‘Black Lightning’: First Look at Lightning in Costume

The CW has released a first look at China Anne McClain in costume as Lightning for the 2019 episodes of Black Lightning.

The look is in keeping with Black Lightning‘s and Thunders looks from the series, and a departure from the comics, where Lightning is generally depicted as a being of pure (often spiky) energy and has little in the way of a real “costume” to speak of.

McClain’s Jennifer Pierce has been a central focus of the first half of Black Lightning‘s second season, as her romance with supervillain Painkiller (also her high school sweetheart Khalil) has heated back up, and the two have hit the road in search of a safe place to hide from Khalil’s bad choices.

You can check it the first-look image below.

So far on the series, Jennifer has been resistant to using her powers. After learning that she was not only a metahuman, but the daughter of Black Lightning, Jennifer’s sister Anissa almost immediately became the superhero Thunder, eager to help the community of Freeland. Jennifer has tried her best to keep it on the DL and keep out of the crossfire — something that has become harder and harder to do with Khalil in Tobias Whale’s sights.

“Jennifer is young, she’s a teenager, and for her getting her powers is very different than Anissa getting her powers for the first time,” McClain told us back during season one. “I’ve said that she’s older, she’s confident, she knows who she is at this point in her life and she’s comfortable with that, but Jennifer is still trying to figure that out. To have this happen to her is a huge deal and she feels like an alien on earth. It’s difficult for her to deal with, it’s going to be very interesting to see.”

This season, she has also been seeing a therapist — using psychic powers in a virtual world, so that it keeps with the whole superhero thing — and that has helped her begin to come to terms with her powers. The fact that she used them at the end of last season to save her father’s life (granted, after her boyfriend killed him briefly) was both revelatory and a little troubling for Jennifer, after all.

Black Lightning returns with new episodes in a new time slot, Monday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT, after episodes of Arrow on The CW in January 2019.