Who's This? An electrifying private eye.
The facts: Jonni first appeared in a four-issue miniseries in 1985, written by Roy & Dann Thomas, with art by Dick Giordano. The series was set on Earth-2 and therefore this modernization of Johnny Thunder guested in a few issues of Infinity Inc. where the Thunderbolt was revealed to be a hostile alien and defeated (even if, by then, the book was set on post-Crisis Earth), So that was it for Jonni as a superhuman character, but she did appear in the series a few more time as a simple P.I. The New52 had a superhero version in Earth 2: World's End, the private eye version once appeared in Vertigo's The Witching Hour, and Kingdom Come continuity claimed she and Black Lightning had a kid together (BL's current daughter has a different mother).
How you could have heard of her: Slim pickings. I blame it on her not being an actual superhero. When tapping into the Thunderbolt legacy, they later went with Jakeem Thunder instead, who has had more staying power.
Example story: Jonni Thunder A.K.A. Thunderbolt #3 (June 1985) "Bolts Across the Bay!" by Roy & Dann Thomas and Dick Giordano
While Johnny's Thunderbolt is an entity to be summoned, Jonni's is more of a Negative Woman situation. It's energy coming out of her, leaving her flesh and blood body insensate, prone and vulnerable. We're jumping into the deep end - haven't read the preceding issues - and Jonni is going to have to reintegrate her body if she wants to survive this.
Roy Thomas is always kind of writing a period piece, isn't he? Even if Jonni's stories take place in the present day (as opposed to All-Star Squadron's 1940s - Arak's Middle Ages are right out), his love of older genres is evident from the get-go. The antagonist (Red Nails, honestly, that's all they call her) uses vintage fashions, Raymond Chandler is quoted, and Jonni has a running Noir narration. From what I can gather, everyone's after the statuette that gave Jonni her powers, including another P.I. called Harrison Trump (gulp) who was initially hired by Red Nails, but now is just as much a prisoner of her and her Glamazons (still not kidding). Don't think we didn't get the Maltese Falcon resonance, Roy. Jonni is hard as nails throughout the sequence of events.
Red Nails reveals her personal laboratory with its big Tesla generator, but I don't know what she means when she says she's "really something of an electrical genius when I'm keeping my clothes on". How smutty were those first two issues?! She directs her Glamazons to hang the private eyes on a big hook so she can test her newest weapon. She wants to use the statuette to power her plasmonic gun which theoretically fires lightning balls (then sell it to governments and terrorist groups). The statuette refuses to cooperate, however. The Pee Eyes swing themselves free and fist fight their way through the Glamazons (while handcuffed), and Jonni shows she can use her environment.
Kick to the face. Grab the statue. Jump into the elevator at the last second. All in a day's work.
They're not on the street for a minute before they're picked up by another sinister sort, Slim Chance (not kidding), the singing cowboy turned TV tycoon, who has his own designs on the statue. And the Glamazons are in pursuit, so that's not over. She and Harrison jump out of the car and into a Dashiell Hammett tour - the bad guys pass 'em by. Jonni's car is nearby, but as they drive off, Red Nails starts attacking from above. Specifically, from San Francisco's Pyramid Building!
While Harrison tries to shake Jonni awake, she's actually flying at the speed of electricity towards Red Nails's set-up. But it seems that despite being made of electricity, the Thunderbolt form is still vulnerable to big Tesla zaps. (Her body's not doing too well either, with Harrison driving the car from the passenger seat and almost crashing into two tramway cars. The Thunderbolt lands on the equally famous Coit Tower and it's landmark versus landmark, because two can play at the game of calling down the lightning.
When she gets back to her body, she finds Harrison dead (I guess he got zapped), but there's something else electricity can do:
And this is about as soft as Jonni Thunder gets. She's a hard-boiled egg! Personally, I dig the private eye elements more than the superpowered ones, but it wasn't exactly a profitable genre at the time. A lot more crime comics today, so she could get another shot, perhaps with some retro flair. But as a Johnny Thunder replacement? We've had more appropriate legacy characters since.
Who's Next? A San Francisco private eye.
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