David Reid, the Magog of Earth-0

• Codename: Magog
• Alter Ego: David Reid
• Occupation: Magog: Herald of Gog; Reid: US Marine Lance Corporal, 2nd platoon of the 81st
• Known Relatives: Magog: Gog (“father”), Alba (mother), Kiera (wife), “Chelsea Sanders” and the other 31 daughters of Diocletian (aunts), Emperor Diocletian (grandfather, deceased); David Reid: Franklin D. Roosevelt (great-grandfather), unnamed mother, unnamed father (deceased), Peter Reid (grandfather, assumed deceased)
• First Appearance/Created By: Magog created by Mark Waid and Alex Ross (official credit in solo series), first appeared in Kingdom Come #1. Lance Corporal David Reid first appeared in Justice Society of America vol 2. #12 (May 2008) written by Geoff Johns and Alex Ross, art by Dale Eaglesham and Ruy Jose.

Gog and Magog

Gog, the true Gog, claimed to be one of the Old Gods. Long before there was the Fourth World of the New Gods there was the Third World of the Old Gods. Their world tore itself apart in a mighty war that left only a handful of survivors. One of these was a purple-faced golden-horned giant called Gog. Little else is known about Gog’s origins and his wife Alba has even hinted that he was only claiming to be a god. Human legend recalls that Alba was the eldest of the 33-daughters of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. The sisters proved “wicked” and were wedded to husbands to curb their wickedness. However, they murdered their husbands and were set adrift. They landed on an island called Albion where Alba mated with a giant called Gog to begat a son called Magog. Evidentially Alba and Gog had some falling out and he sealed her and her sisters in the extra-dimensional world called Blighted Albion. Before they left Blighted Albion Magog was wed to a woman called Kiera and there was a blood-debt between them. Much of this is recorded in a multitude of fragmentary legends and myths. Which version is “true” or even if there is such a thing as a “true version” of events for an entities like Gog and Alba is debatable.

Gog’s method of visitation was to appear on a world and present himself as its saviour and new god. He would then take root, binding himself to the planet’s life-force like a parasite. The interstellar para-military police force called the Planeteers had knowledge of Gog’s threat and related one incidence.

“We lost that world. We limped away two divisions short thanks to Gog’s enforcer. Magog. Gog took root, leached the life force and basked in the worship of this ‘subjects.’ When Gog moved on, he took the planet’s life force with him, left behind a barren husk. It was around that time that Magog dropped off the grid.” (Magog #7-10).

Gog and Magog were names that were feared on an almost instinctual level by many space faring races. However, we know almost nothing about this original Magog except that he seems to have been manifested at Gog’s will in or on a host when necessary.

After the Planeteer’s encounter Gog and Magog vanished from known space. Gog later described his fall to the Justice Society (click to enlarge):

In his version of events Gog was caught up in the war of the Old Gods, but was cast out by his peers when he refused to choose sides in the conflict. He fell thought space and time and eventually crashed into the Congo on Earth. The dormant remains of his head were worshipped by a local tribe who created a staff to channel Gog’s remaining power. That staff was found by a missionary called William Matthews who was driven insane by touching Gog’s mind. Matthews claimed Gog’s name and went on a rampage against super villains who claimed to be gods or demigods. Gog later claimed that Matthews had not been doing his bidding (Justice Society of America vol 2. #16). Gog reawakened when be absorbed Matthews’ life-force so it is possible that Matthews was under a compulsion to collected divine energy that Gog could then use to reanimate himself.

Lance Corporal David Reid

The Justice Society of America (JSA) had been concerned by the power vacuum created by Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman’s absence after the Infinite Crisis. They made an effort to reach out to young “legacy heroes” and inducted many of them into the Society (Justice Society of America vol. 2 #1-4,7). However, their final recruit was a little different. The JSA had been founded in the 1940s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help battle the Nazi menace. That made Roosevelt the JSA’s founder and David Reid, his great-grandson, a potential recruit.

David Reid had been an asthmatic child, but his father’s love and the clean Iowa air had helped him endure. He was proud of his family’s military history and loved to hear stories from his maternal-grandfather about how his great-grandfather had founded the JSA. Reid grew up with “dreams of hope and glory. Where everything was black and white” (JSA Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1) David’s father died shortly before he joined the army and he was helped through that difficult time by his best-friend Eric Marr who was also enlisting. David’s mother was his link with the army (“mother general hardass” as Eric called her). She moved out of the farm after David left and suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease in later life (Magog #12).

The event that spurred David to enlist was a devastating terrorist attack against the US (implied to be 9/11), but he never lost the idealists need to confront evil (JSA Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1). He once described himself as “Reid, David. 72358/92/09A. Lance corporal, 2nd platoon out of the 81st/ Marine… patriot… third world hellholes a speciality.” (Magog #1). Reid’s platoon was involved with the dirtier, less glamorous activities available to the Marines.

If the 2nd of the 81st were sent in somewhere you can guarantee it was against the scum of the Earth. They were part of the first wave into Iraq and were assigned to track down thieves who had looted the National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad. They traced their quarry to a cave system, but were ambushed in the dark. One of the looters, evidentially a Gog cultist, stabbed Reid with an unidentified artefact from the museum. It left Gog’s brand – an eye inside a triangle – on Reid’s arm and put him into a coma for three weeks. Reid was saved by his comrade Mike Donovan and airlifted back to base.

The brand on Reid’s arm was somehow generating huge amounts of plasma energy through and his body. He kept coughing it up until the army scientists designed a special lance that he could use to focus the energy as a weapon. His rank and the weapon earned him the nickname “Lance”. Captain Atom approached Reid with an offer to join the US Military’s elite superpowers division, but he declined. Lance Corporal Reid returned to his normal platoon which had been folded into a black ops unit called “Epsilon” in his absence. The JSA found Reid serving with Epsilon in Northern Afghanistan and recruited him into their ranks (JSA Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1).

The Earth-22 Superman and the JSA were tracking the murders done in Gog’s name by the insane William Matthews. The JSA fought the crazed Matthews back to the Gog Temple in the Congo. Reid grappled with Matthews who told him “I know who you are. I’ve seen you. You’re going to die.” Moments later Matthews dissolved into energy and was inhaled by the previously inanimate Gog head. It was enough collected energy to reawaken the Old God. It reformed its body out of the ground and stood towering over the JSA. The golden giant then told the stunned JSA that “People of Earth. I come in peace.” (Justice Society of America vol 2. #10-15, “Thy Kingdom Come”).

Gog sought to prove his good intentions to the JSA and the people of Africa. He started a march across the continent that would eventually lead him into Kahndaq and the troubled Middle East. Along the way he healed the sick and bestowed boons upon the needy. He healed Damage’s face, Doc Mid-Nite’s sight, Sand’s insomnia, Starman’s sanity and sent Power Girl home. A growing throng of people followed him and the JSA and JLA teamed up to track their progress in shifts. The JSA were concerned that Gog’s followers were easy prey to bandits and local militia, but they had so far managed to intercede before Gog did.

Pushed into what was effectively peace keeping duty strained relationships within the JSA. Green Lantern (Alan Scott), the Flash (Jay Garrick) and the Superman of Earth-22 argued that they should resort to lethal force. However, Hawkman strongly disagreed. The issue was coming to a head as Gog had begun transforming the militia attacking them into trees. He told the JSA “I do not kill. I simply made them into a more suitable form of life.”  One of those militiamen shot David Reid from behind with a rocket launcher killing him whilst he was protecting Gog’s followers.

Magog

Reid died instantly, but Gog had other plans for him. How much Gog had planned Reid’s fate isn’t clear, but he had already been watching him. Now Gog’s power surrounded Reid’s body, healing him, and returning him to life with the command “MAGOG. RISE.” Cybernetics had replaced Reid’s right army, part of his torso, and his left eye. His entire DNA had been rewritten to give him strength close to that of Superman. He was also given a staff through which he could channel even more power.

Through David Reid Gog brought forth a manifestation of his son and herald Magog. The process seems to have been unfinished as Reid retained most of his own personality and lacked the earlier Magog’s memories. There were some changes, however, Lance Corporal Reid had been respectful of the elder JSA heroes, but Magog was more belligerent and outspoken. Lance Corporal Reid had been in many messy situations with the Marine Corps and was comfortable with using lethal force when justified, but Magog was far more brutal and judgemental.

The Earth-22 Superman was circumspect about the new Magog as the Magog of his world had been responsible for the war that he believed had destroyed Earth-22.  Superman tried to stress to this Magog that his powers gave him more responsibilities than ever before. However, Reid was genuinely grateful to Gog and believed in his good intentions. The JSA eventually split into two factions – one side including Magog, Hawkman, and a lot of the new, younger heroes stood up for Gog’s approach, but the older members and the Earth-22 Superman were still opposed to his methods no-matter how well intentioned.

Magog and co. stayed with Gog and found a group of raiders who were poisoning a major Congolese river. In retribution Gog turned the poisoners into clear water than cleansed the river. Afterwards Magog received a garbled radio message that told him his old Epsilon unit were in trouble nearby. He found then dead or dying and killed the militia who had slaughtered them. Magog then returned to Gog, washed the blood off his armour in the cleansing river, and saddled up for the haul to Kahndaq (JSA Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1).

It was through Sand’s link to the Earth that the JSA first discovered what would happen if Gog was on Earth for longer than seven days. After that point they would no longer be able to separate Gog from the Earth’s life-force. Gog asked the heroes following him to “Worship Me”, but it was Magog alone who knelt before him. Just then the rest of the JSA arrived and fought to remove Gog from the ground where he was rooted. Magog sought to defend Gog from the Earth-22 Superman, but was made to see how Gog was torturing his team-mates.

For his defiance Gog attempted to remove the blessing of Magog from David Reid. However, Magog and the JSA fought back. Magog severed Gog’s head from his body and the Earth-22 Superman then entombed it on the Source Wall with all the other failed gods. Gog’s power was gone and with it his blessings. Yet for unknown reasons David Reid’s transformation into Magog remained (Justice Society of America vol 2. #16-22, “One World, Under Gog”).

Splitting the Justice Society

David Reid chose to return to his family’s farm for some downtime after the Gog affair (Justice Society of America vol 2. #23). As a special ops soldier Lance Corporal David Reid had been assigned to every hell hole imaginable. He was accustomed to being sent into third world countries to clean up whatever mess his superiors wanted cleaned up. How he was Magog he had the power to face these situations on his own, he rationalised it as:

Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, the list goes on. Hell on Earth. Squalid pits of institutionalized suffering. Where are all the heroes? Given them an alien world in need and they’re there in a flash. Give them a country in need and they turn a blind eye, start bleating about national sovereignty and exerting undue influence… basically the same tired litany of excuses for not doing what they know is right. Sorry… not my style.

Green Lantern (Alan Scott) was keeping a close eye on Magog. They both knew that Alan barely tolerated Magog’s presence in the JSA and that his connection with the Society was a “mutually beneficial parasitic relationship.” (Magog #1)

Magog’s headquarters – as such – was Baines Automotive Repair in Ordell, West Virginia run by one “Axel Baines”. The name and good ol’ boy act was a charade. Axel had served with David back during their black ops days and had taken a super-advanced laptop called Mirage with him when he retired. He had gone into operations for himself and acted as David’s intelligence and analysis backup. They’d chosen Ordell as it was a small town where people didn’t ask questions. Fine for Axel, but David found it dull.

The Gog affair had shown that there was already a fault-line in the Justice Society between the older, more traditional heroes and the new younger, more action orientated heroes. Reid’s experience as a soldier gave him a confidence and certainty about his moral convictions. He still saw himself as a soldier and accepted the use of lethal force, something that Alan Scott considered aberrant. Leaders from each faction were already beginning to sound out opinions from other JSA members.  The older founders were talking together and Magog had approached Power Girl with his own thoughts (Justice Society of America vol 2. #24 “Origins and Omens).

The tensions finally came to the surface when a group of mercenary super villains attacked the Justice Society’s headquarters. An argument over the handling of their counter-attack almost came to blows between Magog and Wildcat. David later elaborated his position that the JSA had expanded so fast they it been come torn between being a social organisation and a truly effective battle group (with all the requisite training and rules that it implied). The villains were defeated, but the fundamental philosophical split in the JSA remained. They decided to amicably divide into two teams before the argument became personal (Justice Society of America vol 2. #29-33).

Magog and Power Girl founded a breakaway group they called the JSA All-Stars. The new team was head-quartered in an up-state New York ranch outfitted for them by Rex Tyler (the original Hourman). Magog barked orders to the All-Stars in battle and grumbled about their training afterwards despite Power Girl being their real leader. He described the new team to the press as “superhero college”. If the formation of the All-Stars was meant to quiet the arguing it didn’t work. Magog’s tantrums about how the team was organised were just transferred from Alan Scott onto Power Girl. A sparring fight between them devolved into a proper scrap as they spat insults at each other. Magog flew off leaving the matter unfinished (JSA All-Stars #1-3).

The legacy of Gog

In Sudan Magog found several villages what had been slaughtered and the inhabitants reanimated as a technological zombies by a group of soldiers that were almost children themselves. It was the start of a investigation into what Magog called “wonder tech”, black market alien technology supplied by an organisation called Flashpoint. Through the JSA Magog learnt that one of his old comrades, David Bannigan, was involved. Bannigan had worked for Flashpoint when he was killed by a disgruntled client called Miasma – alias Mark Sunderland, a disgraced banker who had disappeared after Lois Lane exposed his schemes and had used Flashpoint’s mind control technology to gather his own army of homeless outsiders.

Flashpoint’s main base of operations was beneath the Haven prison (home of the USA’s criminal geniuses). It’s warden D. P. Macklin was Flashpoint’s owner/leader. Magog first came into their sights when he came to Haven to question Hector Hammond about mind control technology. Later, Magog was fighting Miasma when Flashpoint soldiers arrived. He then tricked them into taking him back to their headquarters not knowing that he was returning to Haven (Magog #1-3)

Despite his moral certainty in battle, David Reid was still uncertain as to what Gog had turned him into. He kept being blind-sided by his own abilities so he asked Axel to check into anything known about Gog and Magog -  earlier incarnations, mythology, etc. A woman appeared at their garage and asked Axel why Magog, her son, saw fit to wallow in human filth. She threw Axel around with her telekinesis and then demanded that he deliver a message to Magog, that “the final barrier has been breached, that his mother awaits. The blood debt has come due. Tell him Alba, first born of the thirty-three — baroness of Blighted Albion, would see her son returned to service to the Realm. ”

After being imprisoned for so long Alba and her sisters had finally broken free from Gog’s prison. They sought to reclaim their original home (Earth) and had insinuated themselves into criminal cartels, terrorist groups, and any other organisations they could use to sow discord. They wanted to incite a war and then invade after the humans had wiped each other out. Their mole in Haven was Macklin’s number two, Chelsea Sanders. Her airhead, valley girl exterior hid an amazing mind and analytic ability. She was assigned to interrogate Magog and she signalled Alba that her son had been found.

Magog escaped within the Flashpoint facility and Macklin tried to kill him. However, he was teleported to Blighted Albion by Alba. A woman called Kiera led him to Alba’s throne room. She obviously had issues with Magog and for some reason he knew her name, although he didn’t know why. Alba was disappointed that this incarnation of her son did not seem to be fully manifested and lacked his original memories and personality. She dismissed him and allowed him to return to the mortal world (Magog #4-5).

Macklin was distressed to see Magog return and summoned the JSA with a story that Magog was attacking his prison. The All-Stars responded first, but the original JSA were not far behind. The prison’s population staged a riot in the chaos and the heroes found themselves fighting the villains and Magog found himself fighting everybody. He used the fight to reveal Flashpoint’s hidden base, but still had to defend himself from Power Girl and Alan Scott. The warden destroyed Flashpoint and the truth was revealed, but Power Girl told Magog that she no longer recognised the man that use to be David Reid. He told them to go to hell and flew away on his own (JSA Annual #2, Magog #5-6).

Little-by-little Reid began to learn more about the 33-sisters and the legacy of Magog. He consulted the magician Zatanna on his connection to Alba/Magog, but drew a blank. He had just encountered another of the sisters when he was called away by Axel. They were recruited by the Shield of the US Army and Colonel Thomas Tomorrow of Planeteers Command 01-Alpha (an alien paramilitary police force) to fight a sentient alien computer virus that had begun to infect the Earth’s internet. It was though Colonel Tomorrow that Reid learnt of Magog/Gog’s infamy and the fear that many still had for that name (Magog #7-10).

The first person that had given David the time of day in Ordell there was a waitress called Lauren. Her husband Lloyd had beaten her so David started teaching her self-defence. Kiera came to Earth in human form and out of spite insinuated to Lloyd that Lauren and David had had an affair. Lloyd then confronted Lauren and killed her. Reid was depressed that he hadn’t been able to save Lauren.

Magog was responding to an emergency at a branch of STAR Labs in Canada when he encountered the influence of Gog again. A subject they’d been studying had been transformed into a giant radioactive monster. Magog tried to stab it, but through his Lance he left the power of Gog inside the monster. It then vanished with a “Ping” leaving the test subject unharmed. Whatever had attached itself to the poor man was living alien technology connected with Gog.

Magog sensed another occurrence of Gog-Tech and traced it to a man with a gun for an army called N.I.L.-8 whose helmet bore the symbol of Gog. Together they defeated a freak circus group that had preyed of kids. Reid was surprised to discover that N.I.L.-8 was Eric Marr, his childhood friend who had enlisted in the army with him. Eric worked out of a secret bunker run by a survivalist group led by a man called Counsellor John Augustus. However, from behind the scenes it was controlled by a pair of mutated twin telepaths called the Brain Trust. They had foreseen their deaths at Magog’s hands and were terrified by his presence (“Blown to Kingdom Come”, Magog #11-12).

[The events of JSA Special #1 occur in here somewhere.]

Portents

Booster Gold, the time traveller from the 25th Century, first met the name Magog several year before when his time travel employee/mentor Rip Hunter stumbled back into the present day muttering Magog’s name. Booster was intrigued so he investigated further and suspected that Hunter and a future incarnation of Magog had been fighting. He discovered that Magog was tied to a potential disaster in the future, but he was unaware of the details. Hunter forbade Booster from investigating that future any further.

Booster sought out the present day Magog and found him at a hostage situation in Kahndaq. Magog diffused the siltation by ripping the hostage takers arm off and Booster confronted him over his sloppiness and apparent disregard for the hostages. However, Hunter pulled Booster away before he could finish and told him

For the immediate future, Magog has his own course to chart. It will be unconventional, but he’ll do a lot of good over the next couple of years. He’ll save lives, Booster. Important lives.

Nevertheless, Booster was aware that something devastating lay in Magog’s future and was determined to be there to stop him when necessary (Brave and the Bold vol. 2 #23).

Back in the present day Maxwell Lord, the former director of the JLI and Checkmate, had used his mind control power to make the world forget his existence. He was manipulating his former JLI friends into reforming as a group and arranged for them to be ostracised from their normal lives. Captain Atom approached his superiors concerning Lord’s existence, but they were nervous about the potentially rogue meta-human and reactivated David Reid’s commission. Magog was on hand as a body-guard for the meeting when Lord tricked Captain Atom into attacking a general. Magog attacked Atom, but was unable to stop him escaping (Justice League Generation Lost #1-2).

Captain Atom had briefly visited a post-war future where humanity had been knocked back to a level prior to the industrial revolution by an unspecified war. He believed that Maxwell Lord had been responsible for it and returned to the future determined to stop him (Justice League: Generation Lost #6).

Maxwell Lord had been returned to life by the White Lantern for a specific purpose that was unknown to him until it reached out to him. Lord had a vision of himself killing Magog and heard the command “Magog will plunge this world into war. Stop the war before it starts.” (Brightest Day #7, Justice League: Generation Lost #7). Lord then sought to bring Magog closer to him by pretending to be still be working for Checkmate. He then gave Magog the task of hunting down and killing the “rogue” Captain Atom (Justice League: Generation Lost #9).

Powers and Abilities

David Reid was an experienced US Marine and had the associated weapons and tactics training.

Gog I (Hypertime duplicate of Earth-22)

The disastrous events on Earth-22 were felt throughout the Multiverse. One potential future of Earth-22, beyond even the events of Kingdom Come, saw one of the few survivors of the Kansas Holocaust grow up to become Superman’s most devoted disciple. Minister William worshipped Superman as a saviour. He helped people in hospital, schooled them, and took on the duties of any good pastor. His faith was driven by the belief that Superman was a god who had sent the Kansas tragedy to test the world and to redeem it. William believed he was special because Superman had “spared him” from the tragedy. In a manner it was William’s way of dealing with the horrors he had seen and to try to give a meaning to the senseless deaths around him.

Eventually Clark Kent (who had left behind the Superman costume) was forced to explain to William that he wasn’t a god and that he really should do something else with his life. Matthew’s philosophy was shattered. He torched his church and stumbled through the streets asking people, begging people “Tell me what to  believe!” He was found by the Phantom Stranger who delivered a scroll from a council of cosmic beings called the Quintessence (Ganthet, Zeus, Shazam, and Highfather). The Quintessence gave him power and knowledge of time travel so that he could precipitate the Kansas Holocaust early thus allowing them to manipulate the course of history on Earth-22.

The power unhinged Matthew’s  mind and transformed him into the a demigod monster called Gog. He  murdered the Clark Kent that had just spoken to him and then travelled back in time to the previous day and killed him all over again. He repeat the process day and after day as he slowly worked his way back through time killing Supermen as he went (New Years Evil: Gog #1). Gog’s actions of killing younger and younger versions of Clark Kent should have ripped the time-line apart, but it exposed the existence of something previously unknown to the Linear Men (the guardians of Linear Time). A phenomena called Hypertime that allowed for the existence of multiple, contradictory realities. In essence Gog was jumping between a ladder of universes that were almost identical to Earth-22.

Gog rampaged across Hypertime killing consecutively earlier and earlier Supermen until he reached the Kingdom Come era of Earth-22 and discovered that this Superman had a child by Wonder Woman. Gog kidnapped the child and journeyed to Earth-0 where he hoped to recreate the Kansas Holocaust by killing Captain Atom. It took the joint efforts of the Supermen, Wonder Women and Batmen from both Earth-0 and Earth-22 with the help of Rip Hunter and the grown Jonathan Kent II (the kidnapped child) to stop Gog (The Kingdom #1-2).  Today the events of Gog’s rampage, and even his existence, appears to have been forgotten. The Infinite Crisis reordered the Multiverse and while Earth-22 still exists the Crisis did erased the duplicate Earth-22s whose Supermen Gog had killed.

Gog II (Earth-0, pre-Infinite Crisis)

A second Gog, this time one native to Earth-0 (the foundation Earth), was also the survivor of a tragedy in Kansas. But, this Gog was one of the survivors of the destruction of Topeka during the opening stages of the Imperiex War. He was saved by Superman who said he’d find the boy’s parents, but they were already dead. In the chaos and confusion it was the boy who found their bodies. The knowledge of his saviour and his inability to save his parents would haunt the boy for the rest of his life (Action Comics #813). As an adult he devoted his life to the study of time travel with the intention of saving the rest of his family who had been killed during the Imperiex War. It took him over thirty years, but he eventually discovered a method of time travel.

Cruelly he found that his method would only take him back a short distance in time, not even far enough back to save his parents. He made thousands of attempts over the next two hundred years, but all resulted in failure. Eventually his motivation changed from idolisation of Superman into hatred for his inability to save his parents. In search of revenge he rewrote his own history, imprinting on his child self a new compulsion – kill Superman! (Action Comics #825).

This Gog, or another version of him, appeared in Smallville to ambush Superboy (Conner Kent, a teenage clone of Superman) and his Teen Titan friends in a feint to draw Superman’s attention. Their battle tore through the historic centre of the town with Superman and Superboy drawing Gog’s fire while Kid Flash and Wonder Girl got the civilians to safety. Gog’s teleporting kept Superman and Superboy off-balance and they both took a pounding. Gog cut Superman with his trident and injected liquefied kryptonite into the wound. He then beat Superman until he believed he was dead and then vanished (Action Comics #815-816).

Next Gog recruited a mild-mannered repo-man called Jesse and turned him into a monster which fought the slowly weakening Superman (Action Comics #822-823). The Kryptonite poison caused Superman to become weaker and weaker. After fighting the Kandorian zealot Preus (another of Gog’s lieutenants) Superman was exhausted, but he was confronted by a legion of duplicated Gogs. The future Gog had used his time travel expertise to duplicate himself into an army (Action Comics #824).

Superman’s saviour that day came in the unlikely form of the monster that had once saved him. Doomsday, newly sentient, refused to allow anybody else to kill Superman and waded into Gog’s legions. Even after Gog appeared to capture Superman Doomsday remained in the field. It was inspired by Superman’s courage to mend its ways and to adopt Superman’s colours. Doomsday’s League of Superman battled the Army of Gogs in a single battle that ranged for a century. The prime Gog eventually grew weary and withdrew from the battle to amused himself by torturing his captive Superman. However, even that grew tiresome after two centuries.

Superman and Gog grew old together. For five hundred years the two white-haired enemies were locked in a seemingly eternal game of resolve – the shackled Superman and the inquisitional Gog. With his last breadth Superman shamed Gog and dispelled his hatred. A moment later Doomsday breached Gog’s defences. He could have killed Gog, but the old man convinced him that together they could undo the future they had created. They travelled back in time and undid the actions of their past selves, nullifying their own existence as history was over written (Action Comics #825).

Gog III (William Matthews, Earth-0, post-Infinite Crisis)

The history of Earth-0 healed itself and erased the multiple paradoxes created by the many Gog and Doomsday time duplicates. A Gog still existed, but he only had fractured memories of what had gone before.

The new Gog was William Matthews, an American missionary to Zaire who disappeared for several years after discovering an ancient temple buried deep in the Congo. Inside it he found the remains of the true Gog (a dormant Old God from the Third World which had come before New Gods’ Fourth World) Matthew’s took Gog’s name and staff and sought to kill the false gods who claimed to protect the Earth. Through Gog’s power Matthews glimpsed the Kansas Tragedy of Earth-22 and believed that only Gog could prevent it.  He claimed “I believe that the unification of good and evil will lead to the future. ” and sought to pave the way for the true Gog’s emergence. He used his new superpowers to attacked Superman before vanishing again (a retcon of the Action Comics plotline)

After being driven away by Superman Matthews began hunting super criminals who claimed to be gods or demigods. His murder of the Teen Titan’s villain Goth caught the attention of the new JSA. Starman tried to put out the fire caused by Goth’s death by creating a miniature black hole. In doing so he accidentally created a wormhole between Brooklyn on Earth-0 and the instability created by the explosion on Earth-22 that had killed the majority of its superhumans. The Superman of Earth-22 was pulled through the wormhole and arrived on Earth-0 without any knowledge of how the war on his Earth had ended (Justice Society of America (vol. 2) #9).

The Earth-22 Superman saw the JSA’s world as a Heaven where their efforts to reach out to the younger superheroes was in stark contrast to his own actions on Earth-22. He believed his world had been destroyed and tried to make a place for himself with the JSA (Justice Society of America (vol. 2) #10). Mister America was brought in by the FBI to investigate Gog’s murders. The media had called him the “Heartbreak Slayer”, but Mister America eventually discovered the name of the real killer. The Earth-22 Superman instantly recognised the similarity of the name with his own Magog. His suspicions were confirmed when he and the Earth-0 Superman saved Hercules from Gog’s attack (Justice Society of America (vol. 2) #13).

The Earth-22 Superman and the JSA tracked Matthews/Gog to the Congo, but he attacked them in their headquarters before they could mobilise. The JSA fought the crazed Matthews back to the Gog Temple in the Congo. They watched as Matthews dissolved into energy and was absorbed by a giant Gog head.

Seconds later the head came to life and ripped itself and its body out of the ground. The now awake golden giant told the stunned JSA “People of Earth. I come in pease.” (Justice Society of America vol. 2 #10-15, “Thy Kindgom Come”).

Each of the three human Gogs were driven to an almost insane hatred of Superman by the power they possessed. Yet none of them except Matthew Williams even suspected the true origins of the their name or knew of the entity that had inspired them.

Next: The true Gog.

Magog of Earth-22, the Kingdom

• Codename: Magog
• Alter Ego: Unknown
• Occupation: Vigilante
• Group Affiliations: leader of the Justice Battalion
• First Appearance: Kingdom Come #1 (1996)
• Created by: Mark Waid and Alex Ross

There are is a continuum of parallel universes that vibrate along each other like the strings of a musial scale. Each universe contains an alternative version of the Earth and its inhabitants. In the foundation universe, Universe Designate-0 by the Monitors’ counting, Magog is David Reid – a veteran soldier, the great-grandson of a US President, and the avatar of the Gog entity. However, his destiny is forever tied to the fatal actions of an older Magog from a parallel universe.

Universe Designate-22 was a universe whose history ran approximately 20-30 years ahead of David Reid’s Universe. The history of its Earth, Earth-22, diverged from Earth-0 when the original Justice League and Society failed to provide adequate inspiration and leadership for the newest generation of superhumans. Their children and grand-children grew up as super-powered delinquents and amoral vigilantes. It was the Magog of Earth-22 who served as their figure-head and role model. The first real confrontation between these generations came when the Joker murdered the entire Daily Planet staff.

Elliot S. Maggin’s novelization of Kingdom Come goes into more detail about Magog and the Joker’s attack on the Daily Planet. Like Superman, Magog operated in Metropolis and was a particular target for Lois Lane’s investigative journalism. Magog had been inspired by Superman, but came to see himself as Superman’s heir and grew frustrated with Superman’s reluctance to step aside.

Lois died not when the Joker attacked the Daily Planet’s news room, but during his escape – she gave her life to prevent him escaping. Superman captured the Joker and handed him over to the authorities. It was while the police were moving the Joker that Magog attacked him. Many commentators found it ironic that his man who had been so often the target of Lois Lane’s ire would be the man who avenged her murder.

Magog’s ascension had as much to do with the lack of Lois Lane’s constant inquisition as it did with Superman’s absence.

Magog killed the Joker moments before Superman got to him. Superman arrested Magog for the Joker’s murder, but public opinion was on his side and the courts acquitted Magog of any wrong doing. Superman was horrified and withdrew from public life leaving the protection of the public to their new blood thirsty champion. Superman’s disappearance left Magog as his de facto successor.

Ten years later, Magog was the leader of a group called the Justice Battalion made up of the Peasemaker, Nightshade, Captain Atom, Alloy (a gestalt of the Metal Men), Judomaster, and Peter Cannon. They fought the Parasite from St Louis to the corn fields of Kansas in a brawl they should have won easily. It ended violently when the Parasite ripped open Captain Atom causing a nuclear explosion that killed a million civilians and left the Kansas heartland an erradiated wilderness.

Commentators would justifiably call the incident the “Kansas Holocaust.” It was finally enough to drag Superman out from his retirement, but his attempt to rebuild the Justice League was too late. They eventually found Magog haunted and solitary wandering the Kansas wastes.

He told Superman,

“Your fault… you bastard. The world changed… but you wouldn’t. So they chose me. They chose the man who would kill over the man who wouldn’t… and now they’re dead. A million ghosts. Punish me. Lock me away. Kill me. Just make the ghosts go away.”

Events moved quickly after that Magog’s capture. Superman’s Justice League creating a Gulag to contain the younger heroes and villains who would not join them. The superhuman community split into three factions – Superman’s increasingly authortarian League, Lex Luthor’s villains, and Batman’s non-aligned outsiders.

And one day, from out of the desert wandered Magog, helmet in hand. He knocked politely on a pillar of the enormous Gulag structure. No one heard him knock, but he stood there quietly and decorously until a monitor alarmed Captain Comet to his presence.

Comet knew immediately that Magog was there, but, so help him, he hesitated to go down and greet the felon. “Where’s he been?” Comet barked into his Justice League communications Link.

“Colorado,” said the Living Doll, from the New Oa satellite. She scanned through a file and found the reference. “A previously abandoned federal prison in Golden, Colarado.”

“Well, he’s not there now,” Comet said. “He’s here. He escaped. Isn’t Superman monitoring him?”

“I’m sure he is.”

“Was,” Comet said.

“Is,” the Living Doll repeated.

And from the doorway of Captain Comet’s command centre Superman’s voice said, “I saw him leave. I knew he was coming here. Let him in.”

Eventually Comet walked up behind Magog in the shadow of the Gulag. Magog turned and smiled lightly, putting his helmet and energy spear on the ground as the older man approached.

“We’ve not met,” Comet said. “I’m Adam Blake,” and he extended a hand.

“I’m Magog”, the caller said. He extended his own hand to take Comet’s, the first-time someone had shaken his hand in years, he thought. “I need a place to think. I need a place out of the sun. I understand that this is the village of the damned. I understand that this is a place where I might be welcome.”

“Yes,” Comet said. “Come in. We’ll find you a room.”

Kindom Come novelization (Elliot S. Maggin), page 212

Magog was content to remain in the Gulag in quite penance, but war came to them all when the others prisoners revolted. The League arrived to quell the uprising, but Luthor’s mind controlled Captain Marvel broke the Gulag open starting a massive superhuman melee. Batman’s forces interceded to help, but it was too late. Superman alone may had been able to contain the battle, but he was held in check by the mind controlled Captain Marvel. Through the melee with only see glimpses of Magog. He’s stands at the centre of the action, but it looks like he’s refusing to take sides. He is now just an observer to the war that he helped spawn.

It was ultimately the human authorities who took the decision to drop an atomic bomb on the super-humans – a last desperate attempt to stop the melee before it consumed the entire world. Superman again could have stopped the bomb, but in a last moment of clarity Captain Marvel realised that stopping the bomb would doom the world. He pushed Superman aside and detonated the bomb himself.

Magog was one of the few survivors of the explosion. He helped pull a few others including Tokyo Rose behind Green Lantern’s shields before the blast hit. He was also with the suvivors when Superman addressed the United Nations and when Wonder Woman was restored to her position on Paradise Island. From what little was shown of him he appeared quite repentant. Magog is shown several times carrying or caring for Tokyo Rose so she may have been somebody close to him. The novelization says that be became a dean of students at a new colony/school on Paradise Island for those arcane men and women who sought to retreat from the mortal world. Magog was also show having a quiet drink in a scene in The Kingdom: Offspring #1.

This Magog, the Magog of Earth-22, was not a super villain. He was a man of convictions and strong beliefs who thought that lethal force could be justified. The destruction that was wrought upon that Earth was not solely his fault. When Superman stood down he implicitly, whether intentional or otherwise, signalled to everybody that Magog was right.

Background

Kingdom Come

The names Gog and Magog spring up time and again in the writing of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Whether they are people, nations, or monsters isn’t entirely clear and shifts from case to case. That hasn’t stopped people claiming them as the ancestors of the Goths, Irish, Finns, or a host of other ethnic groups. There are also English stories that claim the British Isles were settled by survivors of the Trojan Wars led by Brutus of Troy. Brutus had to pacify the giants that already lived on the islands and a particularly gnarly one called Gogmagog. Two wooden giants called Gog and Magog have been part of the parade of the Lord Mayor City of London for over six hundred years.

The name Magog was adopted by Mark Waid and Alex Ross for one of the protagonists in their Kingdom Come series. According to the Kingdom Come Companion the golden armour worn by Magog was designed to resemble the golden calf that the Israelites worshipped whilst Moses’ back was turned. Their Magog became the false god that a younger generation turned to during Superman’s absence. It is telling that Ross used same the person as the figure model for both Superman and Magog – the Christ and Anti-Christ figures.

When I came up with the design for Magog, I was only parodying Rob Liefeld and his design for Cable, and it wound up being a strangely attractive design despite my efforts to make it as ugly as possible. It felt like there was an element of Kirby in it, even thought it was this gross distortion of the history of superhero design.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

The identity of Magog and the unseen Gog was not revealed in Kingdom Come. Magog was a cypher figure, a plot device that served to force Superman into retirement and then to bring him back again.

This is what a post-Liefeld Cable drawn by Leifeld looked like:

The resemblance between Cable and Magog now becomes quite obvious. However, Magog wasn’t even mentioned in Alex Ross’s original proposal for the Heroic Age (the project that became Kingdom Come). Ross told CBR that Magog was originally Mark Waid’s idea:

Now, wasn’t Magog a character created as a response to all those characters that were popping up in the early ’90s?

Yeah. That’s a character that Mark Waid invented that was really just put to me like come up with the most God awful, Rob Liefeld sort of design that you can. What I was stealing from was – really only two key designs of Rob’s – the design of Cable. I hated it. I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character – the scars, the thing going on with his eye, the arm, and what’s with all the guns? But the thing is, when I put those elements together with the helmet of Shatterstar — I think that was his name — well, the ram horns and the gold, suddenly it held together as one of the designs that I felt happiest with in the entire series.

Really?

Yeah. I don’t think it ended up looking like a buffoonish character. In a way, that gold rams head affect took it to a new level of almost biblical metaphor that had a nice little touch to it. It’s the kind of thing I should have been striving, but it was much more accidental.

Waid’s Gog Vs Ross’s Gog

During the 90s a Kingdom Come spin-off series was planned called the Kingdom. It would have been set in the present day, but the ongoing series fell through leaving Waid and Ross with their own versions of Magog and Gog. Waid got to tell his version of the story first with a one-shot called New Years Evil: Gog #1. It introduced a mentally unstable survivor of the Kansas tragedy who was elevated to near godhood by a group of cosmic beings. This Gog came to see Superman as the anti-Christ and sought to turn the world against him.

Mark Waid described this Gog’s connection to Superman:

It [the first issue of the aborted Kindgom series] was the story of how Magog came to be, the story of how Gog showed up in the present-day DC Universe and transformed a young man – who was, as we would learn, the sidekick that Superman had for about six months during his first couple of years as a defender of truth, justice and the American way – the untold, forgotten story of a kid who used to be under Superman’s wing and was adopted by Gog.

Mark Waid, Kingdom Come Companion, page 226

However, the Kingdom became something different and they never got to the Magog part. Waid’s Gog later appeared a couple of times as a Superman villain.

Meanwhile, Alex Ross has meditated on his own vision of who Gog was. Even before Waid’s Kingdom mini-series was published Ross has a solid idea of connecting Magog back to the Kirby influence he had felt come through in his design. The battles in Kingdom Come have a parallel with the war of the Old Gods in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythology so Ross’s idea was that Gog was one of the Old Gods, a survivor of the world that split in two to become New Genesis and Apokolips.

And there will be a god, one of the old gods from that planet, who survived. He will be here on Earth, and he will be called Gog. [...] He winds up looking like this giant Kirbyesque character who has big, gold horns and a metallic body, and he in effect is this very large character who somewhat looks like the ancient ancestor of both Highfather and Darkseid mixed into one. He’s going to be foreshadowing, by his actions, the future of Kingdom Come, and Magog will be this young guy, a parody of a Rob Liefeld young superhero wanna-be, who somehow gets linked up with Gog. Gog would have been, as we were discussing when Mark and I finally got into conference over this, martyred to a degree by Magog; Magog would be driven to the point of killing him. We didn’t have a reason for why this happened, but we were taking every single thing that we could think of from Kingdom Come and trying to throw it into this to make it work.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

That quote from Alex Ross was published in 1998 and is really close to the story that eventually showed up in Justice Society of America. The JSA title was relaunched after the Infinite Crisis and Alex Ross came on board as a cover artist and occasional co-plotter with Geoff Johns. An accident propelled the Kingdom Come Superman into the normal DC Universe where he was an observer of, and commenter on, events that led to the creation of this universe’s Magog.

The Magog Series

Johns’s JSA supplied the context of Gog’s arrival that had been missing in Ross’s original plotline. A long JSA arc dealt with the introduction of a list of new characters including Lance Corporal David Reid. Reid was the metahuman great-grandson of President Roosevelt. He was to be the “young superhero wanna-be” which Gog turned into his herald Magog.

The introduction of such an already well-known character to the DC Universe prompted DC to launch Magog in his own ongoing series written by Keith Giffen and with art by Howard Porter. Giffen told Newsarama on its launch that:

Like most comic fans, I had limited access to the character. I knew his role in Kingdom Come and the Gog story that Geoff told. But what struck me was that, underlying all the glitz and the armor and all, this guy is still a soldier. He’s David Reid, lance corporal. So I thought about how I could apply a real hardcore military mindset to a superhero and get into his head. Most, if not all, of the captions in the book are Magog’s narration, so you can really get into his head. And dealing with a hero whose moral parameters are much wider than, say, Superman’s kind of became fun.

It’s nice to play around with a hero who’s more protagonist than most heroes, maybe even antagonist. And he’s willing to do what needs to be done to get the job done. He’s not exactly Jack Bauer, and he doesn’t have that faux toughness that comes with Wolverine, but he’s definitely somebody who gets things done in his own unique and sometimes incredibly violent way. And I’ve been having a ball. I love this character. And honestly? No one is more surprised than I.

Unfortunately Magog’s series only lasted twelve issues. The series was to have been taken over by Scott Kollins with issue #10, but his multi-part arc entitled “Blown to Kingdom Come” had to be truncated to two-parts. Nevertheless, Kollins told CBR what he thought was Magog’s vital character:

I am a big fan of the “Kingdom Come” series. I felt very much the same way as the main characters and it was a great topic to put in a heroic story. I also think there were some basic concepts in that series that made Magog such an interesting character. It made him a character that we are still trying to tell stories about all these years later, similar to the recent story arc of Magog getting kicked out of the Justice Society of America. Magog works best if rubbing people the wrong way. It’s just his nature. Or his fate?

Even before Magog’s series had launched DC had been playing with the notion that he would eventually go bad and would need to be stopped. Brave and the Bold #23 featured a confrontation between Booster Gold and Magog which made the time travelling Booster aware that something about Magog’s future wasn’t right. Even his appearances in the Justice Society were bout foreshadowing how the main DC Universe was or was not diverging from the Kingdom Come possible future.

This approach was something that dated back to the original Kindgom series. In 1998 Alex Ross commented:

Truth be told, I was actually trying to lead the Kingdom storyline to the point where it actually nullified the future possibility of Kindgom Come; we’d see a glimpse of it and then we’d actually find out that it’s going to get circumvented so that it doesn’t happen.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

That possibility has been picked up in Justice League: Generation Lost where it appears that Maxwell Lord is fated to kill Magog in order to prevent him from causing the war foreseen by Kingdom Come.

Maxwell Lord had been one of the world’s foremost power brokers. A man who had been entertained by governments, empires, and businesses. Whatever Max wanted to happen happened. His crowning achievement was the formation of the Justice League International, but that – like all Leagues – eventually fell. Max then became embroiled in the affairs of  an artificial intelligence called the Kilg%re which transformed him into a cyborg. He appeared briefly in the public eye to organise a short-lived successor organisation to the JLI. However, what most this friends were unaware of was that Max was working behind-the-scenes on a new conspiracy.

• In Part One: Background, Details, and Biography (Early Life).
• In Part Two: Taking over the JLI, Fall of the Kilg%re, Max’s telepathic talent, and Shenanigans, JLI Style.
• In Part Three: Loss of control: Superman, Heimlich & Dreamslayer, and the First Death of Maxwell Lord,
• In Part Four: The Super Buddies, Left Turn Clyde, and Life & Death.

Biography (cont…)

Becoming the Black King

Checkmate was one of a several of inter-related US black-ops/intelligence agencies that were established or reactivated around the same time as Maxwell Lord was setting up his Justice League International. Checkmate’s hierarchy was based on the game of chess, the director was the “King”, the deputy-director was the “Queen”, its special agents were “Knights”, and its normal agents were “Pawns”. The fortunes of the agency waxed and waned in the competitive world of meta-human espionage (Checkmate V1). The last known  King, David Said, and his bishop, Jessica Midnight, were responsible for recruiting Bruce Wayne’s bodyguard, Sasha Bordeaux, as a Knight (“Bruce Wayne: Fugitive”).

Checkmate was reorganised sometime after Bordeaux’s recruitment into a parallel-structure: White Side and Black Side. White Side was broadly political in nature while Black Side was broadly operational. Each side had a King and a Queen and each of them had a Bishop (an advisor) and a Knight (special agent). One side was meant to balance the other. It is, perhaps, not surprising that Maxwell Lord was recruited by the Government to be the new director of operations (the “Black King”). His time with the JLI had given him unparalleled access to and knowledge of the meta-human community (ditto with his business contacts). What isn’t entirely clear is whether Max’s recruitment came before, after, or concurrently with his organisation of the Super Buddies (The OMAC Project).

Manga Khan had hinted to Max that it was possible to reverse his cybernetic condition, but that offer was never realised. From Checkmate Castle in the Swiss Alps Max had access to technology and resources from almost every other US agency including the Cadmus Project, Project “M” and Task Force X and to Federal contracts with STAR Labs, the Blackhawks, and Progene Tech. It was this technology that he would use to restore his humanity. How he did so isn’t entirely known, but the Maxwell Lord from a divergent timeline recorded that:

I have quite a history with artificial intelligence. It was a sentient computer virus called itself the Kilg%re that started me down this path. Perhaps it knew of the latent mind control powers that I would later manifest. Perhaps that’s why it considered me an important asset to its mission of world control. The Kilg%re set me up as the Justice League’s liaison. I manipulated the League as I was instructed. I collected information, but somewhere along the way I had a change of heart.

I’d trade my mother for a subway ticket, but my soul… that was something else entirely. I fought back. The Kilg%re eventually did too. It took control of my body. It transformed me into a cyborg. It tried to take away my humanity. It took dozens of operations through the various organisations controlled by Checkmate — Cadmus Labs, Project “M”, and Progene Tech — to regain my flesh and blood. But although I was free from the metal and oil membranes running through by veins, I understood the value of artificial intelligence. And of keeping power over the world in the hands of men and women. Not androids. Not aliens. Not the Justice League.

Maxwell Lord of a timeline where the OMAC Project was successful (Booster Gold V2 #9)

Time out: Lets be honest dear readers – Max’s personality has bounced around quite a bit. The original working-with-the-Kilg%re Max let a man kill himself, but he was shocked by what the Kilg%re did to his secretary. He had enough of a conversion when he broke with the Kilg%re  that the Martian Manhunter didn’t read him as evil. Nevertheless, the JLI Max was still willing to use mind control to convince the Huntress to join his team. The breakup of the JLI and the resurgence of the Kilg%re robbed Max of the team he’d built and ultimately his humanity. The fight to free himself from the Kilg%re, the failure to rebuild his team (the Super Buddies experiment), and the operations to restore his human body must have taken a toll on his mind. Somewhere in that entire sequence Max fell off the white-hat wagon.

The O.M.A.C. Project

The Maxwell Lord who thought he could bring about a better, more stable, more secure world by creating a well run international superhuman task force had lost faith with that optimistic ideal. The flesh-and-blood Max who emerged from Checkmate’s labs was a pessimist who now saw the superhumans as an inherently chaotic factor that could not be adequately controlled. It cannot be coincidence that Max came to his conversion during the time that the pro-human scientist Lex Luthor was US President. Max’s agenda at Checkmate would have dovetailed nicely with Luthor’s private anti-alien, human-first beliefs.

Max knew that he would need a new type of soldier to police the superhumans and began a research campaign called the OMAC Project. Early prototypes were produced in collaboration with the freelance intelligence operative Mister Orr. Orr’s Mark III OMAC, codenamed “Equus” was nearly feral and the Mark IV OMAC, codenamed “Pilate” (alias Father Daniel Leone) overcame its conditioning. Orr’s OMACs had used a synthetic cancer-line to rewrite the human body, but the results proved unacceptable to Checkmate and they withdrew their funding in favour of a different approach (Superman #204-215). The final design of the OMACs – Omni-Mind And Community – used a synthetic nano-machine virus to infect unsuspecting sleeper agents. The OMAC virus was developed in a collaboration between Lex Luthor’s Lexcorp and Maxwell Lord’s Checkmate. The virus was introduced into 1.3 million “hosts” via a dummy public health campaign.

The invisible machines would remain dormant inside of the sleeper host until activated. They would then take control of the host’s body turning them into a drone with basic fight/flight responses, but keyed to an outside control for strategic and tactical control. The nano-machines protected the host with a super hard exo-shell that had a distinctive head fin and a single eye. These supertough shells gave the OMACs superstrength, flight, and energy projecting attacks and other highly-extensible offensive capabilities. They also concealed the OMACs true identity from their target.

The last part of the OMAC army was a command-and-control computer system. Max had been the pawn of the Kilg%re so he knew the potential of artificial intelligence, but he now needed an AI that he could control. Max discovered that the Batman had built the perfect system, a semi-intelligent satellite called the Brother Mark One, that he had specifically designed to track and monitor superhumans. Max’s silent partner in the seizure of Brother Mark One and the creation of the OMACs was Alexander Luthor, a refugee from a defunct parallel universe. Max, with an unknown amount of help from Luthor, liberated the Brother Mark One from the Batman. Alexander Luthor added a child-like intelligence to it for his own purposes. The Brother Mark One, or “Brother Eye” as it called itself, knew the Batman as “creator”, but it was loyal to Max whom it called “teacher.”

The OMAC technology was not cheap to develop even with Checkmate’s Black Ops budget. Max began laundering the funds and procurement for the OMACs through a series of dummy corporations and the offices of companies like Waynetech and Kord Omniversal which were owned by his former associates. Most of this went unnoticed until Oracle discovered the word OMAC left on an account connected to Kord. She alerted the Blue Beetle (Ted Kord, the owner of Kord Omniversal) and he began his own investigation. Brother Eye and Lord sought to confuse Kord’s investigation and Max even met Ted socially to try and dissuade him of his attempt. Nevertheless, Ted eventually traced the OMAC trail to Checkmate’s castle in the Swiss Alps.

Max had assembled covert intelligence on most heroes and villains identities from his time on the JLI, working for the Kilg%re, and through Brother Eye’s surveillance. Beetle discovered those files in the Checkmate database and erased them before he was discovered. Max was impressed that his friend had got this far and offered him the chance to join Checkmate. Ted refused and was shot dead by Max (Countdown to Infinite Crisis).

Max ordered Sasha Bordeaux to incinerate Kord’s body and to dispose of the evidence. She hated what he had turned Checkmate into and secretly sent evidence of Kord’s murder to Bruce Wayne (whom she knew was the Batman). She implicated Checkmate and Wayne’s stolen satellite. Lord discovered the loss of evidence and used it as an excuse to unveil a fabricated “plot” by the White Queen and King to remove him. He telepathically forced White Queen’s Knight Jessica Midnight to kill the White King and Queen and then made her a scapegoat.  Max had now eliminated the last remaining check on his control of Checkmate. However, the Batman now knew the truth behind the OMACs (OMAC Project #1-3).

Batman’s involvement forced Lord to move up his schedule for the OMAC Project and he activated a previously established hypnotic suggestion in Superman’s mind. Superman began hallucinating that Brainiac was attacking his friends whilst he was actually attacking the Batman. He almost killed Batman before the rest of the Justice League managed to stop him. The Martian Manhunter discovered the “fingerprints” of Max’s mind control in Superman’s mind and revealed his connection Checkmate and the OMACs. Wonder Woman went to face Lord in Checkmate Castle. Wonder Woman’s divine blood prevent Lord from controlling her, but it didn’t stop the controlled Superman from fighting her.

After fighting the controlled Superman across the world Wonder Woman managed to bring him back to Checkmate. While her friend was momentary floored Wonder Woman bound Max in the lasso of truth and order him to release Superman. He told her that she “can’t keep this lasso on me forever. And the next time he’ll [Superman] kill Batman… or Lois… or you. You think I’ve lied to you,  but I haven’t. I can’t. He’s mine. I’ll never let him go.” Wonder Woman then twisted Max’s neck, killing him instantly and permanently removing his control of Superman (“Sacrifice” – Superman V2 #219, Action Comics #829, Adventures of Superman #642, Wonder Woman V2 #219).

The King Is Dead

Maxwell Lord’s death triggered a protocol called “The King Is Dead”, putting Brother Eye into a fully autonomous survival mode designed to eradicate all superhumans. The surviving Checkmate Knights managed to savage something of the organisations knowledge of the OMACs and provided Batman’s forces with the information they needed to halt the OMAC holocaust. However, in one last vindictive act Brother Eye transmitted video of Wonder Woman killing Maxwell Lord to every communications screen on Earth. Her public reputation was shattered as few people knew the full circumstances. It was Booster Gold who realised that the alien armour worn by Jamie Reyes (Ted Kord’s successor as the Blue Beetle) was the key to breaking Brother Eye’s stealth technology so that Batman’s team could finally bored it and disable it from within (OMAC Project #4-6, Infinite Crisis #1-7).

Lord’s activities had turned Checkmate into a powerful and effective, if misguided, organisation. There was a Federal investigation and the organisation was on the brink of being wound up when it was re-purposed by the United Nations. The US signed Checkmate over to the United Nations Security Council and it became their meta-human monitoring and security watchdog. Its new purpose was to fight international superhuman terrorists and to police the increasing number of State aligned superhuman teams. The new Black King, Taleb Beni Khalid of Israel, recruited Beatriz DaCosta (Fire) as his new Knight and Bordeaux was promoted to become the Black Queen (Checkmate v2).

Brother Eye’s broadcast of Wonder Woman murder of Max turned her into an international fugitive. She had killed monsters like the Medusa before and morally considered Max to be no different. Nevertheless, the pressure from the authorities forced her to adopting a new secret identity as Special Agent Diana Prince. She eventually handed herself into the authorities and stood trial for Max’s murder. Her lawyer, Kate Spencer (alias Manhunter), had help from Bordeaux in getting her acquitted (Manhunter #27).  The Government’s arrest of Wonder Woman – the daughter of a Queen Hippolyta, a foreign head of state – triggered an invasion of Washington DC by the Amazons (Amazon’s Attack).

Most people assumed that Booster Gold, never the most highly regarded hero, went off the rails after Max killed his best friend (Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle). What they didn’t realise was that he had become a roving time agent for the Time Master Rip Hunter. Against Rip’s advice, Booster volunteered to help another time traveller called the Black Beetle alter history to save Ted. With Dan Garrett and Jamie Reyes (Ted’s predecessor and successor as the Blue Beetle). However, what they actually created was a divergent timeline where Batman never learnt about the OMACs until it was too late.

Ted’s death should have been the trigger that unravelled Max’s conspiracy. Without that Max’s OMAC were successful in killing hundreds of superhumans and driving the survivors underground. Beetle and Booster reassembled their JLI team-mates and used a Boom Tube to storm Checkmate Castle. In that timeline it was Doctor Light who managed to kill Max. However, it turned out that the Black Beetle was actually Reyes’s future arch-enemy. He had helped Booster save Ted so that there would be no need for Jamie to ever become a Blue Beetle and thus never rise to oppose him. The changes to history were causing Booster to fade from reality and Ted realised that he had to die to save Booster and restore the correct timeline. He then stepped back into the place in time he had come from – thus  restoring reality, but presumably ending his life again (Booster Gold V2 #6-10)

Becoming the Black Lantern

Maxwell Lord was given a second funeral at a cemetery in Washington DC. However, his murder by Wonder Woman had given his remains mystical significance. A trio of villains – Despero, Enigma (the Riddler from the Anti-Matter Universe), and Morgaine Le Fay – sought to usurp Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman’s totemic positions within the Universe’s make-up and needed a spell component linked to Wonder Woman. They chose Lord’s skull and sent a team of agents to retrieve it. Gangbuster, Hawkman and a large group of allies fought Le Fay’s agents, but one of them escaped with the skull. The narrative of the Universe was fundamentally rewritten, but the spell was not perfect and the original reality was eventually restored (Trinity).

Other raids on deceased superhuman graves caused the Justice League to create a special secure morgue that was buried three stories beneath their Washington DC headquarters. Maxwell Lord’s remains were reinterred there, but they did not remain undisturbed for long. An aspect of Death called Nekron attempted to enter the living universe by creating a perverse duplicate of the Green Lantern Corps. His Black Lanterns were corpses animated by a black power ring that read the corpses memories and recreated it as a hateful zombie-like creature. Each Black Lantern was created to elicit the strongest emotional response from a specific target. Black Lantern Maxwell Lord was created to torment Wonder Woman and he fought her in Arlington Cemetery before the last pitched battle in Coast City (Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #1).

Nekron was defeated when the White Entity – the living embodiment of life – was discovered. The legion of Black Lanterns were destroyed, returned to inanimate corpses, but for some as yet unknown reason the White Entity’s White Lantern saved twelve of the deceased and returned them to life. Maxwell Lord was one of those twelve. He acted quickly a cloud Guy Gardner’s mind and escaped before anybody realised he was one of the twelve (Blackest Night #1-8).

Maxwell Lord’s activities now unfold in Justice League: Generation Lost.

• In Part One: Background, Details, and Biography (Early Life).
• In Part Two: Taking over the JLI, Fall of the Kilg%re, Max’s telepathic talent, and Shenanigans, JLI Style.
• In Part Three: Loss of control: Superman, Heimlich & Dreamslayer, and the First Death of Maxwell Lord,

Biography (cont.)

The Super-Buddies – or- Formerly known as a good idea

Max had been absent from the Chronicles for some time when he resurfaced with a brand new enterprise. The Justice League International had been about helping people world-wide, but this time Max was going to organise a group that could help people on a neighbourhood level. His new dream was of accessible heroes who were free from corporate or political interests and were instead backed by a not for-profit organisation based in a strip mall in the New York suburbs. Max needed help to realise this dream so he rescued L-Ron, Manga Khan’s former lackey, from his dead-end burger-flipping job and set about recruiting their old JLI friends to his new cause.

Max’s first recruit was Ted Kord (the Blue Beetle) who tried to plead that he couldn’t take part due to a heart condition, but his protests fell on deaf ears and Max, in that way that only Max can, convinced him to take part. The Elongated Man was going stir crazy and jumped at the chance to sign up. Fire was doing well after turning her modelling career into a pay-per-view website where people could download pictures in her flame form. Captain Atom had sunk to paying an artist to redesign his costume and a script writer to formulate his in-fight banter. They too welcomed the chance to be part of something worthwhile again. Booster Gold was living as the toy-boy of an older woman and also jumped at the chance. The only person that turned Max and L-Ron down was Captain Marvel (Billy Batson), but idea intrigued his sister Mary Marvel and she volunteered (Formerly Known as the Justice League #1).

This time around Max was far more hand-ons with the paperwork – mainly because L-Ron refused to handle as much of it as Oberon had – and over saw the establishment of their new strip mall offices. Miss Tuttle and the local community organisation were concerned at the effect that Max’s new group would have on the neighbourhood and their fears were confirmed when a group of Harvard educated street hoodlums attacked the offices during their meeting. Max’s group managed, for once, to effectively contain the well-spoken threat and deflect Miss Tuffle’s objections (Formerly Known as the Justice League #2). The new group was to be called the “Super Buddies” (apparently “Super Friends” was taken). Max launched a promotional campaign that was derided by the press and that vexed his friends (Formerly Known as the Justice League #3).

Debate over Max’s advertising was tabled when the team, minus Max, L-Ron and Sue Dibny, were kidnapped by Roulette. She wanted them to fight as superhuman gladiators on her illegal pay-per-view network. They were kept under a mind control field that made them politely passive in their cells and murderously violent in the Arena. The mind control field was so powerful that the usually placid Mary Marvel almost killed Captain Atom when they were forced to fight under it. Fire managed to wiggle past the mind block – she thought in Portuguese (her native language) and the field broadcast in English. She then freed the others and made it to the Arena in time to stop Mary from killing Atom. However, even she couldn’t stand-up for long against the insane Marvel. Roulette was eventually forced to cancel the event and free the team when Mary’s normal personality returned (Formerly Known as the Justice League #3-4).

While his team were away Max’s offices were visited by a representative from the Cluster – who conveniently and threateningly left their very large spaceship hovering above New York. Years earlier Manga Khan, the Cluster’s verbose leader, had traded L-Ron (his personal robotic servant) to Lord, but Khan missed L-Ron so much that he had returned to Earth to barter for his return. Max resisted the pressure to trade L-Ron as if he was a slave or an object – even when the Cluster offered to exchange him for the former Green Lantern G’nort. A legion of Khan’s robotic soldiers surrounded the Super-Buddies offices as he and  Max negotiated – even the JLA chose to wait to see what Lord would pull out of the bag. Khan bargained hard and even offered to use the Cluster’s technology to restore Max’s humanity (he was, at least at this stage, still a cyborg), but he resisted.

The impasse between Max and Khan was ended when Beetle and Booster returned from taking Captain Atom to hospital and accidentally toppled Khan’s robotic guard. The Flash, who was watching with the JLA, disarmed the guards and prevented a fire fight. It was then Sue, not Max, who – despite the Cluster’s superior tactical advantage – somehow managed to convinced Manga Khan that he was their hostage. Max then negotiated a settlement with Khan whereby they’d “release” him in exchange for him giving up all and any claim to either L-Ron or G’nort. After Khan had left Max signed up G’nort and told him that they were starting a chapter in Antarctica – he then left G’nort to hike down to the southern polar continent on his own (Formerly Known as the Justice League #5-6).

Left Turn Clyde! – or – I can’t believe they didn’t keep this in continuity.

With the Manga Khan instance out-of-the-way life continued, more or less, as it had done for Max and the Super Buddies. Captain Atom had resigned and he was suing Max over his near fatal injures he’d received from Mary Marvel. Blue Beetle inverted the colours on his costume, Booster Gold got rid of his collar, Mary Marvel and Fire started sharing an apartment, and everybody kept wondering if they were paid or not.

The new mystery was the identity of the owner of a bar that was opening next to their offices. Sue discovered that it was co-owned by a reformed supervillain and kept lobbying Max to storm the bar and force him out. She grew increasingly exasperated as first Max and then everybody else seemed unbothered by the news. Sue finally stormed next door and punched the villain, Richard Hertz, alias Blackguard of the 1,000, on the nose. Her husband and friends put her actions down to swinging hormones associated with pregnancy – something she angrily denied. Max managed to get the situation smoothed over until they discovered that Hertz’s partner was their former team-mate, jerk, and all round macho-man Guy Gardner. That the name of the new bar was called “The Dark Side” – the name of an old underground New York villains bar – didn’t perturb Gardner in the slightest (JLA Classified #4-5).

Gardner’s reappearance not included, Max needed more power on the team. Beetle and Booster were visiting Power Girl at the JSA to pass on Max’s offer to join the Super Buddies when Booster unwisely ventured into Doctor Fate’s rooms. He was investigating one of Fate’s Magical Idols, joking about the type of incantations one would say with it, when he inadvertently sent himself, Beetle, Fire, Ralph, and Mary to “the deepest darkest pits of hell!” Max was incredulous that Hell actually existed  – he was more impressed that Fire could still get a cell phone signal there. Unfortunately Fire burnt the phone when she heard who’s fault their current predicament was. Power Girl briefed Max and Sue on the situation, but she was unable to contact Doctor Fate or to activated the magical idol. Guy found their predicament amusing and used it as an excuse to show his “superiority.” He used the idol to send himself and Power Girl on a rescue mission and then once in Hell he used his yellow power ring – which he had so far kept secret – to find the team.

Etrigan the demon had taken the five Hell bound Super Buddies to Hell’s equivalent of a Fast Food diner where they were to word out their time (they were, after all, illegal immigrants as far as Hell’s paperwork was concerned). Fire was horrified to find that one of the passive, mindless souls in line at the diner was Ice (Tora Olafsdotter), who at the time of her death had been Fire’s best friend and Guy Gardner’s girl friend. Guy wrecked the diner to free his friends and was shocked to see Tora. By now Etrigan had grown tired of the additional chaos the Super Buddies had wrought in Hell so he said he’d allow them to leave with Tora (she’d been sent there by mistake). The condition was the Orpheus Protocol, she would follow behind them, but none of them could look over their shoulder at her or she’d vanish back to her proper afterlife. They then started the long climb out of Hell, but tragically Fire couldn’t help herself and momentarily glanced back causing Ice to vanish is a flash of white light (JLA Classified #6-7).

The distraught heroes finally escaped Hell and found themselves back in a New York City that was being wrecked by a sky scraper sized G’nort.  When Power Girl, Mary, and Guy tried to stop G’nort they found themselves blocked by twisted versions of Captain Marvel and Mary. The rest of them tried to return to the Super Buddies offices, but in its place they found a bar/strip club advertising a group called the “Power Posse” which was run by a sleezier, overweight version of Max. He was having an affair with Ralph’s wife and had employed a thuggish version of Metamorpho as a bouncer and an even dumber version of Booster as a barman. The biggest surprise was to find Ice still alive, but working as a stripper called Tiffany. By this stage even the Super Buddies had worked out that they were in a parallel universe. The evil universe’s Ice had killed her Fire on Max’s orders and he was angry to see her heroic duplicate. The evil Max then ordered his Ice to kill Fire again. The Super Buddies managed to defeat their duplicates and were saved the trouble of escaping that dimension when their universe’s Doctor Fate finally teleported them back home (JLA Classified #8-9).

Life and Death

The Super Buddies had been a marvellous, if aborted, reunion of Max’s team, but it represented something of a deadend for the people involved. Rapidly, very rapidly, things began to fall apart and to change.

• Guy Gardner never did allude to where he had acquired his yellow power ring, but it was soon forgotten when Hal Jordan managed to defeat the Parallax entity that had possesd him for years. Hal’s resurrection coincided with a re-foundation of the Green Lantern Corps by the Guardians of the Universe. Guy returned to being a Green Lantern and was even made a member of the Honour Guard which served the Guardians on Oa (Green Lantern: Rebirth).
• Captain Atom, who had been injured fighting Mary Marvel, found that his Air Force commission was reactivated by President Lex Luthor. He was then appointed to head up the task force that Luthor wanted to arrest Superman and Batman. Instead, Captain Atom blew himself up destroying a vast kryptonite asteroid what Luthor had used to frame Superman (Superman/Batman “Public Enemies”). The explosion didn’t kill the Captain and instead bounced him into another parallel universe where superheroes were distrusted (Captain Atom: Armageddon).
• The Super Buddies were never entirely sure if it really was Ice, Tora Olafsdotter, that they met in Hell or whether it was a projection designed to torture them. Etrigan claimed that she’d been sent there by mistake and that the Super Buddies were responsible for correcting that if nothing else. It would be several years until Ice reappeared, but she may not have been able to come back if she hadn’t been rescued from Hell.
• The first casuality  of the Super Buddies was Sue Dibny, the Elongated Man’s wife. Jean Loring, the ex-wife of the Atom (Ray Palmer), murdered Sue in a delusional scheme to make the Atom love her again. Sue had served as Max’s assistant during the Super Buddies and he was seen at her funeral talking to Booster Gold (Identity Crisis).
• Booster Gold fell on hard times and reverted to taking sponsorship again.
• The Blue Beetle had discovered that his new costume was identical to the one of the Beetle from the evil parallel universe so he immediately changed back to his original look (JLA Classified #9).

Events around the Super Buddies were pulling them, and even the normal Justice League, in a myriad number of different directions. People were distracted and many things that should have been noticed were ignored. One of those things was Maxwell Lord’s real agenda and conspiracy he been building…

Next: Checkmate!

• In Part One: Background, Details, and Biography (Early Life).
• In Part Two: Taking over the JLI, Fall of the Kilg%re, Max’s telepathic talent, and Shenanigans, JLI Style.

Biography (cont.)

Loss of control: Heimlich, Dreamslayer, and Superman

Max’s tenure as the administrator of the Justice League had held the team together and had kept it strong despite the disparate personalities involved. His own brand of practical, blunt logic and arms length management had worked surprisingly well for the League. The arrangement’s glaring weakness was that Max had no true deputy, there was no backup plan should anything happen to him. Nevertheless, his colleagues respected their enigmatic benefactor and even regarded him as a friend. He seems to have reciprocated that sentiment and he was about to introduce his girlfriend Wanda to the League – a massive step for the fastidiously private Max – when everything he had built came crashing down.

Max and Wanda were approaching the JLI’s New York Embassy when Max was shot by a sniper. The bullet wound was not fatal, but Max was left comatose. The international press started a death watch outside the hospital and many people did not expect Max to recover. The UN feared that the JLI would spin out of control without him and appointed Ambassador Kurt Heimlich as Max’s temporary replacement. Max had governed the JLI with a relatively light touch, but Heimlich’s iron fist caused chaos within the League. Heimlich and Max’s assassin were eventually revealed as agents of the Bailyan government, but Max’s coma and the Heimlich debacle caused the UN to suspend the JLI’s remit.

Max made a miraculous recovery from his injures, but he did not realise that this was because he was coming under the control of Dreamslayer of the Extremists. Dreamslayer was a powerful sorcerer/entity from a parallel Earth. He based himself on Kooey Kooey Kooey and used Max’s telepathic talent to force an engineer to rebuild the original Extremist robots and their leader Lord Havok. Dreamslayer baited the JLI to investigate Kooey Kooey Kooey and then used Max’s telepathic power to turn them against their friends. It was only the Silver Sorceress’ self sacrifice that defeated Dreamslayer and freed Max and the other Leaguers (“Breakdowns”). Max was given a clean bill of health by his Doctors, but everything that he had worked to create had been torn down (Justice League Europe #35).

J’onn helped remind Max why the League was important and spurred him on (Justice League America #60). Lord contacted the Batman about reforming the League, but Batman passed and referred him to Superman. The Man of Steel had repeatedly passed on earlier offers to join the JLI and had no intention of working for Lord. Left on his own Max began to revert to his old methods. He contacted the Royal Flush Gang again and paid them to create a suitable event to draw a new Justice League together. What Max didn’t know was that a second benefactor, a new Weapons Master, had given the Gang weaponry that turned them into a genuine threat. They were even able to capture Superman before Hal Jordan and Aquaman allied themselves with former JLI members to defeat them. Max was horrified at what has almost happened, but his League was back together and they were now bolstered by Superman’s participation. What Max had not bargained for was the Man of Steel resistance to his authority (Justice League Spectacular).

Superman told Max that “The Justice League is not one of your toys. It doesn’t exist to feed your ego. It exists because there’s a need for it — and because we say it does.” (Justice League America #61-62). Nevertheless, Max pressed forward with a new United Nations deal. The League would have greater autonomy and access to a new high-tech complex next to the UN in New York. In return they would aid the UN with security matters as and when requested. Superman didn’t appreciate the deal, but his protests were delayed by Starbreaker’s attack on Maxima’s homeworld (Justice League America #63-65). Max was not the only person who had a problem with Superman and he repeatedly clashed with Guy Gardner. Guy pointed out that Superman came and went as he wanted, and he refused to carry a JLA signal device, yet he still expected to dominate League matters (Justice League America #68).

The interpersonal rivalries were halted by Superman’s untimely death fighting Doomsday. The creature left Blue Beetle comatose, Booster Gold’s equipment destroyed, Fire powerless, and precipitated Ice taking a leave of absence. Max was forced to rebuild the League again and offered membership to the Ray, Black Condor, Agent Liberty, and Wonder Woman (Justice League America #71). However, most of the new members didn’t last beyond the new team’s encounter with Doctor Destiny (Justice League America #72-75) and the revelation of Bloodwynd’s true identity (Justice League America #76-77). Only Wonder Woman remained on the team and she succeeded Superman as the group’s natural field commander (Justice League America #78).

The UN left Max’s new JLA alone until a situation developed on the island nation of Seylone. The UN’s Geneal DuLac requested the League’s help to establish a bridgehead at Seylone’s airport for a peacekeeping and humanitarian mission (Justice League America #78-79). Max’s relationship with his team was strained when they rescued a pair of interstellar criminals and then refused to hand them over to the State Department for extrication. Max wanted to cooperate with the President and Captain Atom’s military team, but Wonder Woman stood fast. The situation was compounded when a doppelgänger of Guy Gardner murdered one of the criminals (Justice League America #81-83).

The relationship between League and administrator finally broke during the second visitation of the Overmaster. It/he appeared on Mount Everest and announced the extinction of humanity. The UN Security Council forbade the League from intervening, but Captain Atom refused to acknowledge their order. The UN leaned on Max and threatening to kill the League’s funding unless he acted. Max organised a bloodhound unit of “League Busters” to bring back Captain Atom’s rogue League faction. He never intended to use the team, but Atom called his bluff and Max was forced to send them into the field. Wonder Woman revolted against Max’s decision and took the rest of the League to help Atom. After the defeat of the Overmaster the League fractured into three competing teams – all outside of Max’s control (“Judgement Day”).

First Death

Wonder Woman’s League faction established an open-shop, drop-in presence in an orbiting “Refuge” that they had salvaged from the Overmaster. The Kilg%re – the artificial intelligence that had originally helped Max set-up the JLI – desired the alien technology and information contained within the Refuge. It’s first attempt to infiltrate the Refuge was a failure so it decided to reactivate its collaboration with Max. Without his knowledge the Kilg%re activated a “kill switch” that it has placed inside Max’s brain. He had approached Wonder Woman’s JLA with his services, but they politely declined – not out of spite, but because they wanted to be in control of their own destiny. Max passed out during his visit to the Refuge and was rushed to hospital by his worried friends (Justice League America #93, 98).

Max’s doctors told him that a rare form of tumour that was spreading through his brain. They told him that they could save his life, but the operation would leave him a vegetable (Justice League America #94). In hospital, Max was approached by the Kilg%re who offered him a” way for your consciousness, for your will, to survive, Mr Lord. Is that worth any price?” Max, ever the pragmatist, accepted – even if he wasn’t aware that his old “benefactor” had returned. The Kilg%re removed Max’s consciousness and let his physical body to die (Justice League America #95).

Max’s hospitalization was noted by the Arcana, the secret society he had joined shortly after founding the JLI. They sent a team to his home to recover any sensitive documents he may have preserved, but they were attacked by a new super villain who was unaware that Lord had just died. The villain, codenamed Judgement (alias James Collins), was the brother of the mental patient turned terrorist (John Charles Collins ) that Max and the Kigl%re had sacrificed at the UN to create the right political climate for formation of the JLI. James Collins had blackmailed Max for hush money which he had then used to fund his own transformation into a powerful super-villain. Collins wanted revenge against Maxwell Lord, but he had waited too long (Justice League America #94-96).

The first thing that the League knew about Max’s metamorphosis was when Fire checked on him at the hospital and was told that he had just died (Justice League America #95). A funeral was arranged and many past and present Leaguers attended. Also in attendance were powerful figures from the media, politics, and finance. This highlighted how powerful Max had been, but it also showed his friends in the League just how little they knew about him. Judgement shifted his attention to Max’s friends and attacked them at his funeral. Collins was defeated, but he escaped to attack the League’s Refuge before they were able to capture him in own home (Justice League America #96-97).

Judgement’s attack on Lord’s funeral had destroyed Max’s “corpse”. However, an autopsy had been carried out and Max’s Doctor contacted the League to tell them that he had discovered that Max’s brain had been wiped clean. The autopsy records were mysteriously erased while the Doctor was speaking with Hawkman (Justice League America #97). The Kilg%re had digitized Max’s mind and had turned him into a synthetic intelligence, a computer program, within its own computer world. It then created a new cybernetic-body based on that of Lord Havok, the Leader of the original Extremists, for Max to inhabit. The new identity was both a smug play on Max’s name and an unwelcome reminder of one of the League’s most dangerous foes. The Kilg%re believed that Max/Havok’s knowledge of the League would allow him to successfully penetrate their Refuge, but he was defeated by their superior numbers (Justice League America #98-100).

Without Max’s influence the Arcana moved to procure another source of influence with the Justice League. They recruited the Blue Devil via his movie producer friend Marla and got him to supply them with a commentary on the League’s activities in the belief that they were actually researching a Justice League movie (Justice League America #101). Their plans were thrown into chaos when Marla died (Underworld Unleashed) and the Arcana’s Queen of Spades had to lean on her associate Speakman to restore contact with the Blue Devil (Justice League America #108).

Max/Havok began asserting his independence from the Kilg%re and planned to bring the Arcana under his own control. He recruited Judgement as his lieutenant and had him kill the Arcana’s agents that had been sent to kill Speakman. The Blue Devil’s unwitting deal with the Arcana was revealed by the man-demon El Diablo, but they arrived at Speakman’s studios during Judgement’s attack and Speakman died before he could be properly questioned. Max attacked the Arcana and recruited the Queen of Spades to his cause. He then used the information they had gathered from the Blue Devil to out do the Kilg%re and actually usurp control of the JLA’s Refuge. The JLA regained control of it by flying into deep space where they were outside of the range of his control signal. The League returned to Earth and followed the signal to the lair of the Arcana’s leadership (the four “Aces”), but they arrived just after it had been destroyed by Havok and Judgement (“Purge”, Justice League America #111-113).

The Wonder Woman’s open-door JLA was winding down and Captain Atom’s League splinter team was increasingly seen as a liability so the UN contacted Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman with the idea of creating a single, more powerful League. Their League’s first case involved the arrival on Earth of a group of White Martians disguised as a group of alien superheroes called the Hyperclan. The visitors destroyed the old JLA Refuge and targeted known super villains for headline grabbing executions. One of the villains the Hyperclan executed was Judgement, Lord Havok’s lieutenant (JLA #1). However, there was no trace of either Lord Havok or Maxwell Lord.

And that is where the Arcana/Maxwell Lord storyline ends. It was never finished by Gerard Jones before his run on Justice League America was cancelled in favour of Grant Morrison’s Big Seven JLA relaunch. The comments made by DC editorial, circa Infinite Crisis (see Part One), imply that they regard Max’s tenure as a cyborg as a dead-end – an inconvenient detail to be quietly ignored. There is a scene in JLA #1 where the Hyperclan BBQ a line of supervillains tied to stakes. The entire issue involves scenes like that which draw a distinct line under the earlier League’s stories. The only villain clearly identifiable in the line up is Judgement, but the next in line looks a bit robotish/Dr Doom like so he could be Max’s Lord Havok.

Next: The Super Buddies

In Part One: Background, Details, and Biography (Early Life).

Biography (cont.)

Taking over the Justice League

Max first met the founders of the Justice League of America (JLA) at a Gotham City gentleman’s club where they were confronting an executive. Lord observed to one over opinionated millionaire that,

“Believe me. I want the JLA as close to me as possible. I rather like the idea of a Justice League. Just imagine. In the right hands, with the right guidance… they could be an army to change the world…” (JLA Year One #7).

The League had risen to pre-eminence as a United Nations (UN) recognised organisation, but dwindling participation by its founders had forced Aquaman to disband it. His grand experiment was to found a second, smaller League, but Aquaman’s own attention wandered and his League proved surprisingly vulnerable to a low-key attack by Professor Ivo’s androids and to the hate and chaos caused of Darkseid’s anti-hero riots.

Those same riots triggered the formation of a new Justice League led by Batman, J’onn J’onzz, and Doctor Fate (Legends, Justice League #1). This group could fill the international security role that Max and the Kilg%re foresaw, but they feared that it too, would disintegrate (Justice League International #12). Years after the fact, Max would articulate a second reason for wanting to control the Justice League. He claimed that he had wanted to save humanity from the metahuman gods who tried to pass themselves off as normal people. One way to do that was so keep the metahuman’s most celebrated organisation as passive and ineffectual as possible. The second anti-superhuman reason that Max sprouted in Countdown to Infinite Crisis is of course completely at odds with his portrayal during the JLI era. He was manipulative and self-serving, but he was never that bigoted. It is possible that Max’s first resurrection by the Kilg%re caused brain damage that further altered his personality.

Max and the Kilg%re would have to bring this new Justice League under their direct control. They created a new generation of signal devices (Justice League International #12) and Max delivered one of them to Doctor Light (Kimiyo Hoshi). He informed her that he was authorised to induct her into the League. He also arranged for a former mental patient called John Charles Collins to hold the UN General Assembly hostage with a bomb surgically attached to his torso. The new Justice League evacuated the building, but Collins killed himself trying to trigger the bomb. Unfortunately for Collins, Max had deliberately withheld the bomb’s firing pin and used his pawn’s death to create the right political climate for his take over of the League (Justice League #1).

Lord worked behind the scenes to smooth over relations between the Russian Rocket Red Brigade and the Justice League after three alien superheroes (Wandjina, Silver Sorceress, and the Blue Jay) invaded a Russian nuclear power station (Justice League #3). When the League returned from Russia they found Lord and a new hero called Booster Gold waiting for them in their headquarters.

Batman launched an immediate investigation into Lord’s activities and how he had recruited Doctor Light and Booster Gold. Light quit in disgust and Booster almost quit as well, but an attack by the Royal Flush Gang proved his potential and he was accepted into the League. Moments later, Lord was announcing Booster’s addition to the press and was calling himself Justice League’s “official press liaison” (Justice League #4). Neither the League or Booster knew that Lord had hired Jack of the Royal Flush Gang to stage the event. Lord’s lawyers made sure that the Gang was out on the street within days of their arrest (Justice League International #12).

Most of the Justice League were occupied with a conflict between Doctor Fate and the Greyman when Lord began manoeuvring again. From his private office at the UN Lord had crafted a Security Council resolution that would turn the Justice League into an official arm of the United Nations. The new “Justice League International” would function as an independent city-state with embassy bases in each member nation’s capital. Lord would be the League’s UN liaison and administrative head along with his new personal assistant Oberon (Mister Miracle’s former trainer).

J’onn J’onzz saw the obvious benefits for the world, but he and others had reservations about the move. Without Max’s knowledge the Kilg%re used an Apokoliptian training-weapon to create a threat for the League to defeat. Pictures of the League’s valiant fight swung public opinion behind the new resolution. The US and Russia would only agreed to it if their own heroes, Captain Atom and Rocket Red, were given League membership, but any lingering doubts were brushed aside by a personal intervention by Superman (Justice League International #7).

Fall of the Kilg%re

Max’s plans for the League almost unravelled when the Manhunters, an ancient android police force turned secret society, tried to kill the chosen mortal successors to the Guardians of the Universe. Max’s secretary, Miss Wootenhoffer, was a Manhunter sleeper agent. She shot Max several times at close range before the Kil%gre killed her. It patched Lord up again and left him with little memory of the attack (Justice League International #9).

Max was visibly upset when he heard that no members of the task-force put together to fight the Manhunters had stayed around to join the League. He told the League that he was being watched by his own computer system and claimed that he needed extra-firepower to face an outside force that was controlling it. The Kilg%re made it look as if the Construct – an old League computer villain – was controlling Max. It wanted the League to fight and destroy Metron so that it would be free from his control. However, the machine did not know that Mister Miracle had been raised on New Genesis and knew Metron personally.

The JLI were briefly transported to New Genesis during their meeting with Metron. The Kilg%re took the opportunity to place a kill-switch in Lord’s brain that it could activate at any time that it wanted to dispose of him. The Kilg%re was forced to flee from Metron’s lab and allowed him to think that it had transferred its sentience into a terminal in Lord’s office. It implored Max to upload it to the internet, but something else had happened to Max when he was shot. The man who had woken up had changed, some spark of altruism has been kindled in him and he had genuinely begun to see the League as his friends. Max refused to help the Kilg%re’s machinations any more and destroyed its remaining terminal.

The remains of the Kilg%re intelligence withdrew elsewhere to undergo it own convalescence. Without it, the power that had held Lord’s injuries closed disappeared and he collapsed. The League found him and rushed Max to hospital. J’onn J’onzz scanned Max telepathically to establish the truth and discovered his Damascus-ian conversion. J’onn believed that Max had genuinely changed and left a JLI signal device with him (Justice League #11-12, Justice League America Annual #9).

The first people that Max met upon waking in hospital were representatives from a secret organisation of power brokers called the Arcana. They had begun as a mysteries sect during Renaissance, but the Arcana had long forgotten their origins and had evolved into a secret society of power brokers. Their operations, and hence their name, where loosely patterned on a deck of playing cards – the diamonds controlled finance, the clubs were politicians, the hearts controlled the media, and the spades controlled the group’s security. Max accepted a place in their society as a “three of diamonds”, but he doesn’t seem to have been particularly active in the organisation until after his involvement with the Justice League (Justice League America #111-113, Annual #9).

Max remained hospitalised in Mt Sinai Medical Centre during the JLI’s repatriation of the Suicide Squad from Russia. Max already knew the Squad’s administrator, Amanda Waller, and respected her. She was the closest he had to an equal or rival in terms of position and ability, but their working relationship was always abrasive (Justice League International #13, Invasion #3). He also sat out the first visit to Earth by the intergalactic merchant Manga Khan and his Cluster (an interstellar trade caravan, Justice League International #14-15). Max was still on medical leave when at his Cape Cod Beach House when the Batman led a covert JLI team to investigate Rumann Harjavti’s Bailya. Batman’s team were discovered during the Queen Bee’s assassination of Harjavti and Batman was forced to masquerade as Lord at a diplomatic function (Justice League International #16-17).

A New Talent

The founding JLI roster was already beginning disperse by the time that Maxwell Lord’s extended convalescence finished. Rocket Red and J’onn J’onzz were in space pursuing the Cluster (which had kidnapped Mister Miracle) and Black Canary had resigned. Two new members, Fire and Ice, had volunteered, but Max refused to let the team drift apart as the first two League’s had done. He boosted the team’s strength with the temporary appointment of Lobo and then he launched the League’s first membership drive – something of a tradition under his leadership. However, drive back fired when they recruited a pair of Thanagarian spies who were impersonating Hawkman and Hawkgirl ( Justice League International #19).

The main Thanagarian force was part of an alien armada which included Dominators, Khunds, and Daxamites that was trying to invade the Earth. The JLI’s Australian Embassy was an early target and the politicians leaned on Max to keep the superheroes in line with the military response. The bulk of the League was dispatched to the Pacific theatre to help the military. Max was one of scores of normal people who were revealed to have the capability to develop superpowers when the Dominators set off a “genebomb” designed to disable only those humans with the specific genetic factor (the metagene) that allows humans to acquire superpowers. Max wasn’t initially affected, but he collapsed while briefing the heroes being sent on a mission to liberate the cure (Invasion #1-3, Justice League International #22-23).

As he recovered from the genebomb Max began to wonder just how much the Kilg%re had known about his metagene. Lord secretly hiked out to Metron’s mountain laboratory. There he managed to restore partial power to Metron’s computer. It confessed that it had known about his metagene, but it blew itself up in trying to kill Max. The explosion trapped Max by caving in the entrance to the laboratory. In desperation he shouted “Can you hear me you super-powered dipsticks?!” into the darkness, but he was unaware that he was sending a telepathic “suggestion” to the Blue Beetle in New York. Beetle, much to his team-mates bemusement, claimed that he knew that Max was in danger and raced off to save him (Justice League International #24).

When Max returned to work he found that Oberon had launched another recruitment drive – this time targeting the heroes who had helped the JLI during the Invasion. They were invited to the New York Embassy for a party at which Max announced that a second JLI team was going to be created. The new “Justice League Europe” team was to be based in Paris and overseen by the Paris Embassy chief Catherine Colbert and by Captain Atom who was to be a field-commander with status equal to J’onn J’onzz (Justice League International #24, Justice League Europe #1-5).

Max’s new telepathic “talent” got its first real test when the Queen Bee activated a post-hypnotic suggestion that she had planted in the Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) during the JLI’s incursion into Bailya. She turned Ted into a knife wielding manic who believed that his only purpose was to murder Maxwell Lord. He chased Max into the streets of New York. Max kept “pushing” Beetle’s mind to create momentary distractions, but he was eventually cornered. The Huntress saved Max’s life and Beetle was deprogrammed by the Suicide Squad’s Amanda Waller and Nabu (the Lord of Order behind Doctor Fate, Justice League America #26-27, 29). The Huntress helped the JLI again when a youth stole one of Big Barda’s weapons. Max was so impressed with the Huntress’s help that he used his talent to convince her to to sign-up with the JLI (Justice League America #29-30).

Max’s talent: Whether the genebomb gave Max his power or just enhanced it isn’t entirely clear. He was an extremely persuasive and well-connected man long before the Invasion so he may have used the power subconsciously – the Kilg%re certainly seemed to be aware of it. (Justice League of America #24). His talent is a form of mind control. At first he could only nudge people’s opinions and decisions in the direction he desired or make them believe in minor distractions, but his strength and skill have significantly increased over time.

Shenanigans, JLI Style

One of the Justice League’s strangest acquisitions under Max’s tenure was the island kingdom of Kooey Kooey Kooey. The tiny, but strategically important island was “annexed” by the League in a deal between the Islands’ Chief and Max (Justice League International Annual #3). Their deal was meant to protect the islanders way of life, but  Blue Beetle and Booster Gold saw the island as a business opportunity and launched a JLI-themed island casino resort using JLI funds. Lord had no knowledge of this until after it was up and running. By the time that Max teleported in to sort it out the island had moved on wrecking the casino. He, Huntress, Ice, and Oberon found themselves stranded on a small, rapidly melting iceberg in the middle of a shark infested tropical ocean. The stress made him confess to the Huntress that he’d influenced her mind, but he had to push her mind again to stop her from strangling him. They found the proceeds of the casino – technically League funds – floating in the ocean after Major Disaster, the super villain who bankrupted the casino, lost hold of them (Justice League America #33-35).

Beetle and Booster’s punishment for the Club JLI mess was to serve maid duty around the New York Embassy. Booster endured it for a time, but quit because he felt unappreciated and was head-hunted by Claire Montgomery, Max’s ex-wife, to lead a new superhero team called the Conglomerate (Justice League America #35, 37, Justice League Quarterly #1). Max’s reaction to Claire’s team was jaded. He wrote in his journal that “She [Claire] said she wanted to make a difference in the world. Please. What she wanted was to compete with me. To rub her ex-husband’s face in the dirt. To show up my team with her team.” Max baited Claire by putting together a charity contest between their two teams. He then used his corporate network to hire away or otherwise deplete the Conglomerate’s roster. Their contest ended badly when her replacement Conglomerate turned out to be evil visitors from the anti-matter Earth (Justice League Quarterly #8).

Max has displayed a talent for making unusual hiring and recruitment decisions. His first meeting with Major Disaster prompted him to launch a third the short-lived JLI team with the Major, but Justice League Antarctica – a dumping ground for the League’s problem members – turned into a disaster after it became embroiled in rogue penguin/piranha research experiment (Justice League America Annual #4). He also agreed to Guy Gardner’s request to hire Kilowog as the League’s handy man (Justice League America #33) and he hired Doctor Fate’s former associates Petey (a demon posing as a dog) and Jack (a lawyer) as his supernatural affair consultant and legal representation (Justice League Quarterly #4).

Max kept the day-to-day operations of the JLI running as best he could, given the disruptive personalities involved and their natural tendency towards chaos. However, he preferred to keep their corporate affairs under a shorter leash. He allowed his own company, “Heroic Images Inc” (a wholly owned subsidiary of Innovative Concepts), to handle the team’s PR and licensing – at least until Green Lantern Guy Gardner hospitalised Heroic Images’s President Dwayne Lumbago (Justice League America #38).

Max organised the funeral arrangements when Despero murdered Mister Miracle (Scott Free), but at he was punched to the ground by Big Barda (Miracle’s wife) at the funeral after she accused him of keeping Scott from retiring (Justice League America #38-40). It was eventually revealed that Scott was actually in deep space with the Cluster (again) and that it was a robotic duplicate of him that Despero had destroyed. Scott’s return allowed Max to dump Despero’s body with the Cluster, but Manga Khan insisted that Max accept his robot servant L-Ron in exchange. Max initially disliked the boot licking, over melodramatic robot, but he became to secretly enjoy its/his toadying (Justice League America #42). L-ron eventually took over the job as Max’s assistant after Oberon quit to spend more time with Scott and Barda (Justice League America #45).

Max had kept his telepathic talent a secret. When he finally described it to J’onzz J’onzz he was told “You really have changed. A lot. I have noticed, and I’m damn proud of you.” Max was even getting his social life on an even keel and had begun dating a woman called Wanda Epstein – a fiction editor for Partisan House. He only used his talent once to start a conversation with her and tried to play it normally from there (despite a rather strange hallucination where he briefly believed he had become a superhero called Maximum Force, Justice League America #41).

Max was supervising the induction of a new Moscow Embassy Chief called Sonya Linbotov when the World War II superhero General Glory reappeared. Max liked the General’s effect on the JLI’s public standing and kept him on the team whilst he followed up the General’s origins through his government contacts (Justice League America #46-48).

In Part Three: The assassination attempt, clashes with Superman, and the first resurrection.

Background

Maxwell Lord IV first appeared in Justice League #1 (May 1987) which was written by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis with art by Kevin Maguire and Terry Austin. The new Justice League that had emerged from the Legends crossover was a new and unusual mix of heroes who hadn’t been together in the same universe for very long and it was missing other, more traditional heroes who were off limits due to revamping. Keith Giffen described the function of Max in the stories:

And we’d toss in a few curve balls, too – one of which would mirror our own confusion over the iffy status of the team. We decided to call him Maxwell Lord. […] Mystery Max is the driving force behind the group – somehow, he enlists and assortment of heroes to form a new Justice League. How he does it, no one is quite certain. Characters themselves don’t know what they’re doing in the group. Connections are crossed, mistakes are made, characters enter and leave – and only one thing is certain: Max did it.

Keith Giffen, foreword to JL: A New Beginning trade paperback

And that is pretty much how Max remained for most of the series. He is a walking plot device that shaped and managed the team, but never really became one of them. A few scraps of information about his background are included and he’s even given a girl friend at one point. However, his main function is either as a generic authority figure or, more often, he’s there to show what happens when he is absent. If you ever re-read those old stories you’ll notice that he spends a surprising amount of time in hospital or recovering at his Cape Cod Beach House.

Giffen/DeMatteis’s successors took Max in seemingly random directions. This reached it zenith when Gerard Jones killed Max and then resurrected him as a cybernetic avatar of the computer that he had originally worked with to create the JLI. Jones’ storyline was clearly going somewhere, but his run was cancelled in favour of Grant Morrison’s Big-7 JLA relaunch. The trouble is that not even Jones can remember what his plans for the character were:

I’m embarrassed to admit it–but I don’t remember! For some reason, which I also don’t remember, we had to let that story lie fallow for a while. Was someone else going to do something with the character? I’ve lost it. Anyway, he was supposed to be a running nemesis. I remember Brian and I talking about having him take over the headquarters, or the team in some way, and there’d be more revelations about how much of him was Max deep inside. But I didn’t expect to be there long enough to play it out, so I let it go.

Gerard Jones, Fanzing interview.

Max was killed off in Justice League America #94 (December 1994). It would be almost ten-years until the he reappeared in Formerly Known as the Justice League – a six-issue mini-series that reunited the original JLI team (creators and characters) for a rollicking nostalgia trip. The Jones era story were acknowledged by Max being referred to as a cybernetic lifeform, but it was otherwise business as usual. Formerly was followed up in 2005 by a six-issue arc in JLA Classified called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Justice League.” But, events elsewhere in the DC Universe were conspiring to undermine those stories. Sue Dibny was raped and murdered in Identity Crisis, Guy Gardner was restored as a full Green Lantern, Captain Atom was sent to the Wildstorm Universe, and in Countdown to Infinite Crisis the Blue Beetle – Ted Kord – was brutally murdered by somebody who looked very much like Maxwell Lord!

This wasn’t the same Max as shown in Formerly and “Can’t Believe”. This was a bigoted, flesh and blood Max who had seized control of the Checkmate intelligence organization. Many of the elements of his early appearances were reprised (control of international organisation, partnership with an artificial intelligence), but this was a darker more ruthless Max. However, the inclusion of Max in the Checkmate story almost didn’t happen. At a Wizard World convention Dan Didio – now DC co-publisher – discussed how they needed a leader for Checkmate and were casting around for ideas before Max’s name was suggested. Somebody remembered that he’d become a cyborg so they tried an alternative character, but that was unsuccessful. Eventually they turned back to Max …

“We thought about that [cyborg] aspect of the story some more and then asked, ‘Did anyone read it?’ No. ‘Did anyone like the idea?’ No. So we moved ahead with Max as being a human, and having been a human, and not letting that small part of the past stand in the way of this story. We wanted what was best for Countdown, and for us, that meant that Max had to be a human.”

Dan Didio, Wizard World Chicago, quoted by Newsarama

Keith Giffen has continued to work for DC Comics and in his own words “I have lunch with Dan Didio! We get along fine!” so people expecting an outcry from him over these development were left disappointed. On Max’s murder of Beetle, Giffen commented that

Maxwell Lord started off as kind of a bastard, but not pure evil. If you remember correctly, Maxwell Lord murdered someone in his origin. Lord was always sort of a nebulous, self-serving hard ass. I don’t know that he’d pick up a gun and shoot somebody in my world, but it’s not my world.

Keith Giffen to CBR

The evil-Max was killed by Wonder Woman, but he has recently been resurrected as part of the Blackest Night/Brightest Day events. He is also back under Giffen’s control in Justice League: Generation Lost and Booster Gold. How, of even if, Giffen will square the circle of Max’s character change remains to be seen.

Stats

• Name: Maxwell Lord IV
• Alter Egos: Black King (Checkmate station), 2 of Diamonds/3 of Diamonds (positions in the Arcana), Lord Havok III (cybernetic identity used while serving the Kil%gre), Maximum Force (hallucinatory costumed identity)
• Occupation: International powerbroker, President of Innovative Concepts, former UN liaison for Justice League International, former Black King of Checkmate
• Group Affiliations: Justice League International, the Arcana, Super Buddies, Checkmate
• Known Relatives: Sylvia Duani (ex-wife), Claire Montgomery (ex-wife), Maxwell Lord III (father), Mother (unnamed)

Biography

Early Life

Maxwell Lord IV was born on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States (either Boston or New York, his given birth dates would put him in late 30s or early 40s). His father, Maxwell Lord III, was an English Professor at Yale University and was disappointed when his son rejected journalism in favour of the glamour and power of the business world (Justice League America #53). Max was studying business at Tuck School of Management, New Hampshire when he met and fell in love with a fellow student called Sylvia Duani. Their tempestuous affair, including marriage and divorce, lasted only a month, but its heat unfavourably coloured Max’s views on his later, less intense relationships (Justice League Quarterly #8).

After graduation Maxwell Lord became, in his own words, “an arrogant, ambitious young executive. A man who’d been raised to believe that it’s not how you play the game — it’s winning that counts. ” (Justice League International #12). The description of Max’s background varies, in JLA Year One #7 he’s described as “new money”, but in Justice League America #53 a reporter says that he was born “with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth”. He has mentioned a mother (unnamed) living in Los Angles so it is possible she she was from old money and instilled the aspirational edge in Max while his English Professor father would have preferred him to become a writer or journalist.

Max has always displayed an uncanny ability to persuade, flatter, and manipulate the people around him. He joined a company called Innovative Concepts and rapidly progressed up the corporate ladder. His meteoric rise as an executive left him hungry for more power, but his ascent was blocked by the presence of an entrenched company President. Lord struck up a phony friendship with the old man and feigned interest in his rock climbing hobby. Max then lured his boss to a remote cave system with the intention of arranging an “accident,” However, the man fell and injured himself in a genuine accident. Max got cold feet and decided to save the old man. It was then that Max happened upon a hidden laboratory.

The laboratory contained a computer system owned by the New Genesisan science-god Metron. It was an information retrieval unit designed to watch the Earth, but it had somehow achieved sentience and had evolved into an artificial intelligence that called itself the Kilg%re – a detail it kept from Lord and Metron. In the interests of self-preservation it had come to a very logical deduction “if the Earth passes, I too shall pass.” Therefore it decided the most logical route to self-preservation was to engineer and control a peaceful world order. To do that it would need a physical agent, so it made a deal with the power-hungry Maxwell Lord. He later described its offer:

“I wish I could say the damn machine hypnotised me… but it didn’t. Not in the conventional sense. What it did was.. show me things. Possibilities. Potentialities and. Yes. Power. And suddenly I forgot about by compassionate rescue [of the company President] and, suddenly — the new Maxwell Lord was born. “

Max returned to Innovative Concepts and replaced his deceased boss. With the Kilg%re’s help he built an international reputation and power-base. Innovative Concepts grew into Maxwell Lord Enterprises and became one of the world’s richest companies. Lord became one of the richest men and arguably the most powerful. He was fated by politicians, leaders, and the powerful. He was the avatar that the Kilg%re would use to create his new world order (Justice League International #12). Sometime during this period Max was married and divorced twice, both times to a corporate trouble-shooter called Claire Montgomery. He has cited the shadow of his earlier relationship with Sylvia as a reason for his split from Claire (Justice League America #53, Justice League Quarterly #8).

In Part Two: The foundation of the Justice League International.

Cyborg

Victor Stone was created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez for The New Teen Titans. He first previewed in DC Comics Present #25 (Oct 1980), before making his first real appearance in The New Teen Titans #1 (Nov 1980). Many times Cyborg’s team-mates have called him “the tin man with a heart” for it is his essential humanity and decency that have defined him and not the cybernetics and metal that cover much of his body. He takes after his scientist parents with an IQ of 170, but he rebelled against their home schooling and sought companionship at a normal high-school student. He became a medal winning athlete and may even have turned professional if it hadn’t been for an accident at his father’s laboratory. Vic lost his arms, legs, half his head, and a significant fraction of his internal organs to the accident.

Vic’s father was a cyberneticist and he used his own prototype technology to save his son by replacing Vic’s damaged organs, limbs, and skin with gleaming metal implants. His new body was faster, stronger, and tougher than his original, but Vic only saw himself as a half-man/half-machine monster. The empath Raven sensed Vic’s despair and recruited him into the reformed Teen Titans. It took Vic years to come to terms with his machine nature, but at least the Titans gave him a place in the world. It was with the Titans that Vic met his best-friend, Garfield Logan (Beast Boy/Changeling), a young man who like Vic had been transformed into a superhuman/freak by scientist-parents who were just trying to save his life (New Teen Titans 1#, Nov 1980, DC Special Cyborg #1, July 2008).

Victor Stone’s life has been a struggle to retain that part of his humanity which still remains intact. He almost totally lost himself to the technology when he bonded with an alien race called the Technis and unwittingly became a threat to the Earth. The Justice League thought that the Technis/Cyborg union was an enemy and the Titans had to fight their mentors to save their friend (JLA/Titans #1-3, Dec-Feb 1998-99). Nightwing and his friends were able to move Victor’s conciousness into a new hybrid biological/living-metal body. This new body allowed his to appear human again, but a fight with the Thinker’s digital intelligence caused the alien metal to spontaneously downgrade into a configuration that exactly matched his original cybernetic body.

The Justice League had insisted Cyborg stay with the Titans as a condition of his freedom after the Technis affair, but he came into conflict with them again after the death of Donna Troy. A new Teen Titans were formed with Cyborg, Starfire, and Beast Boy as mentors to the former-Young Justice. Some of the Leaguers were initially distrustful of their pupils joining the Titans, but Stone managed to allay their fears (Teen Titans #6, Feb 2004). He appeared to find a new purpose as their leader and the heart of the new group. He also seemed to find a peace with his own cybernetic nature. Few saw his workshop beneath Titans Tower where he allowed himself to be completely disassembled each night by machines that preformed a constant cycle of maintenance and upgrades. Vic had inherited his father’s gift for cybernetics and had made himself completely responsible for his own body so that he was not reliant on STAR Labs or other facilities for his routine “health” (Teen Titans #9, May 2004).

During the Infinite Crisis Cyborg accompanied the recently resurrected Donna Troy in her investigation of the spatial rift that had opened in deep space. However, there was an accident when the survivors tried to teleport away from the collapsing rift. Unlike Starfire, Cyborg actually made it to Earth, but his body somehow became fused with Firestorm’s body on a molecular level. Doctor Mid-Nite of the JSA was able to keep them both stable until they could be separated (52 Week #5, 7 June 2006). Firestorm survived their merging relatively unscathed (52 Week #24 18 Oct 2006), but Cyborg wasn’t so lucky. He was heavily damaged and appeared inoperable. Deshaun, the fiancée of Vic’s old girlfriend Sarah Charles, studied Vic’s condition, but he was unable to reassemble him (DC Special Cyborg #1-6, July-Dec 2008).

Without a senior Titan to lead them the Teen Titans floundered amid an ever-expanding roster of neophyte or untested teen heroes. After Deshaun’s failure to repair Cyborg, Beast Boy had recruited the twin geniuses Marvin and Wendy Harris. It took them six months to repair his cybernetics sufficiently for his core systems to reboot. Many of the Titans found it comforting to talk or bound idea off of the unconscious Cyborg in much in the same way that people talk to coma patients. Cyborg wasn’t conscious of this, but enough of his circuitry was online for it to record everything they said to him. When he finally awoke Vic was saddened and shocked at the state of the Teen Titans and he immediately re-recruited former members Wonder Girl and Beast Boy (Teen Titans #34-37, May-Aug 2006).

With the Teen Titans becoming more self-reliant on the West Coast, Vic decided he should try recreating their success with an East Coast team. None of the other senior Titans were available, so he put together his own group including the latest Hawk and Dove, Anima, Little Barda, Son of Vulcan, Lagoon Boy, and Power Boy. The new group appeared to have potential, but they were ambushed during an early training session by three Trigon Seeds (Raven’s siblings) who were looking to kill as many former Titans as possible. Power Boy was killed and Cyborg was left as an immobile torso (Titans East Special #1, Jan 2008). Nevertheless, the attacks did prompt a reformation of the original Titans as a group (Titans #1-4, June-Sept 2008).

An individual matching Cyborg’s description was reported to have attacked several STAR Labs facilities. Upon investigating Vic discovered that a former friend had been turned into a military-grade duplicate of himself. Vic, the Titans, and Teen Titans stopped his rampage, but they discovered a conspiracy coordinated by the intelligence broker “Mr Orr” to turn injured soldiers into cybernetic super -oldiers using technology stolen by Deshaun. Vic wasn’t against helping injured soldiers to walk again, but he was horrified to see his father’s technology perverted into a lethal weapon. Even Orr’s Cyborg Revenge Squad couldn’t stop Cyborg reasserting control of his family’s intellectual property (DC Special Cyborg #1-6, July-Dec 2008).

Joey Wilson, the body hoping son of Slade Wilson (the Terminator), had once been a Titan, but the strain of jumping through so many people’s minds had sent him insane. He had tried to assassinate several presidential candidates and to kill his team-mates, before the JLA and Titans defeated him. However, Joey had hidden himself deep in Vic mind. He used Cyborg’s electronic interfaces with Titans Tower to spy on the new Teen Titans team and then attempted to kill them before he was again defeated (Titans #11, Teen Titans #69, Teen Titans Annual #1). The Titans knew that a psychopathic killer called Vigilante was after Joey, whom they still hoped to save, so they staged a battle with Cyborg making it look like he was still possessed. Vigilante show up and blew the machine part of Vic’s head off. Cyborg remained unconscious while the Titans and Vigilante clashed with Joey’s latest attempt to kill them (“Deathtrap”).

Afterwards Vic undertook an intensive routine of upgrade and maintenance on all the Titans and Teen Titans systems until Beast Boy pulled him away to spend some time in the daylight. He’d been punishing himself for the death of Power Boy and was afraid that the Titans, his family as he saw them, was drifting apart again. Beast Boy and Saran Simms pushed Vic to start dating again and recommended an online dating service. After several anti-technology encounters with a couple of friends and former friends, he finally decided to leave the technology side behind and accepted a blind date with a scientist called Dr Tamara Belson (Titans #14, Aug 09).

Vic had been the one who has pressed for the Titans reformation – something the others resisted until the attack on Vic’s Teen Titans East. However, they had all slowly begun drifting into other lives or roles leaving Vic and Starfire to hold the fort at the Titans Compound in New York. An attack by Phobia forced Vic and Kory to re-evaluate their own insecurities, for Vic it was the fear of loosing his team-mates (Titans #21-22, Mar-April 2010).

Why does Cyborg deserve to be in the Justice League? Because Vic would already be in the Justice League if Superman and co. were in charge. His name was first put forward by the trinity in the “Tornado’s Path” story arc and he was universally agreed upon as a good candidate. Batman noted that Dick Grayson had told him Cyborg was ready to join the League and would definitely say yes if asked. As fate would have it Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman didn’t get to determine the roster of the new League so Cyborg wasn’t asked at that stage.

Cyborg is the standard bearer of the Wolfman/Perez New Titans as an independent group. He was the leader of Geoff Johns’ Teen Titans and was responsible for bringing the New Titans back together. If he is joining the Justice League is a definite signal that the New Titans do not exist as a group any more.