M186--Abigail Brand by Green-Mamba on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Abigail Brand

First Appearance: Astonishing X-Men #3 (September 2004)

Following the discovery of the Kree, the United States government decided that the threat of extraterrestrial invasion was too large of a job for SHIELD to handle in addition to Earthly affairs, and ordered the construction of a new division titled the Sentient World Observation and Response Department, otherwise known as SWORD. Built to be totally autonomous of its parent organization, its workforce was hired from numerous agencies and the private sector, including ex-Future Foundation members who oversaw the development of the Peak, the orbiting space station that served as SWORD headquarters. But the origin of its new director, Abigail Brand, was a complete mystery.

Officially, she was a "liaison" of off world societies, with the most persistent rumors being that she was a half alien hybrid of sorts; though there were still other whispers that these rumors were intentionally spread to disguise the fact that she was actually a mutant. This was not helped by SWORD being more openly friendly to mutants than most government agencies, including officially recognizing the X-Men, assisting each other in situations that concerned both parties. Whatever her origin, Brand was well known throughout SWORD as a tough as nails soldier who was difficult to read but willing to do absolutely anything necessary to keep the Earth safe from outside threats, even if it meant doing something that made her look like the villain at times.

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Supposedly she has the superhuman ability to project intense heat from the palms of her hands. She also supposedly has... relations with Hank McCoy, formerly Beast of the X-Men. Neither are substantiated by proof.

Yeah I'm one day early but I'm going to be busy tomorrow, so here's the next entry ahead of schedule. Abigail Brand essentially completes the trio of government agency directors after Nick Fury and Maria Hill. I kind of approached them as a whole--Fury is the badass you don't exactly know if you can implicitly always trust, Hill is the one most open about her motives but the most openly hostile, and then Brand is the most distant and mysterious. Nothing about her is fully known to outsiders. At least, that is the angle I decided to come from. So I thought it would be neat to not really confirm whether or not she's a mutant, alien, or both in my continuity. She just kinda is. And I think it speaks poorly of mutant rights in my universe if the powers that be decided her being an alien is easier to swallow than her being a mutant.

But anyway, I decided to base her look on her classic black and green jumpsuit, which I kind of reimagined into like a type of spacesuit of sorts. Like I see it as a suit that can become pressurized at will and easily connects to readily available space helmets they keep in the Peak, in case of decompression or something, if that makes sense. My established design for Carol Danvers in her Ms. Marvel years also formed some of the basis for this suit, as that was also SWORD built. And of course she's got her green hair and sunglasses.