Profile: Element Girl

Element Girl
Real name: Urania Blackwell
First appearance: Metamorpho #10, February 1967
Creators: Bob Haney, Sal Trapani

History: Urania Blackwell was a spy for the USA government who'd undergone an experiment that gave her powers similar to Rex Mason, aka Metamorpho. Her first major assignment is to infiltrate a European crime syndicate called Cyclops and investigate its leader, a man codenamed Stingaree. Blackwell soon falls in love with Stingaree and agrees to marry him, only to have him spurn her when his affections turn elsewhere. In turn, Blackwell manages to convince her agency that the romance had been a sham and asks for their help in finding some way to strike back at Stingaree. The agency obliged by offering her the chance to take part in a long-planned experiment to replicate the incident that led to Rex Mason being transformed into Metamorpho. Blackwell volunteers for the experiment and is molded by the sun god Ra into an elemental with superpowers identical to Mason's. Blackwell, now calling herself Element Girl, seeks out Metamorpho and recruited his help in her mission to destroy Stingaree. Together they destroy Cyclops, and the two allies found themselves in danger of becoming a romantic pair, much to the dismay of Metamorpho's fiancee Sapphire Stagg. Deciding it best to remain with "Sapph-baby", Rex severed his ties with Urania to salvage his relationship with Sapphire, to Urania's disappointment.

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: in the aforementioned Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, in the 20th issue, Death of the Endless, the sister of Morpheus, paid Urania a visit, and told her to look up to the sun and the pagan Ra, to have her powers removed so she can then die by turning to stone and falling apart. And when a phone call comes in at Urania's apartment, Death answers with a smirk on her face at how somebody's dying, as though it's something to celebrate.

What's wrong with how this was done? For one thing, it embodies the shoddy notion that specific characters are useless if they're minor and the writers supposedly don't know what to do with them. For another, it's yet another moment in the disgraced Neil Gaiman's resume that's simply repellent, and demonstrates how he practically used the autonomy he may have had in writing his own series for DC as a shield for bumping off a character who, if the editors/publishers wanted to, could've written decent stories around, and all without breaking up Rex and Sapphire's coupling. Put another way, if they'd wanted to, they could practically have given her personal agency and even created a boyfriend for Urania similar to Steve Trevor originally being Wonder Woman's. And that's an idea the Big Two have tragically faltered on considerably as time went by. When Gaiman was working in comicdom, what's irritating is how he could apparently influence what could occur in the DCU proper, but nobody else was allowed to make use of the characters from his comics? A total disgrace.

Was there anything good to come out of this? Nope. To date, Urania's still in graveyard limbo, and save for a recent 2024 Metamorpho miniseries set in the past written by Al Ewing, another bad modern writer, she's largely forgotten, mainly because that's what DC's management wants. It's utterly atrocious how some of the worst, most overrated writers have succeeded in bringing down the quality of mainstream entertainment, including Gerard Jones, and the damaging effects they were responsible for have lingered long after they fell from grace.