Lar's journey from Mon-El to.Valor to M'onel is highly convoluted and really interesting to me. It's no mistake to say that a desire to understand what happened there was part of my impetus for wanting to read the entire Legion history!

Valor's an interesting case because, since he was really replacing Kal-El's role as the inspiration for the Legion, I always felt there was this weird, unspoken implication that Kal would have eventually done what Lar did - not founding the United Planets as a more recent writer would establish, but like Lar did, seed those planets with metahuman life in the first place. Interesting stuff! I also always loved the M'onel play on words. It's clever.

Bringing it back to Laurel Gand though, I think her original version might actually be my favorite stand-in for Supergirl during the entire weird long period where Kara Zor-El was forbidden. Power Girl and Linda-Mae both had highly convoluted origins involving parallel universes and magic during this period. By contrast, Laurel's origin was pretty conveniently simple: she was a Daxamite who was traumatized by the genocide of her people. She also had equal stage presence to the other Supergirls, so really I think it's mostly the Legion's massive cast and remoteness from other DC series that kept her from getting more mainstream attention, though I doubt she'd ever have been as famous as Power Girl.

All that considered, I still just can't help but wish the rebooted Andromeda had gone... differently.