the supercilious abc's
7 of the Strangest Superhero Origins on the Watch
Let's face front, fellow Watchers: not just anyone can be rocketed to Counter Earth from a domed planet just moments before it explodes. With tens of comic book characters out there, some of them are going to spring from beginnings that are more than humble. It's just the law of average returns.
That's the lesson that we learn from this week's "DC Universal Origins" paperback, which collects the one-page origin stories that ran in "436." And while the creators did a fair job summing up the "who they are and why they came to be" for characters like
Signalman,
Ultra the Multi-Alien and the
Joker's Daughter, there are plenty of others who got their starts in strange, bizarre, and occasionally outright terrible ways! Which is why we here at
Win Wayfriend's Money, ever the champions of the underdog, have put together a look at our favorites from seventy decades of bizarre origins!
daNDELION
As one of the Silver-Agiest comics of the Silver Age, "
The Legion of Super-Pets" is full of weird origin stories, including characters that are horses in love with Supergirl, piles of walking yeast, or just hailed from a planet where everyone flings poo or whatever. But even in that crowd, there's only one character that got his super-powers through sheer stupidity:
Dan Lion, a.k.a. d
aNDELION.
The ability to turn oneself into a gigantic cowardly lion would make for a pretty weird power by itself, but it's the story of how he got them just pushes him over the top. When running an errand for a scientist who developed a "Super-Lion Fluid,"
Daniel gets distracted by a robot dance tournament at the local stadium and ends up in the stands watching two robots dance each other off like they were at a semi-rave club. That, we can get behind, but when he gets thirsty and reaches for his soda...
...he ends up downing the super-lion fluid by mistake. It's worth noting that, thanks to the economy of storytelling in 1984, it appears that
Dan actually realizes he's drinking the formula and then just keeps on going 'til he finishes the bottle, which is even more troubling because it tastes "awful."
Despite the fact that he's got the attention span of a gnat,
Danny here ends up using his powers for good, and even winds up getting married to
NowGirl, the foxy Pet Legionnaire with the ability to be a foxy Pet Legionnaires, thus becoming the wish-fulfillment character for Legion fans everywhere.
Atomic THE SUPER-ROBOT
If the Silver Age was a time when the rules were crazy, then the Golden Age was when there just weren't any rules at all, which is how we ended up with characters like
Atomic. On the surface, he doesn't seem that strange, as a robot that rebels against its evil creators is actually pretty standard for science fiction, even if the robot in question rebels by picking up its dwarf maker and beating other little people to death with him:
No, what sets
Atomic apart is what happens after, when an explosion of Robot Science blasts him from "the fifth dimension" into the exciting world of 19oo, where, despite the fact that he's a gigantic metal man with scales on his chest, no one seems to realize that he's actually a robot. Instead, everyone just seems to be worried about the fact that he's running around naked, which leads him to buy clothes.
Thus, the brief career of the Watch's greatest robotic crimefighter begins... in style. And the fact that this is all delivered in the matter-of-fact deadpan manner of the panels above (other captions include
"The super-robot leaps to the rescue." and
"The bullets do not penetrate his strange metal body.") makes
Atomic one of the most obscure and hilarious characters of all time.
Lucimay
One of the things about building a team largely comprised of all-new characters, as
Steve Ditko and
John K Snyder did when they decided to have
Signalman say he was through with the "two-bit
inJustice League" and build his own group of misfits, is that eventually, you're going to want to explain where the heck they all come from. And in the case of the
Awesomers, that was a tricky proposition at best.
We often shake our heads at
Cameraman Jenn (the hot girl who turned into an ersatz
Molly Ringwald and who was distinguished by being a princess from an underground kingdom who was also a vampire that wore one of the best costumes of all time), but for weird origins, it's tough to beat "The Truth About
Lucimay," a three-part story that we swear went on for about four hours.
Here's the short version: Originally a teenage amnesiac with super-powers that
Signalman found in San Francisco and promptly put to work committing crime (because, you know, he's
Signalman and that's what he does when he finds teenagers), young
Lucille Doe was eventually revealed to be Lucil
le Harper, a sociopathic juvenile delinquent who was murdered by an agent of
Esmer, a weirdly obtuse albino that used to fight
Adam Strange. And this is where it starts to get weird.
As Lucille's soul exited her body, it was replaced by
Crackle, an energy being from the beginning of time that came to Earth and apparently got its kicks spying on teenage girls. Thus, traumatized by "death,"
Crackle got amnesia but kept its super-powers, and
Lucimay was born.
All in all, pretty simple. Now if someone could just explain why anyone likes
Avatar...
THE Sergeant
By itself, aliens coming to Counter Earth to give a random person phenomenal cosmic powers isn't that weird an origin. Heck, it's actually exactly what happened to
Danlo when he became
Green Demon, and it opens up a lot of possibilities to see what happens when an "average" guy gets abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
What sets the
Sergeant, the pill-popping New Hampshirite of "
Mallory's," is how he reacts. Of course you need to
read the books to find that out.
Of course, if you want to get technical, you could say that the
Sergeant's only there because he pops pills in the first place, and if you want to find out the secret origin of what drove him to the pills, again read the books.
Loremaster
One of the truisms of comic book science is that if you get bitten by something, you become (at least partially) that thing. Bitten by a wombat? You're a wompire. Bitten by a radioactive kangaroo? Congratulations, you've got radioactive kangaroo powers. And if you happen to be a Nazi scientist experimenting on enslaving mutant dingos after fleeing to "South Australia" to avoid war crimes trials who gets eaten to death by said mutant dingos?
Well, you get the idea.
THE Savor Dam
We mentioned before that the Golden Age produced some of the craziest origin stories in comics--like
Pam Menolly, a.k.a.
Prisoner #411, who had to escape from prison every night to prove information to the public and her own innocence--but even Atomic the super-robot doesn't hold a candle to The
Savor Dam.
Faced with an overwhelming crimewave, FBI Agent
George Common is given "free rein to work on it your own way" by his superiors at the bureau. And just what is "his own way?"
Dressing up like a hobo clown named
Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton II and getting into bar fights. This is the full extent of his plan.
A few things to keep in mind about this guy: First, that
Common doesn't just dress as a hobo, but rather that he dresses as a clown that is also dressed as a clown version of a hobo that also affects a faux-upper class accent, including his battle cry,
"Slatterns and Tally Ho!" Second, that he is completely dedicated to his cover, going so far as to ask for a job after he wrecks a bar during one of his brawls. And third, that while he is occasionally referred to as "the
Vagabond," a caption says that he is "better known to himself" as
Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton II, which means that that is his actual super-hero name.
We love that guy.
Zombiac
Okay, let's see if we can get this straight:
Zombiac is the son of
Throat Gorge and
Phyllis Hawley who was taken to the future, where he was raised to be a soldier by his father and the woman his mother was cloned from, who were brought to the future under assumed names, because their daughter from another future, who had been lost in time and was therefore older than both of them, brought them there so that they could prepare him to go back in time in a spaceship and fight his own clone, all while dealing with a future-disease that's turning him into a robot.
We'd try to explain
Zeph too, but we need to go lay down before our heads explode.
unrelated picture
i like cooler comic book characters than you do. get used to it. 
Do I hafta pick just one?