid's best work there, I think. Even when Brainy contrasted her power scale with what he perceived as her failure of intelligence, he too came across as more interesting than usual. (Though still a major jerk, of course. )

I don't remember the writer, alas. But I remember a fanfic where cartoon Ayla became Light Lass after her return from imprisonment as a living cloud of energy. In that reality, Star Boy pretty much has both his traditional powers, plus the ones shown by Threeboot Ayla. So in the fanfic, cartoon Dream Girl teams up with Star Boy & "gifts" Ayla with anti-grav powers so she can join the Legion alongside her brother.

I actually think the episode in the cartoon where Ayla is reunited with Garth & Mekt is the best work of the second season. The streamlining & re-imagining of their story is actually quite moving. Even Superman X doesn't get in the way, as he usually did that year.

Also, as follow-up to Fanfic Lass' earlier points, if anything I remember really disliking Ayla's post-GD attitude back in the day: much more so than Violet's. I remember thinking that a broken heart doesn't really justify being so harsh to everyone in the same way having your identity stolen and your person assaulted by terrorists would.

But I got over that eventually. Grumpy Ayla was still more interesting than the kvetchy Timber Wolf hanger-on, at least.

Hey, fellow Ayla fans,

Noticed lately that since she adopted a lower-maintenance, more sensible 'do off-screen after becoming a mom with a daughter, Scarlett Johnansson has begun to look a LOT like a grown-up Ayla?

That, I stress, is a GOOD thing.