The Justice League has had its fair share of exceptional members, and few have given as much to the team as the android known as Tomorrow Woman.
From the big guns like Superman and Wonder Woman to lesser-known characters like Tasmanian Devil or Crimson Fox, the Justice League has included almost every hero in the DC Universe at one time or another. Many of the characters join the team for years at a time, without making much of an impact, while some change the team forever after just a brief stint.
An android created to infiltrate the League and take them down from within, Tomorrow Woman is one of these heroes. Now, we’re taking a look back at this Pinocchio-like hero and what she did for the team she was designed to destroy.
First appearing in JLA #5 by Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell, Tomorrow Woman was one of the team’s most short-lived and most impactful heroes. Joining the newly reformed League after a recruitment drive, she believed herself to be the first of a new species born ahead of her time and was gifted with vast telekinetic and telepathic abilities thanks to her four-lobed brain.
But in reality, Tomorrow Woman’s origin was far more sinister than even she knew. Like the second Red Tornado before her, Tomorrow Woman was actually a highly advanced android created and programmed by the supervillain scientists T.O. Morrow and Professor Ivo to infiltrate the new Justice League and destroy them.
Their creation was so advanced that even Superman and Martian Manhunter failed to detect she was anything other than human, nor could they detect the weapon inside of her. With an EMP powerful enough to render the Justice League braindead located in her heart, Tomorrow Woman was a living bomb pointed at the world’s greatest heroes.
Planning to succeed where his Red Tornado scheme failed, Morrow sought to remove the idea of freedom—the same freedom that turned the Red Tornado into a true Leaguer—from his newest weapon’s identity. Hiding her true nature even from her, he implanted her with false memories and a desire to truly do good, causing her to truly believe herself to be a hero, entirely unaware of the dark purpose for which she was created.
Shortly before Asmodel’s invasion of Earth, her brief time with the team was almost entirely spent battling the war machine called IF as it blazed a trail of destruction across the United States with the JLA trying their hardest to save lives in its wake. Realizing that the weapon can only be deactivated using an electromagnetic pulse like the one in her heart, she overcomes her masters’ programming, detonating herself within the core of the weapon and saving the League singlehanded.