Earth A
(Big Bang Comics and all characters are copyright Gary S. Carlson and Chris Ecker. Knight Watchman is a registered trademark.)
Table of Contents
ARGO Database Warning
WARNING: This is a restricted database entry. If you are reading this entry without Laertes clearance or greater, contact an archival MS for assistance immediately. Failure to do so will result in legal action in accordance with ARGO statute 12.
REASON FOR RESTRICTION: This entry concerns several secret identities, secret origins, and secret fates. This information has been trusted to ARGO in confidence.
For further information, ask an archival MS for access to the following:
Star-studded Comics 1 (Self-published)
Berzerker 1 (Calibur)
Megaton 1-8 (Megaton Comics)
Vanguard 0-6 (Image)
Vanguard: Strange Visitors 1-4 (Image)
Big Bang Comics 0-4 (Caliber)
Big Bang Comics 1-35 (Image)
Big Bang Comics: Summer Special (Image)
World Class Comics 1 (Image)
Whiz Kids 1 (Image)
Round Table of America: Personality Crisis (Image)
Round Table of America: Fire on the Moon (Image)
Knight Watchman 1-4 (Image)
Knight Watchman: Skeletons in the Closet (Self-published)
Ultiman Family 1 (Image)
Ultiman Giant Annual (Image)
Big Bang Universe 1-3 (AC Comics)
Big Bang Presents 1-6 (Self-published)
Big Bang Adventures 1-15 (Indyplanet)
Our archivists recommend BBC 24 and 27 (Image). These two issues contain a very comprehensive overview of the history of Earth A and its sister universe Earth B, though they are written from the perspective that they are fictional worlds (from the perspective of the alien writers, they are).
Our archivists also recommend Big Bang Adventures for keeping up to date with the latest developments on Earth A.
Earth A
Other Appellations:
The RTA’s Universe (Alpha), Universe 5196 (Universe 161)
Fox Harmonic:
Mu-Alef
Astral Connection:
L7 D7
Earth A features a robust Astral connection typical of that of universes with a superhero population. This universe features what you’d expect of a world with such an Astral connection–ghosts, gods, telepathy, etc.
The gods have long retreated from man–but not to other planes of existence as with the gods of other universes. They have left to outer space to bring life and vibrancy to what would otherwise be a dead planet with Jupiter, king of the gods, settling the planet that bears his name. The planet is an interdimensional reality, much more than a mere gas giant, with gods of light and life living on the surface and gods of darkness and death populating the underworld below.
What we call the Astral Earth A calls the Universal Unconscious. It is a realm controlled by and constituted of thought. It is the realm of gods, archetypes, and the unfathomable. The regulating force between the Astral and physical reality is called Odic energy in our world and in Earth A libido after the concept by Carl Jung, who in Earth A was a psychologist and not a thaumaturgist like in our world. The Universal Unconscious was pillaged for power by the supervillain Archimedes E. Tripe, the Living Archetype through a mystic device he called the Libikon before he was ultimately stopped by the RTA (RTA: Personality Crisis).
Ghosts are infrequently seen on Earth outside Dr. Weird, but the atemporal hero breaks many rules of nature just by existing. Ghosts do not normally tarry long on the Earth after manifesting, and even Dr. Weird with all his power was only able to hold back The Beacon’s spirit for a moment after she was killed by the Sub-Human in the 90’s (Big Bang Comics 4, Caliber). The amulet of the Ghost Master was able to bring ghosts to Earth to serve its wielder, but as they demonstrated when they got loose, they much rather preferred being in the afterlife (Big Bang Comics 1, Image).
Caution Rating:
3
The supervillains of Earth A are no joke. Whether they’re illusive masterminds like the Pink Flamingo, cosmic threats like the Living Archetype and Time Being or mad scientists like Hy Q. Binana and Dexter Cortex, they’re very dangerous.
Multiverse Activity:
Moderate
Earth A has a complex history with the multiverse. The ghostly guardian Dr. Weird, being beyond time and space, was aware of the existence of the multiverse long before his peers in the RTA, but they to became aware of the multiverse during the Criss-Cross-Crisis of the 1960’s when their Earth and Earth B, a close analog of Earth A where superheroes were typically older and began their careers in the 1940’s, nearly collided. This resulted in Thunder Girl of Earth B becoming stranded in Earth A alongside her nemesis Dr. Hy Q. Binana.
Since then, Earth A and Earth B have crossed over several times. For instance, Venus of Earth B moved to Earth A and the Badge of Earth a moved to Earth B, and both the RTA of Earth A and Knights of Justice of Earth B were menaced by the Living Archetype who forced them to face their inner children (as in he transformed them into adorable child versions of themselves).
Several beings interact with Earth A, B, and the wider multiverse beyond. Dr. Weird patrols several realities, going where the cosmos needs him. The godrealm of Jupiter (both in the sense that it’s the realm of Jupiter, king of the gods, and that it is situated on the gas giant Jupiter) manifests on Jupiters across the multiverse and the planets. The planet’s famous red spot is used to power a portal that can take the gods nearly anywhere in the multiverse. This was how Venus, who had served as a member of Earth B’s Knights of Justice, came to reside on Earth A as a member of the RTA.
Earth A has also been involved with the I-series, a multiversal structure whose component universes are known to break out of macrospatial orbit with each other from time-to-time. Many are the beings who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the champions of Earth A. Some have been mighty, some have been savage, and some have even been terrapins, but their help has always been appreciated by the Round Table of America.
Keywords:
Analog, Quantum, Covalent, Calendar Analog, Historic Partner
Earth A first came to our notice in the late 1990’s. When ARGO scientists made contact, they found a world full of superheroes and history. Though Earth A has a smaller population of superheroes than our own universe, perhaps owning to a later hyperstatic climacteric, their heroes have a history every bit as colorful and complex as any of ours.
Earth A is a peculiar world. It is a covalent world, meaning that it shares in the macrospatial superstructures of several multiverse series (multiverses-within-the-multiverse) like how an atom is shared in a covalent bond between molecules. Earth A is, sometimes, a member of the I-series, which is known for its many covalent worlds that slip in and out of its macrospatial orbits. This connection to the I-series breaks and re-establishes itself like the tide coming in and out and this creates perturbances in the fabric of reality which can alter memories and historical events. For instance, some superheroes in Earth A recall interacting with a green-skinned policeman who traveled through time, but some do not. It is also rumored that a family of reptilian hominids inhabit the sewers of New York City, but upon investigation they couldn’t be found. They either never existed or vanished with the skill of ninjas.
Description:
Before Ultiman
Is it impolite to call one’s world Earth A? Well, we call ourselves Earth Alpha, so we really can’t complain. And neither can any Earths that call themselves 1, Prime, etc.
Aeons before the first superhuman, Earth was ruled by the gods and Jupiter was king of the gods. But he and his race left the Earth and turned dominion of it over to Man. Jupiter settled the planet that bore his name, moving the entire godrealm to the gas giant, and from that distant world the gods watched as man slowly became like gods (BBC 34, Image).
They saw the advanced civilization of Atlantis reach for greatness only to fall to the bitter snare of hubris and sink below the waves. Still, in a testament to human resilience, they survived, adapted, and became a race of mermen not only living in the oceans but thriving. It is likely that their plight stirred the hearts of the gods, for their leader Rymer was granted a magic trident by Poseidon and became the immortal ruler of Atlantis, the Ancient Mariner (BBP 6, Self-published).
They saw the island nation of Fire Island reach for greatness only to fall to the temptation of isolation and complacency. Still, in a testament to human will, they constructed a magical paradise–a country of fire-people who lived in a country above a volcano, inside a cloud of smoke.
They saw Camelot reach for greatness–and grasp it–but only for a few fleeting generations before intrigue and disloyalty brought its walls crashing down. Still, in a testament to human creativity, artifacts from that great age would survive, in particular, a suit of armor filled with gears that would one day, far, far, into the future, move of its own accord…
And all while the gods watched and man grew, the little people, the pixies, were preoccupied with their own matters. They saw great potential in the nascent science of man and turned away from the magic of their ruler Lady Pellinore. From a dimensionless world connected yet unmoored to the Earth, they perfected science which man in his limited interactions with the pixies would confuse for magic (BBC 25, Image).
Mankind grew through the aeons, then, as if a spark had been lit, they leapt forward into superhuman greatness in the 20th century.
It was an explosion of power, of skill, of imagination, of courage, a big bang of men and women who reached for the greatness of the gods and grasped hold of it with both hands.
The first superhuman, by virtue of of haunting the timelines, was Dr. Weird. Dr. Weird was a time traveler from the year 2031 (we record it as the causally linked universe Earth A2000) who journeyed back to 1941 and found himself in the middle of a library–and a robbery.
Shot dead, he found that though he died, he could not move on to Heaven, for he had died before he had been born, a paradox unseen in all of creation. He would have to remain earthbound, for only when the year became 2031 would he be allowed through the pearly gates.
To help him endure the wait and be of use to mankind in the meantime, he was empowered by divine forces to fight supernatural evil. Perhaps, in some fashion, Dr. Weird was the the response by the powers-that-be to the growing weirdness of the universe, a dark avenger to usher the world into light, for in a mere two decades the world would be changed forever by the arrival of Earth-A’s greatest champion, Ultiman.
Quite possibly the most powerful superhuman from Earth A, certainly the most powerful superhuman in the 40’s and 50’s, Dr. Weird operated under the notice of mankind for years fighting whatever evil lurked in the shadows of the world. His existence was disputed for years with most of mankind believing him to be nothing more than an occult rumor.
Meanwhile, as Dr. Weird fought supernatural evil in the shadows, a man no less strange but far more normal fought mundane evil in the shadows. He was the Spook, and his existence was just as much disputed as Dr. Weird’s. Even those that believed in his existence couldn’t decide what he was. Was he a mobster taking down the competition? A vigilante police officer? An honest-to-goodness ghost? But the Spook was in truth just a man, his only superpowers being a trusty right hook and an indefatigable will. The Spook fought crime in Midway City, the city which would one day become home for the famed Knight Watchman whose crime fighting career was inspired by the Spook.
The Spook and Dr. Weird can be thought of as unsung precursors to Knight Watchman and Ultiman who would show up in the 60’s. Both duos embodied the two poles of superheroics–fighting the evil within the human heart in the streets and alleys of civilization and defending humanity from evil beyond mortal ken.
Given the Nazi’s obsession with meddling in occult matters they little understood, Dr. Weird spent a good deal of his time in the 40’s foiling their schemes, but he was not the only superhero to oppose the Nazis.
Dr. Noah Talbot and his daughter Moira worked at a secret laboratory in California to create the ultimate weapon for the Allies–hydroglycerine, a chemical compound made of dense hemoglobin and salt water. Hydroglycerine would be used to create android bodies for Allied soldiers. When a soldier would be mortally wounded, their minds could be transferred to an android body filled with hydroglycerine. But when test chimp Bubbles was injected with hydroglycerine, he was thrown into frothing rage in minutes. The cause was the hydroglycerine itself. it had altered Bubbles’ physiology so that he needed to extract oxygen from water as well as air, his rage was caused by the fear of suffocation.
Dr. Talbot managed to get Bubbles under control, but his elderly heart couldn’t take the strain of the excitement. As he felt death approach, he asked his daughter Moira to transfer his brain into an android body. Dr. Talbot would live or die by the merits of his invention.
His hydroglycerine body worked marvelously, better than he had dared hope. He had become an aquatic robot, a Human Sub, and he placed his powerful body in the service of his country during its darkest hour (BBC 2, Caliber).
The Human Sub would be a persistent thorn in the Axis’ side. He was especially a terror to U-boats and virtually ended German dominance of submarine warfare. Though the Axis would attempt to counter him with their own U-men project, even a numerical advantage wasn’t enough to unseat the Sub’s mastery of the deep.
The Sub did more than fight for the Allies. He was, after all, a scientists, and exploration was his forte. He explored the world and expanded man’s knowledge of the world he lived in, filling in the final blanks spots of the map. In 1940, he discovered the lost empire of Atlantis, led by the Ancient Mariner who promptly declared war on the entire surface world. Fortunately, the Human Sub was able to broker a peace treaty with Atlantis and since then the Ancient Mariner has been the Sub’s sometimes-enemy sometimes-ally. Later on in 1940, the Sub discovered Fire Island, an enchanted island populated by fire-people who lived in the smoke cloud above a volcano. Blue Blazes, the leader of the fire-people, would, like the Ancient Mariner, be a sometimes-enemy sometimes-ally.
Back in the United States, another metal man was patrolling the streets of America and pinning the firearms and clothing of gangsters to the wall with mechanical precision. This was Art Dodd, Robo-Hood. He was, like the Human Sub, a mechanical man, but unlike the Human Sub, he owed his origin to magic, not science.
When the blitz uncovered a hidden chamber in a castle that dated back to the time of King Arthur, an anachronistic marvel was unearthed–a suit of armor filled with complex clockwork. Shipped to an American museum to avoid being damaged by the continual Nazi bombardment, it came under the care of security guard Art Dodd.
When burglars mortally wounded Art Dodd, he collapsed next to the suit of armor. As he bled out, he had a vision of Camelot’s twilight and the history of the armor. It was one of several armors created by the magician Merlin for the mortally wounded of the Round Table. As those great warriors breathed their last, their souls were transferred into the armors, and now the same would happen to Art Dodd.
Art Dodd opened his brass eyes, looked at himself, and found that he was a metal man.
Even though he had never used a bow in his life, he found himself drawn to the weapon, and used it with superhuman skill to capture the men that had killed him. Deciding that he could do a lot good keeping the homefront clean of gangster vermin, he became Robo-Hood, the mechanical Robin Hood!
Hey, what would you do if you were suddenly an arrow-shooting robot-man in the 1940’s?
Though the Sub, Dr. Weird, the Spook, and Robo-Hood were all influential in shaping human events, they were not the start of Earth A’s climacteric–the point at which superpowers become the dominant force shaping human history.
The war would have been won for the Allies with or without the Human Sub’s assistance, and concerns over artificial humanity clashing with natural humanity caused further research into hydroglycerine androids to be shelved by the federal government. Dr. Weird was as obscure and occult at the end of the 40’s as he was at the beginning. Robo-Hood was a good gang-buster, but he didn’t bust anything that the normal police couldn’t, with time, handle.
The climacteric would come in the form of the Ultimate Human Being, an astronaut who embodied the hopes of post-war America.
The Ultimate Age
In 1961, astronaut Chris Kelly of the Gemini space program was conducting a capsule orbit when a meteor composed of a substance that would come to be known as Ultranium collided with his capsule. His fellow astronaut was killed instantly, but Kelly miraculously survived.
He not only survived but was empowered by the incident. He gained superhuman strength, durability, and speed. He could fly. He could project energy from his eyes, see in fluoroscopic vision (a fancy way of saying he could see through walls), and hear the faintest of sounds. He became the Ultimate Human Being–Ultiman.
Overnight, Chris Kelly had turned the arms race of the Cold War from one of nuclear weapons to one of superhumans, but the other nations of the world couldn’t produce anyone like Chris Kelly. The superman of Nietzsche had arrived, and he was American.
Earth A is very fortunate that Kelly wasn’t just a good soldier, he was a good man. He didn’t want to be a living weapon, nor did he want to be treated as one. He had seen the world from space–so small, so fragile–and believed that Ultiman was a hero for the entire world. Though he worked under the US government and kept liaisons through General Black and his personal secretary Lori Lake, he made it clear that he was not a soldier. He refused to involve himself in any military capacity. Ultiman saved people, he didn’t fight them, and he would not involve himself in Korea, Vietnam, or any of the followings wars the United States would wage.
Ultiman was a warm, personable man who was loved the world over. Though the superheroes to follow him would adopt secret identities, he did not, and the world knew him as Chris Kelly, smiling and invincible superhero. When JFK asked Ultiman to become the spokesman of his physical fitness program, he accepted, and mental and physical vigor increased throughout the nation.
Further superheroes would follow Ultiman–the superfast Blitz of Motor City, the resourceful Knight Watchman of Midway City, the radiant Beacon of Gateway City, and more. America’s burgeoning superhuman population raised concerns in government. Unlike Chris, these superheroes weren’t government agents, and several of them kept secret identities.
Who were these men and women whose identities were unknown, who wielded godlike power without any federal supervision? Uncle Sam had to know.
Congress launched the Kefhauser Investigations, named so for the leader of the investigations, Senator Kefhauser, to unmask America’s superheroes. The Kefhauser Investigations could have ended America’s superhero culture then and there, or have brought it to stop as similar episodes of federal overreach recorded in other realities can attest, but the Kefhauser Investigations were exposed for a Communist plot by the Knight Watchman (BBC 2, Image).
The establishment warmed considerably for superheroes with the arrest of Kefhauser. And its a good thing JFK’s administration was amicable to the superheroes, because the entire world would need them in just a single year.
In 1962, the Martians invaded.
Specifically, they were the Glax’xons, a culture that believed that their specific Martian race was superior to all other races–Martian and alien alike. So set were they in their thinking that they had tracked the lone survivor of an inferior Marian breed to Earth with the aim of ending his race once and for all. They knew the US government was hiding him, and they ordered Kennedy to give him up–or else.
This Martian was Chuck Cox, Ch’kk KK’xx, known to the intelligence community as Mr. Martian
America’s superheroes weren’t about to turn over an innocent to a bunch of genocidal nuts, nor were they about to bend the knee before threats, no matter the power backing them, and so they stood alongside Mr. Martian, the new heroes: Ultiman, Mr. Martian, the Beacon, the Blitz, the Hummingbird, and Knight Watchman, and the old mechanical marvels Robo-Hood and Human Sub, now called the Atomic Sub.
The two metal men had been through a few changes since the 40’s.
The Human Sub was sunk by a band of Atlantean warriors (the Ancient Mariner was going through one of his the-Sub-must-die phases) and was presumed dead by the world. But he would resurface in heroic style as the Atomic Sub, new and improved. He had survived his beating by scavenging metal from Atlantean war vessels to repair his wounds and while scavenging came upon a score–
Robo-Hood had been fed to a car smasher by gangsters and only his badly dented head survived. Claimed first by the police, it was then claimed by the world’s foremost authority on robotics, Dr. Metallius, who vowed to repair the fallen hero.
Dr. Metallius found that it was too late to simply reattach Art’s head to a new body, it’s cerebral components were already going out, so he did the next best thing–he hooked Art’s head up to a supercomputer and uploaded a copy of his brain-patterns into a fresh shell.
Robo-Hood awoke, and had to deal with the crippling reality that he was no longer Art Dodd. He was a copy. He was only Robo-Hood.
Fortunately, a bumbling, cheerful young man by the name of Mike Merlin came along to help Robo-Hood adjust to his new identity crisis.
Mike Merlin was a descendent of the Arthurian Merlin, though his magical abilities left something to be desired compared to the reputation of his bloodline. They alternated between “non-existent” and “comedically useless.” But as a descendent of Merlin, Mike felt it was his duty to take care of one of his ancestor’s creations, and so took Robo-Hood “under his wing,” though in practice it was the other way around.
Robo-Hood brought Mike along when he fought against the Martians, and its a good thing he did because, because Mike ended up saving president John F. Kennedy’s life. As scores of Martian saucers prepared to blast JFK into chowder, Mike cast a hail-Mary spell and managed to make it work–he transformed the saucers into soap bubbles.
The superheroes rounded up the Glax’xons and returned them to Mars. Seeing no choice, Ultiman leveled their cities to prevent them from ever waging war again, though he spared the people. Blasted back to the stone age, the Glax’xons no doubt suffered many casualties, but in the grand scheme of things, Ultiman was remarkably merciful. The Glax’xons were willing to invade an entire planet to wipe out the last, final untermensch. They couldn’t maintain their capacity to make war.
With the sun coming out through a sky that no longer contained UFO’s, America and the rest of the planet cheered. Seeing how well the heroes worked together, JFK asked them to stay together as a superteam, and the heroes agreed.
People called JFK’s administration Camelot, so they decided to run with the Arthurian theme. They did, after all, have the Knight Watchman on the team and Robo-Hood, whose metal body was straight from the round table. They were JFK’s knights, the Round Table of America, and so the RTA was assembled!
Robo-Hood and Mike would quickly leave the RTA (moody robots make for moody teammates), but they would be back in a few years, and Robo-Hood would become a long-term member and Mike a long-term mascot.
Later on in the decade, the RTA’s sidekicks formed their own superteam in the image of the RTA. They were the Whiz Kids–Moray, water-breathing granddaughter of the Atomic Sub, Kid (now Teen) Galahad, partner of the Knight Watchman, and Cyclone, the Blitz’s pal. Mike declined membership, being slightly older than the other three, and stayed on with the RTA as their mascot and occasional ace-in-the-hole (never underestimate the utility of a bumbling magician).
In 1966, Dr. Weird would detect something wrong in the multiverse–a growing tear in macrospace that threatened to consume not only this universe, but another. In seeking a solution to this problem, Dr. Weird enlisted the help of the RTA and their counterpart on the other world–the Knights of Justice.
This other world would take the appellation Earth B, with the world of the RTA being called Earth A. Earth A and B are what ARGO calls “super analogs” of each other. Analog worlds share significant historical overlap. For instance, our world is an analog world to Earth A and Earth B and they are analogs to our world. We all have Earths with similar geography. We all had a Roman empire. We all had an American Revolution. We all did the Charleston in the 20’s.
Super analogs are even more similar. The compositions of the RTA and Knights of Justice were eerily similar. They each had an Ultiman, Knight Watchman, Blitz, Beacon, and Hummingbird, though each duo had their differences. The Beacon of Earth A was a woman who got her gem from a crashed UFO. The Beacon of Earth B was a man who got his gem from an underground civilization. The Ultiman of Earth B was a Chris Kelly, but he wasn’t an astronaut, he was 4F reject from the army, and his powers worked differently. While on the whole weaker than the Ultiman of Earth A, he never needed to recharge, his powers were constantly increasing, and he never had a weakness to magic.
The most significant difference between Earth A and Earth B was that Earth B was twenty years behind Earth A. It was 1966 on Earth A when Dr. Weird discovered the tear, but 1946 on Earth B. The Knights of Justice fought Nazis just as often as they fought supervillains.
Dr. Weird managed to repair the hole in reality by combining his power with that of two Ultimen, two Blitzes, two Beacons, and finally two stars drained of their energy by the Beacons. This repaired reality, but the culprit behind this Criss-Cross-Crisis had one more card to play.
The culprit was none other than the Earth B supervillain Dr. Hy Q. Binana, a foe of Thunder Girl, the chosen champion of Mother Nature. He wanted to wipe out both worlds, and as insurance planted two bombs on Earth A and Earth B. The bombs were located and disabled, but the Atomic Sub would sacrifice his life to neutralize one, and Thunder Girl would find herself stranded on Earth A along with Dr. Binana. Though travel between Earth A and Earth B would become normalize in the coming years with several crossovers between the Knights of Justice and the RTA, Thunder Girl’s magical nature prevented her from crossing the boundary, so she was stuck on Earth A, and soon she would have something that would bind her permanently to Earth A–a family.
Thunder Girl was an orphan back on Earth B. But just as there were doubles (what ARGO terms Fox echoes) of superheroes, there were doubles of normal people, and Thunder Girl found that in this world, she had died and her parents (and a sister named Eve she never knew existed) had survived while the reverse was true in Earth B. Following a complicated episode with Ultiman that involved amnesia and a magic multi-universe tornado, Thunder Girl slipped right into a brand-new Earth A life that felt like that life she was always supposed to have.
Whether she ever told them that she wasn’t actually their daughter is not known to us.
Immediately following the Criss-Cross-Crisis, Thunder Girl was offered membership in the RTA but declined. She chose to join the Whiz Kids, wanting to hang out with superpeople her own age. Instead, Dr. Weird would join the RTA, when he wasn’t busy trying to make life as paranormal investigator Rex Ward work. Dr. Weird tried to have something like normal, human relationships with his assistants Raymond and Becky, though he wouldn’t find establishing ties with them anywhere near as easy as Thunder Girl had with her Earth A parents. Becky was in love with Rex Ward, but hated Dr. Weird because she believed erroneously that he had killed her brother, and Dr. Weird was in love with Becky but was afraid of acting on his feelings as he didn’t feel it was right for her to love a dead man. But worse was Raymond. Raymond was a traitor. He was never Rex’s friend. He was always the dark wizard Morlok, and only pretended to be Dr. Weird’s friend so that he could steal the power of ancient artifacts from underneath Dr. Weird’s nose.
Since the Criss-Cross-Crisis, we’ve discovered other super-analogs, some of which differ from Earth A by only a few details. For instance, on Earth A2, Ultiman wasn’t an astronaut whose capsule was hit by a Ultranium meteor in 1961 but a Navy test pilot for an experimental fighter whose plane was struck by an Ultranium meteor in 1953, and on Earth B2, Ultiman wasn’t a 4F reject granted awesome power by a meteor that crashed nearby, and he wasn’t even Chris Kelly, he was Buzz Mason, a young man from the distant, utopian future with a hunger for adventure in his soul who built a time machine which transported him to back to 1936. Being from a future where everyone was superhumanly fit and strong, he was like a god among (then) modern man.
ARGO continues to track and monitor each and every super-analog. You never know when they might crossover with Earth A and Earth B.
The Sub’s passing marked the end of an era. Going forward from 1966, things would change and change fast. Heroes would live, heroes would die, and nothing would ever be the same.
Changing Times
The 1970’s
In the early 1970’s the Hummingbird would leave the RTA in order to break the mad pixie Garlon’s grip over the Land of the Sprites forever. Though he was tempted to stay with Lady Pelinore and rule over the Land of the Sprites as her king, he remained loyal to Margaret Silver, and returned to local reality only to find her with another man. Devastated, the Hummingbird threw himself into superhero work and reinvented himself as the Red Roc, then the Microbe, and then back to the Hummingbird.
The federal admin of the early 70’s was losing patience with the superhero community. Adventure after adventure they would perform impossible tasks, defeat unbeatable foes, and work miracles, and yet they refused to involve themselves in the Vietnam war, holding fast to Ultiman’s vow not to participate in martial conflicts. Sick of the government’s badgering and overtures, several members of the RTA quit, including Ultiman, the Beacon, and Knight Watchman. The Badge volunteered to fill the void and joined the RTA as leader. The admin hoped that the Badge, being a seasoned G-man, would be willing to steer the RTA into military involvement, but they had no such luck.
Mike Merlin would rejoin the RTA under the Badge, but this time as a true peer instead of a mascot–and this time as a woman instead of a man. While studying the mystic arts he had, somehow, turned himself into a woman. The change had considerably increased his mystic powers, and now he was one of the strongest members the RTA had ever seen.
In 1970 and 1971, Reid Randall shared patrol of Midway City with his protégé Jerry Randall, Galahad. He would take the “night shift” and Galahad would take the “day shift.” When 1972 rolled around, Reid passed the knight stick to Galahad who took over both shifts and identities. During the day, he was Galahad, and during the night, he was the Knight Watchman.
In the mid 70’s the admin became up with the RTA. They launched a false-flag op to discredit the team before firing them all. They had hoped to turn America against the RTA, but their plot backfired and was exposed for all the world to see. Ultiman would resume control of a reformed RTA now without any ties to the federal government.
In 1977, Venus, previously of Earth B, chose Earth A as the place to start her new crusade of reviving faith in the old gods in the hopes of finding the Earth A double of her deceased love. She would be welcomed into the RTA and serve for three years.
The 1980’s
The 80’s were a time of great change and great loss. Ultiman retired from superheroics and allowed his ultranium charge to drain leaving him without superpowers. He had struggled with recharging his powers throughout the years. His body had built up a tolerance for the ultranium radiation. It took more and more exposure just to get him up to his old baseline, and the sessions became more and more painful and left him more and more exhausted. He wanted there to be something left to create a family, and so he retired and married news reporter Arlene Arliss. They had a daughter together, Christine, who was destined to one day become Ultragirl through the death of her father, so the history books of 2965 recorded.
In 1980, America’s first chrononaut Alex Kirk would travel 300 years into the future and discover a world ruled by cruel, sentient machines. He would lead a human rebellion only to be crushed by Lord Anthrax, the ruler of the machines. His body was converted into a cybernetic killing machine called a Berzerker and sent to mop up the remnants of his rebellion. Recovering a fragment of his humanity, he traveled back in time to the 1980’s to try and prevent the future of Lord Anthrax from ever coming to be. He ran into Vanguard, a Kalyptan warrior tasked with protecting the defenseless Earth (or so the Kalyptans assumed) from their enemies, and their fight damaged his time sphere and sent him forward in time to 2019.
1980 would also be the year that Venus would leave the RTA, ending her three years of involvement.
In the early 1980’s, the Whiz Kids rebranded themselves the Whizzards and expanded their roster to include more than sidekicks. Under the leadership of Galahad, no longer Teen Galahad but just Galahad, they welcomed members like Black Power, Hot Pink, and Gargoyla.
In the mid 80’s Dr. Weird retired to the Astral and took up residence in a dark castle surrounded by a bottomless pit, accessible only by a draw bridge made of skulls. From this stygian manor, Dr. Weird pondered how he could have been so wrong, so misled about his relationships with Becky and Raymond. He realized that he needed to learn more about people, and to that end began focusing on fighting human evil over supernatural evil. He targeted the evil that grew inside peoples’ hearts. He would come to sinners when they reached a crisis point and try to win them back to the side of good before they were destroyed by their own actions. He would save many whose plights would have flown under the radar of the old Dr. Weird.
In the late 80’s tragedy would strike both the Whizzards and the RTA.
Bubbles the aquatic chimp, mascot of the Whizzards, pet of Moray and the Atomic Sub, would pass away. The little guy would be visited on his death bed and saluted by the entire superhero community (Whiz Kids 1). Moray would be devastated. She loved Bubbles, and now the one link she had to her grandfather and simpler times was gone. She vanished without a trace, and broke the heart of Cyclone. She remains missing to this day.
The Beacon became possessed by a evil, alien intelligence, which corrupted all the lights of her gem to a midnight black. The Beacon was driven insane and attempted to rid the world of all evil–by force. Her friends on the RTA opposed her, and defeated her by tricking her into using too many powers at once. The gem exploded, and Beacon was free of the corruptive influence. However, her mind was shattered, and it took several years before she could get back on her feet. By that time her gem had reassembled itself from shards, but she found it difficult to control properly, and so she retired from superheroics and became the curator of the RTA’s museum in the Hall of Heroes. The Blitz would fight a giant, living storm giant and while trying to dissipate its energy by runing around it in loops (a classic superspeedster trick), the giant exploded. His partner Cyclone rushed to reach him before the blast did, but he failed. The Blitz was engulfed by the explosion and vanished. Cyclone for his part was partially caught in the explosion, and it cost him his legs.
The Blitz was declared dead…but you never can tell when there isn’t a body…
Following the supposed death of the Blitz, the RTA would disband. They would reemerge in the 90’s as the Free Agents.
The 80’s would end on a bright note, however, as Reid Randall briefly came out of retirement for one last ride of glory. When Galahad was hospitalized trying to prevent the assassination of the mayor of Midway City, Reid took over until he was well, and he got to deliver one last punch to the Pink Flamingo’s leering face before hanging up the mask for good this time (Knight Watchman 1-4).
The 1990’s
In 1990, the second Knight Watchman went into semi-retirement, resting his old bones while taking his daughter Gwen out on patrol from time-to-time as the new Kid Galahad so that he could train her for the day that she would take his place.
As Knight Watchman went into retirement, Ultiman went out of retirement, though doing so cost him his marriage. He returned to the RTA with gray in his hair–the recharge sessions kept getting worse and worse. As his daughter Christine grew up, she became Ultiman’s nurse, tending to him during his painful recharge sessions.
An old enemy of the Atomic Sub called the Sub-Human attacked the museum at the Hall of Heroes in an attempt to lure out his old nemesis–who he didn’t know had sacrificed himself back in the 60’s. The Beacon, who had retired to be the curator of the museum, attempted to fight him off but was slain. Julia would be avenged by the Free Agents, the name the RTA used in the 90’s. The Free Agents would feature old stalwarts, Ultiman being the most prominent, and new recruits like Megaton, formerly the world’s strongest boy, a popular child star on several Disney channel television films. Born with two hearts, Megaton had the strength of a grown man as a child, but his hearts started to beat out of sync in his teenage years. His only hope was an experimental supersoldier treatment shelfed for killing all test subject–Project Polaris. But his two hearts made Megaton the perfect subject for Project Polaris, and he emerged not only well, but supercharged with enough energy to be a superhero. Members of the Whiz Kids would also join the Free Agents. Galahad would join as leader (semi-retirement, remember?) and Cyclone would join as Overdrive. Without legs, he had to made due with cybernetic legs that while slower than his natural ones, gave him enough speed to keep up.
Dr. Weird would go up against Satan himself, who Thunder Girl called the Sinister Serpent, and would become trapped in Hell. His one connection to the universe beyond was a telepathic tether with Ms. Eerie, an occult superheroine powered by the aggrieved spirits of every woman who ever suffered violence at a man’s hand. Ms. Eerie took over for Dr. Weird on Earth and comforted him through his suffering, and in time she was able to free him from hell, but at the cost of her mind being fragmented. She became berserk and sought death for any that dare raise their hand to a woman. Dr. Weird was forced to escort her to the afterlife, as gentle as he could, though the gates once more shut in his face.
In the late 90’s, during a particularly grueling recharge session, the ultranium meteor that charged Ultiman exploded, transforming Christine into Ultragirl but at the apparent cost of Ultiman. Earth A, Earth B, and several other worlds , timelines, and civilizations mourned the passing of the Ultimate Human Being. But Ultiman was not in fact, dead. He had been transformed into a berserk energy-absorbing monster. In near-mindless furry, he attacked Ultragirl and Megaton, but his mind managed to take control of his hunger, and he relented. He attempted to embrace his daughter, but he found that his very presence drained the energy–and life–of Ultragirl.
This caused another explosion of energy. Christine was knocked out, leaving Megaton to face a depowered Ultiman. Ultiman asked Megaton to keep a secret. He asked Megaton to tell his daughter and the world that Ultiman died. He was going to go away, retire forever, and leave the world to be protected by the next generation.
Who was Megaton to refuse the greatest hero of Earth A? It was quite an ask though, as Megaton wasn’t just Christine’s fellow superhero, he was her boyfriend!
The Millennium and Beyond
In 2019, the time traveler Berzerker rematerialized from his battle with Vanguard in front of Thunder Girl, who engaged him (knowing only that the Berzerker was the weird green guy that fought Vanguard years prior) and with a zap of ALAKAZAM lightning, Thunder Girl sent him off to someplace, sometime.
What events may transpire on Earth A in the years to come, we can only speculate (but we have it on very good authority that you can find out at Big Bang Comics.com and Indyplanet!)
The Far Future
Much is known of Earth A’s future (or to be specific, possible future. Alternate timelines have a habit of never quite doing what destiny says they should).
2031 is the year that Rex Ward journeyed to the past of 1941 and set in motion events that would set his destiny as the Golden Ghost, Dr. Weird. Since 1941, Dr. Weird has been tasked by the powers-that-be to fight against evil until the year becomes 2031 again. Every time he enters the timestream, he finds the way to 2031 barred to him. When the date finally rolls around, will Dr. Weird finally be granted the rest that has so long been promised him? We will just have to wait and see.
We record this hopeful world that is/was/will be as Earth A2000.
2280 is that year that the machines take over–though it will never come to pass if the Berzerker has his way.
It is such a sadness, in light of all the good the Atomic Sub and Robo-Hood have done for this world, that this future remains a possibility.
How exactly sentient machines take over the planet is not precisely understood. One would assume that superheroes would still be around in the year 2280. Even if the the mortal legacies of Knight Watchman, Blitz, and the like came to a dead end, there would still be immortals like Athena and Thunder Girl. Were they slain? Exiled to another plane of existence? We do not know. All we know is that there are no heroes in this dismal time. Those that try to be heroes, like Alex Kirk, soon pay the price.
Alex Kirk was (or more specifically, was/is/will be) a time traveler. He journeyed into the future back in 1980. Disgusted by what he saw, he led a rebellion–but he was slain by the machines, and to thoroughly break the moral of what was left of his rebellion, his corpse was converted into a cybernetic killing machine known as a Berzerker. But after slaying so many of his own men, the corpse that was Alex Kirk awoke, and in horror desperately sought for a way back to the past to undo the future that was Lord Anthrax
The Berzerker left on a mad journey through time to try and prevent the future that is his past from ever occurring. May he succeed.
We record this nightmarish world that is/was/will be as Earth A2200.
Even further into the future, in the far distant year of 2965, Earth is a technological utopia of space explorers and scientists watched over by the Pantheon of Heroes, foremost among them being Ultiman’s daughter, Ultragirl. Mankind is at peace under a benevolent global government (if only the Earth State of our own world could be so perfect). Every day brings new discoveries from the stars. Earth holds its head high as a well-respected member of the universal community. Even death has lost some of its sting as Valhalla Industries has discovered a way to digitize thought-patterns from DNA samples, creating a kind of immortality (Ultiman Family 1).
And mankind is at peace with his mechanical creations. Artificials are even trusted as judges (BBC 18, Image).
If this future is causally linked to the future of the Berzerker, then there’s a silver lining to be observed–even if the Berzerker fails to prevent his future from dawning, it will not last forever. The nightmare will grow to be a dream.
We record this utopian world that is/was/will be as Earth A2900.
The future is not set in stone, which makes it both hopeful and terrifying, but whatever the future holds, whatever challenges may come, whatever crises may manifest, one thing is for certain–there will always be heroes on Earth A!
Individuals of Note
The Original RTA
Ultiman
In order to understand Ultiman and his current state, one must understand this–that before he became the Ultimate Human Being, Ultiman was astronaut Chris Kelly and Lt. Chris Kelly. He grappled with being a paradox as a man, with being an astronaut advancing science in the name of global human development and a soldier, a partisan member of a nation in a cold war with another. He would continue to grapple with the paradox of his existence as a superman, with being Ultiman the hero of the entire planet and Ultiman the potential threat to the entire human race.
Kelly was a true believer in the universal brotherhood of man. It was why he went into space. He wanted to advance not only America but the human race. And what he found in space supported his believes–a small blue marble, calmly containing all of mankind’s rage.
But that perfect image was marred by an event simultaneously horrible and miraculous. A meteor of Ultranium struck his capsule. His copilot, a friend of his, perished, and he only barely survived the crash. Afflicted with severe radiation poisoning from the meteor, no one thought he would live long.
But he didn’t just live. He got better. And then more than better. And then superhuman.
The world watch in disbelief as Chris Kelly first walked, than flew.
Chris Kelly learned that pain came with power and gain came with loss. Two sides of the same coin. From the very beginning he was aware that Ultiman had the potential to be a savior, but also a danger. His awareness perhaps bordered on neuroticism. Before anything else, he did not want to hurt people. It was his greatest fear above all others and he was always prepared to take drastic steps to ensure he would never be a danger. This can be seen early in his career during the Reverso incident. When a Mirrorworld doppleganger named Reverso ran amuck, Chris feared that he was the one actually causing the chaos through “black-out” episodes and nearly killed himself. If not for the intervention of his friend the Knight Watchman, there would be no Ultiman today (BBC 3).
While respecting the military institutions which had given him the training and support it took to become an astronaut, Kelly was firm that he would not and would never be a weapon. He would not involve himself in any martial conflict or warzone. He would not kill. He would not be a danger. Though no one dared make a big deal of his refusal, Kelly and the Brass both knew what this was–insubordination.
Kelly’s relationship with the military would remain complicated all of his life. He would maintain contact with the military and federal government though his official liaison General Black and personal secretary Lori Lake, but his time as a Lieutenant virtually ended when he became Ultiman. The military both loved and hated Ultiman. They loved him because he was the ultimate deterrent. What army would dare attack Ultiman’s homeland? They hated him because he was the ultimate offensive weapon, stronger and more precise than any nuke and without any fallout backfire, and yet he refused to be fired at the enemy. The military would try and create their own supersoldiers out of what they learned about superpowers from Ultiman and Ultranium. The superteam The Anomalies are but one result of the government experimenting with Ultranium.
The need for self-control and to actively suppress any chance he had of being a danger was one-half of Ultiman’s psychological complex. The other half was a need for privacy.
Ultiman did not have a secret identity. Chris Kelly was Ultiman, Ultiman was Chris Kelly, and everyone knew it. He was, perhaps, the most popular and feared man in the world, perhaps in all of history. No man has ever had the celebrity of Ultiman. No man has ever had the need to be alone.
His superhuman need for seclusion first manifested itself when he constructed his Secret Citadel, a hideaway in a hollowed-out volcano where he could be alone with his thoughts surrounded by treasures and mementos of his many adventures. It would reach its greatest manifestation when he took over the identity of his identical brother Carl.
Carl Kelly was a rake, a criminal, cad, a liar, and ultimately the bad shadow to his brother Chris. He was the bad son, Chris the good son, and Carl was well aware of this fact. The fact that Chris was the Ultimate Human Being while he was a common crook made his jealousy all the more bitter. When the opportunity presented itself, Carl teamed up with the notorious supervillain Rex Cortex and stole his brother’s powers. But there was spark of goodness within Carl, and he found that he could not stand by while his powerless brother was killed by Cortex. Carl sacrificed his life to protect his brother, and in doing so, gave Chris perhaps the greatest gift he could have been given–a new identity.
As Carl, Ultiman was able to move through life as a normal man, albeit one with a bad reputation. The reputation wasn’t without its benefits, however. Carl was a known figure to the underworld and this allowed Ultiman to spy on the criminal element.
Controversially, since Carl was lecherously in love with Lori Lake and Lori Lake was an on-again off-again romantic interest of Ultiman’s, Ultiman would try and maintain character as Carl by tempting Lori away from Ultiman. Was it unfair for Ultiman to play with Lori’s feelings like this? Yes, but in his defense, we must understand the incredible pressure he was under to maintain his false identity. He was either Carl or he was nothing.
As the decades went on, Ultiman discovered that his body was beginning to develop a tolerance to the Ultranium radiation that gave him his powers. Originally, a little exposure to Ultranium was all it took to get back to peak fighting form when his powers started to fade. But little by little, he found that he needed more and more exposure to stay strong. Recharging took longer and started to hurt.
In the 1980’s, Ultiman married. It wasn’t to Lori Lake, as many expected, but to a news reporter named Arlene Arliss (BBC 12, Image). Ultiman retired from superheroics and took Arlene to live in a secret Command Center in the Rockies where they raised their daughter Christine. Ultiman allowed the Ultranium radiation to fully leave his body. He became a normal man, and was happy as a normal man. Though the world missed him, Earth’s other superhumans and an army of loyal Ultiman robots were more than able to fill in for his absence.
In the 1990’s, Ultiman ended his retirement. Though he was content for a time to leave the world of superheroics behind, the expectations the world placed upon his shoulders eventually wore him down. He was Ultiman. The world wanted Ultiman. How could he deny the world?
Ending his retirement would cost him his marriage. Arlene was already taxed by the isolation of the Rockies and now she worried what effects continual exposure to residual Ultranium radiation would have on her and Christine. It would be a cost that would haunt Ultiman.
Eventually, Ultiman’s need for greater and greater amounts of Ultranium radiation led to his death.
As Christine got older, she spent as much time with her father as possible to help nurse him through the physical ordeal his recharging had become. But one day, too much power was drawn out of the Ultranium meteor and it exploded. Christine was empowered and became Ultragirl, but Ultiman was presumed dead in the blast.
The truth was that Ultiman had survived but had been transformed into a berserk energy leech. His very presence threatened to steal away his daughter’s powers–and her life. So after a confrontation with Christine and her boyfriend Megaton, Ultiman decided to disappear from the world. With Christine knocked out, Megaton was the only one to see him leave alive, and Ultiman made him promise never to tell a soul that he had survived. He believed it better for Christine and the world to think that he had absorbed too much energy from Christine and exploded (Megaton 7).
Now, as a dead man, Ultiman fulfills his need to never be a danger and his need for privacy to an extent he never has before.
Whether he is in retirement forever remains to be seen…but according to our Fox echo library, big events are in store for Ultiman…(BBA 25).
Atomic Sub
Dr. Noah Talbot was a oldest and most experienced member of the RTA. He began his career in the 1940’s, decades before there was an Ultiman or Knight Watchman. He began as a scientist trying to create android bodies for America’s armed forces. He wanted bodies that mortally wounded servicemen could have their brains transplanted into. To that end, he was experimenting with hydroglycerine, a solution of sea water and dense hemoglobin, which would allow the brain to be transferred into a robotic shell.
He tested hydroglycerine on test monkey Bubbles, and the injection caused Bubbles to go berserk. Noah was able to get Bubbles under control and realized the problem was that Bubbles was suffocating and reacted in fear. The hydroglycerine had altered Bubbles’ body so that he needed to extract oxygen from water. Like a fish, he could breath water, but also needed to breathe water.
But it was too late for the elderly scientist. His heart couldn’t take the strain caused by Bubbles’ attack and he felt death fast approaching. He ask his daughter Moira to transfer his brain to the lab’s prototype android body. She did so, and the Human Sub (not yet the Atomic Sub) was born! With a superpowered android body with a built-in jetpack, the Human Sub could not only travel underwater like his namesake but travel through the air like a jet.
The Human Sub was the terror of Axis forces, but he did more than smash Nazis and Imperials. Dr. Talbot was still the scientist he had always been and had the heart of an explorer. He discovered the lost empire of Atlantis and its ruler, the Ancient Mariner, as well as the secret kingdom of Fire Island and its ruler, Blue Blazes. Both monarchs had terrible tempers and would be sometimes-enemies sometimes-foes for the Sub.
In the late 1950’s, the Sub was briefly thought slain by Atlantean forces (the Ancient Mariner had gone through one of his angry phases), but he emerged from his supposed death stronger than ever. Wounded on the ocean floor, he repaired his body with scraps of wrecked Atlantean submersibles–and incorporated one of their particle engines into his body which made him atomic powered and, of course, and Atomic Sub.
The Atomic Sub spent the sixties adventuring with the crew of the ocean exploration vessel Pandora, Bubbles the chimp (you never know when you might need a water-breathing monkey), and his granddaughter Moray, who vexed the Sub as a child because she would keep taking hydroglycerine pills to breathe underwater and then go exploring under the waves and then as a young lady by falling head-over-heels for various surfers, islander natives, and Atlantean hunks (BBC 9).
The Atomic Sub would die heroically saving not only his own world but the world of Earth-B during the Criss-Cross-Crisis of 1965. His legacy would be taken up by his daughter Moray who used hydroglycerine pills to become a water-breathing heroine and member of the Whiz Kids.
(BBC 2, Caliber Press)
Knight Watchman
Olympic hopeful Reid Randall came home to Midway City when he heard that his family’s garment business was being menaced by criminals. But he quickly learned that Midway City needed far more than Reid Randall.
When a car bomb took the life of Reid’s brother Ted and his sister-in-law Janet, Reid took inspiration from the days he and his brother used to play knights in the backyard.
Who said chivalry was dead? Who said knights were a thing of the past? Who said one man, one knight errant, couldn’t make a difference in the world?
Donning a disguise, Reid patrolled the warehouse district and with his superior athletic training flattened not only the criminals that threatened his family’s business but all businesses that operated in the district–and he left the blackguards tied up in women’s clothing for added humiliation.
One evening, a goon called him a “night watchman,” and this made Reid think of when his mother called him her “knight in shining armor.” It was then that Reid realized he wasn’t a man pretending to a knight anymore. He was a knight. He was the Knight Watchman.
Reid Randall was a knight true, whose garments were of black and blue.
Reid stepped up his game considerably after his first few nights out. The first thing he upgraded was his disguise. The costume he used was something crude, something made purely for practicality. But now that he had time, he thought he could make something rather striking–he was from a family of fashion designers, after all. And we at ARGO have to say, he’s got the best looking costume out of all the Earth A heroes. Points to the Reid family.
Then he improved his other disguise–that of Reid Randall. He wanted to be someone no one would expect of being the Knight Watchman. It was important to Reid that he kept the identity of the Knight secret. He didn’t want anyone else in his family to suffer like Ted and Janet. As Reid Randall, he cultivated a foppish air as he took control of his family’s business. He became the head of a clothing business, a fashion business. He designed ladies’ garments. Surely no one measuring petticoats would be able to throw a punch!
Then he improved his gear.
Though only a basic human without any superpowers (though one does have to wonder if he doesn’t have some degree of superhuman augmentation given how he could endure intense acrobatics and grueling combat night after night for years without landing in a wheelchair), Reid armed himself with an arsenal of vehicles and gadgets which gave him the edge on any Midway miscreant and made up for his lack of natal superpowers. Many of his devices were created by the inventor Igor Eisner, though some were created by his own hand.
His vehicles included:
The Iron Horse–a tricked-out motorcycle which was equipped with a sidecar for Kid Galahad when he joined the Knight’s crusade.
The Watch Wagon–the apotheosis of what it means to be a car, the Watch Wagon was as durable as it was fast and came equipped with a battering ram in the shape of the Knight’s shield symbol mounted on the hood. The Watch Wagon has been updated countless times since it first hit the road.
The Flying Shield–exactly what the name suggests, the Knight’s shield symbol as a flying vehicle. Early versions were essentially helicopters powered by a central rotor, but more modern versions are essentially highly advanced stealth fighter jets with all the tricks and weapons that entails.
His tools and weapons included–
Knight Stick–a night stick, and the Knight Watchman’s weapon of choice, but they also come with special features. They can fire a grapple hook out of one end, perfect for giving the Knight mobility in an urban environment and also come with a taser to add an electric bite to each blow.
Jet pack–a classic staple of gadgeteer kits the multiverse over. Sometimes grapples hooks don’t provide enough mobility. In those times, there is the jet pack.
Watch signals–audio/visual communicators disguised as watches.
Flash-bang capsules–can turn the tide of a fight in a flash. Sometimes all you need is for the bad guy to turn away for just an instant.
Smoke bomb capsules–a favorite of gadgeteer superheroes regardless of the reality. Perfect for when you want to vanish from sight.
Stun Gun– not as in taser (he has one built into his knight sticks) but as in a fist attached to a pneumatic pistol that can be fired to deliver a stunning knock-out blow over a distance. It may sound a little corny, but giant robots in our reality and others have had great success using a similar principle. There’s no reason the same principle can’t work on a smaller scale.
Aqua suit–with a single vocal command, this suit becomes a combination wetsuit and diving suit, sealing Reid’s face to allow him to breathe underwater.
Laser knife–a laser that, through the mysteries of superscience, could shorten itself down to the size of a knife allowing the Knight Watchman to cut through most material. Whether or not Reid ever used a full-on laser sword is unknown, but given the knight theme and Reid’s long history, you never know…
Badge armor–a suit of electrically powered armor that the Badge only wore once when he briefly came out of retirement in the 1980’s. It enhanced his speed and power at the cost of valuable precision–it made his movements too fast and too impactful, but it did its job of keeping Reid’s body together for one last mission.
Reid kept his equipment stashed in the Watchtower–a abandoned water tower–and his vehicles and facilities (crime lab, triage station) below in the abandoned warehouse on which the Watchtower stood.
Finally, Reid took a squire–Ted’s son, Jerry, and the two became a chivalrous duo, Knight Watchman and Kid Galahad.
Reid would amass perhaps the largest and most colorful lineup of adversaries out of all the heroes of Earth A. He fought against the flamboyant criminal mastermind Pink Flamingo, the shapeshifting Mr. Mask, arsonist-for-hire Diablo, and many, many more.
In 1972, Reid retired his old bones was replaced by Kid Galahad, then called Galahad, who used his Galahad persona during the day and the Knight Watchman persona at night, though Reid briefly came out of retirement during the Badge program incident of the 90’s, dusting off his uniform one last time to help out a hospitalized Gala (Knight Watchman 1-4).
The Beacon
Julia Gardner, wealthy, young, and holding a doctorate in gemology, couldn’t help but investigate when she saw a UFO crash on her way to her father’s lab (BBC 19).
Inside the UFTO was an alien woman. Dying, the woman pointed Julia towards a strange gemstone at the center of the craft…and then vanished, leaving not a trace of herself behind.
Julia examined the gemstone at her father’s lab and discovered that it was an inexplicably complex device that could project energy in one of three modes. Yellow energy gave her the ability to fly nearly as fast as Ultiman. Purple energy created an invincible forcefield. Green energy created an offensive field that could push and pull objects. These were the original colors she discovered, but throughout the years she discovered more colors and more powers, such as red energy which absorbed energy.
Julia barely had time to learn about her powers when America was attacked by alien invaders (Earth was a prime target for aliens in the 60’s, it’s likely the space program marked mankind as the “new, vulnerable players on the block” which led to many would-be-conquerors learning the hard way that man was far from defenseless). Julia confronted the invaders and learned from them that her gem was a Dextron power gem and that they were used to power entire starships. That made a great deal of sense. Purple=power to shields, green=power to weapons, yellow-power to engines, and other colors represented powering certain starship weapons and devices.
Such was the reputation of the Dextron power gem that the aliens immediately surrendered and gave up their plans for world domination, which told Julia that there was a lot more about her gem that she had yet to learn.
With the world safe, Julia resolved to continue keeping the world safe–as the Beacon!
Eventually, the Dextrons would investigate the death of one of their own and discover, much to their horror, that one of their starship gems was attached to a savage human! They demanded Julia hand it over, and Julia complied, the problem being that the though Julia wanted to give up the gem, the gem didn’t want to give her up, and resisted any attempt to separate the two. Seeing that nothing could be done, the Dextrons left Julia with a warning–she could keep the gem, but if she ever abused its power for evil purposes, the Dextrons would return and eliminate her.
Though the Beacon would be known for fighting crime across Gateway city, in truth, the world and beyond was her patrol. She would go on to fight threats terrestrial and extraterrestrial and became the go-to superhero for space aliens. The Dextron gem’s reputation helped her out of more than a few jams, and when reputation failed, she had her growing familiarity with the gem’s powers to fall back on.
But her greatest foes were perhaps, not space aliens, but the men in her life. Her father George Gardner was overbearing, believing that he needed to firmly run his daughter’s life, and her fiancé Captain Jordan Stewart was a chauvinist who believed the Beacon would have been better off if a man had found the gem. Julia was content to be mousey in their presence while playing independent woman away from them, but eventually she used the strength she found in her Beacon persona to tell them to back off. She broke off her engagement with Captain Stewart and engaged in a brief fling with the Blitz and a long-term platonic relationship with Robo-Hood, who she helped find his humanity during his darkest hours.
The Beacon would develop a reputation as a superheroine that would think first, act second, a gentle, peaceful superheroine who would always try to talk things over with her adversaries before fighting them, who always wanted to believe the best of those she fought.
In the 1980’s the unthinkable happened. Julia’s gem became corrupted by an alien intelligence which slowly changed her light until all she could project was black, a black so deep and dark that it seemed to annihilate even the idea of light. In this darkness, Julia was driven insane, and believed that it was her sworn duty as a superheroine to bring peace and order to the Earth–by brutal force. Her RTA friend stopped her by tricking her into using too many powers at once which overloaded the gem and caused it to explode into shards. Julia’s mind was shattered, just like her gem, but through her force of will and the love of her friends she was able to slowly repair her psyche, and as her pieced itself together, so to did the gem with fragments seeking out other fragments. This caused problems when the gem fragments began possessing people and corrupting them as the gem had corrupted Julia, but eventually the gem fragments were assembled back into a full gem. Julia could control this reassembled gem, but only barely, and she decided to put down the gem and retire from superheroics.
But though she was done with the gem, the gem was not done with her, and a faint, passive connection between Julia and the gem kept Julia youthful and invigorated. Even into the late 80’s her body as fit as it was in the 60’s.
Julia became the curator of the RTA’s museum in the Hall of Heroes and put her gem on display as one of the exhibits (one questions the wisdom of doing so, but perhaps she was hoping to protect the gem by making everyone think it was fake put up for display purposes?).
The Beacon would perish in the 1990’s when the Sub-Human attacked the museum she curated. Though she tried to fight him off by once more claiming the gem, she was rusty after her years of retirement, and when the Sub-Human blew her gem apart, she perished shortly after (BBC 4, Caliber Press).
Though the Beacon was unable to leave her gem behind for another to take up, her history of accomplishments leaves a legacy any young superhuman can be inspired by.
…But you know, the gem did rebuild itself from shards once. Perhaps, it will do so again…
The Blitz
Racing champ Jimmy Travis’ life was changed forever during a race in Germany (BBC 5, Image). When his rival Helmut Schlechtmann sabotaged his car, the Spirit of 76′, Travis crashed and uncovered a hidden hatchway leading to a secret, abandoned laboratory and the giant swastika on the wall told Jimmy exactly who the lab belonged to (it seems in every reality the Nazis were an ostentatious bunch). A strange yellow and red costume in a glass case labeled UBERMENSCH told Jimmy that this lab must have been part of the Nazis’ attempt to create the Aryan superman.
A collection of labeled vials nearby informed what sort of superpower experiments were going on. All vials were empty save for one.
They included: flucht, which meant flight, meaning that someone on the Nazi payroll was able to fly during WW2, undervurwundbarkeit, which meant invincibility and probably had something to do with the Nazi’s U-men project since underwater men would need some sort of superhuman durability to survive at extreme depths, sehkraft, which meant eyesight and was probably the root of some sort of superscout project, and interestingly, kraft, which meant force. We aren’t sure what that could be, maybe some sort of telekinesis project?
And the one that still has something in it was labeled blitz-geschindigkeit, which meant lightning-speed.
Jimmy wasn’t planning on trying the chemical at all. Who finds a long abandoned Nazi drug and decides to try it? But his hand was forced. Helmut wasn’t content just with cheating. He wanted Jimmy dead, and told two underworld gamblers to do the job.
A gunshot from outside the lab (Helmut didn’t have the most professional goons) caused Jimmy to accidentally spill the blitz-geschindigkeit formula onto himself. His clothes dissolved and he felt a tingling sensation. Seeing as the ubermensch costume was the only costume around, he quickly put it on.
Jimmy was very fortunate that his costume wasn’t plastered with swastikas and war eagles. That would have made his later superhero career very awkward.
When the two gamblers tried to rub him out, Jimmy found that the formula had worked! He had superspeed! He lunged at his attackers and found that it was if they were statues!
He easily subdued them, and then left for the race. There wasn’t time for any normal man to catch up, but he wasn’t a normal man anymore!
The Blitz was fast enough to chase down Helmut’s car, disassemble it by hand, tie him up, run to his hotel for a change of clothes, run back to his broken car, fix the car, push the car towards the finish line, and then finish as racer Jimmy Travis.
All in a matter of seconds.
Now that was speed!
Taking the name Blitz, Jimmy started his superhero career as the protector of Motor City, racing capitol of the world, where he fought various supervillains like Doc Darkness, Weight Wizard, and Pain Glass (BBC 9).
Though no car could be as fast as the Blitz, Jimmy kept racing them. Racing cars was his life. Even before he became the Blitz, people called him the the Fastest Man on Earth. He was the racing champion of the world. He raced cars, he built cars, he designed cars, cars were his life. And racing cars was good training for him at the start of his career. He knew what what it was like to operate at high speeds. As the Blitz, all he did was go a little faster and use his legs. But as his powers advanced and we broke the speed barrier…and then the light barrier…and then got so fast he could travel though time, cars became way too slow for him. He couldn’t even pretend to find them interesting anymore, and what was more, he developed superhuman senses and reflexes that allowed him to operate at operate precisely at the highest possible speeds. It wasn’t fair for him to keep racing, and he knew it, so he eventually retired from racing amid much aplomb, ballyhoo, and speculation.
Jimmy stood out from his fellow superheroes in several respects. Though most superheroes were stoic types, Jimmy was anything but. He was prone to playing with his opponents, quipping with them, tying their shoes, and generally not taking them serious at all unless he absolutely had to. He was also a notorious skirt chaser. He treated women like he treated cars. He liked them until he drove them enough, then it was on to the next. He even went after the Speed Queen, Louise Darnell, the fiancée of his Earth B counterpart. That was pretty low! Good on her for rebuffing him.
Gina Barnelli, the daughter of Gino Barnelli, the man who owned Jimmy’s racing team, briefly brought an end to Jimmy’s womanizing ways. She sternly and coolly shot down the hot-shot, and this made her all the more desirable to him. Jimmy would pursue her to the exclusion of all other women, but old habits die hard, and in the end Jimmy fell back to his lecherous ways.
Like the Knight Watchman, Jimmy would take a sidekick, Marty Eastman, the Cyclone, but the Cyclone and Blitz were not the ideal partnership of Knight Watchman and Galahad. There was friction between Marty and Jimmy. Marty was the kid brother of one of Jimmy’s abandoned conquests, and he didn’t let Jimmy forget it. Jimmy always wasn’t a good teacher. He had a short temper and had trouble explaining just how a superspeedster was supposed to do a thing. But Jimmy and Marty both wanted to prove themselves to the other, and in time they had a dynamic just as solid as Knight Watchman and Galahad.
In the 1980’s, while trying to disrupt an energy creature through the classic “run around it and create a vortex move,” the Blitz would vanish in an explosion that cost Cyclone his legs (BBA 14). The Blitz was assumed dead (though you never can tell when they don’t leave behind a body) and Cyclone vowed to take his mentor’s place. With a pair of cybernetic legs, Marty became Overdrive and proved himself a worthy successor as a member of the Free Agents.
Mr. Martian
Ch’kk Kk’xx, Americanized as Chuck Cox, was a refugee from Mars whose UFO was shot down by the military. After learning about America from the safety of a telepathic disguise that made him appear human, he decided it was a pretty peaceful, understanding culture, at least when compared to the Glax’xon tyranny that ruled his world. The Glax’xons were essentially Martian Nazis. They believed in the superiority of their specific Martian race over other Martians, and especially over aliens. He revealed himself to the US government, who accepted him with open arms and granted him citizenship and a job as a special agent. Happy to have friends on the alien world of Earth, Chuck shared his technology with the US government–antigravity saucer drives, a multi-ray gun (which despite appearances, was not a Martian weapon, but their version of a swiss army knife) equipped with rays that could heat and shrink objects, and an advanced reusable spacesuit (Chuck wears his to this day). The US government likes to keep their Martian technology hidden behind layers of red tape and misdirection, but no doubt some of it made its way into their supersoldier programs.
When the Glax’xons invaded Earth in an attempt to take back and execute Ch’kk, the superheroes of America said no, and the resulting battle resulted in the formation of the RTA. The RTA escorted the captured Martians back to Mars where they discovered that the Glax’xon had completely genocided Chuck’s race. In response, Ultiman devastated their city and reduced their capacity to make war to nothing.
It’s hard to judge the ethics of the situation. It is certain that many Glax’xons perished after Ultiman more or less reset their civilization back to the stone age. On the other hand, the Glax’xons were a threat to the entire universe. They were willing to wage war against an entire planet just to kill the one inferior Martian who got away. And if the roles had been reversed, there is no doubt that the Glax’xons wouldn’t have been near as merciful as Ultiman.
Though he was absent during the Criss-Cross-Crisis, he served long into the RTA’s history and was instrumental in helping them overcome the energy-devouring alien Black Corona, who Chuck identified thanks to his extraterrestrial knowledge (BBC 33, Image).
When the 1980’s rolled around, Chuck started appearing with the RTA less and less, and now is virtually retired from superheroics. Perhaps he prefers to work in his capacity as a government agent? The government is, along with the RTA, the closest thing he has to family since the destruction of his race. The government took him in when he had nothing, it’s only logical that he would feel a debt of gratitude. Given that the government and RTA have not always seen eye-to-eye, it’s also possible that Chuck has simply retired to live a simple and quiet life, unwilling to choose one family over the other.
Robo Hood
Robo-Hood was, like the Atomic Sub, a metal man with a human heart, though his origin owed more to magic than science.
During the Blitz (as in the Nazi bombing of England, not the superhero), a castle dating back to Arthurian times was hit by a bomb, revealing a secret chamber with a strange suit of armors filled with gearwork far too advance for the age radiocarbon dating said it came from. To preserve such a miraculous archeological discovery from the Blitz, the suit was shipped to an American museum for further study. One night, the museum was broken into by burglars, who mortally wounded security guard Art Dodd. As Art Dodd laid dying by the strange suit of armor, he had a vision of the past–
In the twilight days of Camelot, Merlin the wizard had assembled a clockwork army. When the knights of the Round Table fell in battle, they were brought before these mechanical men, and their souls fled their dying bodies and took refuge in the clockwork where they live again and fought again.
What became of all these mechanical knights is not known. Perhaps there is a clue in the literary character Talus of Edmund Spencer’s Fairie Queene? But regardless, Art Dodd was before one of these mechanical vessels. Out went his soul from his body, in went his soul into the clockwork.
Understandably angered that he had just been killed, the now mechanical Art chased down and apprehended the burglars and found that he was so precise with a bow that he could beat a gun in a quickdraw and stuff its barrel with an arrow.
Now calling himself Robo-Hood after Robin Hood (who else?), Art entered the superhero business. America was championed by robots in the 40’s. There was the Atomic Sub fighting abroad and Robo-Hood fighting stateside. Together, they set the stage for the RTA to arrive in the 1960’s.
American supervillains of the 1940’s seemed to really like nursery rhymes as a theme given all the enemies Robo-Hood faced–Hey Diddle Dillinger, Killer King Kole, the Black Bird (he liked to carry out pie themed crimes), etc, etc.
In the late 1950’s, Robo-Hood’s world was turned upside down. While going after some criminals in an junk yard, he was caught by a magnet and dumped in a car crusher. Only his dented head survived, which was picked up by law enforcement. It was claimed by the brilliant and eccentric Dr. Metallius (he had all the legal paperwork signed) who created a new and improved body for Robo-Hood.
He managed to get Robo-Hood’s mind back online by hooking it up to a supercomputer, but he realized he wouldn’t be able to repair Robo-Hood. The head would soon die, and Arthur Dodd would be released to the afterlife.
So he did the next best thing. He copied Robo-Hood’s brain patterns on tape and uploaded them to a fresh body. Similar technology would be used by Valhalla Industries in the time of the Pantheon of Heroes to store DNA brain patterns on computers (Ultiman Family 1).
Robo-Hood awoke with new eyes, but knew that even though he had Arthur Dodd’s memories and emotions…he was not Arthur Dodd. He was a copy. He was Robo-Hood.
Needless to say, Robo-Hood was in for a long and severe struggle with his identity. But he would not have to struggle alone. Into the picture came Mike Merlin, wannabe magician and descendent of Merlin who felt that he owed it to one of his ancestor’s creations to be his buddy. Though Robo-Hood would often act dismissive of the bumbling thaumaturge, deep down he appreciated having someone by his side.
When the Martians invaded in 1962, Robo-Hood and Mike joined the RTA to repel the invasion, but Robo-Hood wasn’t interested in being apart of a team. He was moody with his identity issues and didn’t want to deal with the color cast of characters that composed the RTA. He figured that Mike was enough “crazy person in a colorful costume” for anyone. But eventually Robo-Hood would join full-time (BBC 33, Image) and become particularly close to the Beacon who helped him rediscover his humanity like a light in the darkness.
Robo-Hood has been one of the longest serving superheroes on Earth A, and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
Mike Merlin/Ms. Merlin
Originally, Mike Merlin was a young dabbler in the mystic arts with more gumption than skill. Believing himself to be related to the ancient cambrian Merlin, Mike felt responsible for Robo-Hood when he developed identity issues in the late 50’s and stuck by him as his pal. The two were quite the pair, the jaded man of metal and his enthusiastic, clumsy partner. When Robo-Hood briefly joined the RTA in 1962 to help defeat the Martian invasion, Mike joined with him, and was instrumental in defeating the Martians. When President Kennedy himself was threatened by flying saucers, Mike pulled the proverbial rabbit out of his hat and accidentally cast a spell that transformed the saucers into harmless bubbles.
When Robo-Hood rejoined the RTA full time, Mike went with him, and served as the team’s mascot.
One day, Mike showed up to the RTA as Ms. Merlin, with absolutely no idea what he had done to himself to transform into a woman. She was simply a woman now and much more powerful to boot, easily one of the strongest members of the RTA.
Though her powers were increased as Ms. Merlin, she was still treated as the team’s mascot for some time and often left behind on dangerous missions such as the mission to rescue Planet X from the Gas Giants of Jupiter (BBC 33, Image). But by the time of the RTA’s final showdown with Archimedes E, Tipe she was treated as an equal member of the team (RTA: Personality Crisis).
Eventually, it was revealed that Mike’s change in gender and power was due to possession by an ancient sorceress. Once that was taken care of, he retired from the RTA to deeply study the mystic arts and has recently emerged to lead the Whiz Kids in what what might be their greatest mission (BBA 13).
The Hummingbird
On a day like no other, ornithologist Alan Laurel was dragging his sweetheart Margaret Silver through another nature hike, this one to investigate reports of a new species of hummingbird, when they stumbled into an alien invasion in progress (BBC 19. Image).
Two aliens in disguise led the dazed mayor of nearby Circle city to a tiny saucer and then, stepping on a device, they all shrank to six inches and entered the craft.
Being curious about such a strange sight and being the kind of people who take action before getting help, Margaret and Alan stepped on the device and entered the craft after the aliens.
The aliens, the Kr’Wallians, wore bird-themed costumes, which explained the hummingbird sightings. They planned to brainwash the mayor into being their patsy during the inevitable full-scale invasion of the planet, but they were foiled by Margaret and Alan. As Margaret escorted the mayor out of the ship (which returned them to their natural height), Alan took one a Kr’Wallian uniform and stayed behind to cover their escape.
In the resulting brawl with the Kr’Wallians, Alan discovered that his suit had certain powers. By pressing the arm bands together, he could temporarily shrink down smaller than six inches, the wing-parts allowed him to fly, and the mask gave him telepathy through which he could command birds (because, being a passionate ornithologist, he understood how they thought).
During the fight, the saucer was damaged, and the Kr’Wallians believed that if a single Earth man could give them this much trouble that it wasn’t worth sinking more resources into the invasion. They left, but saluted Alan before they did so, honoring him as a brave warrior.
Though he had thwarted the invasion, Alan was stuck at six inches (meaning his action figure was the only RTA action figure to be released a 1:1 scale). Still, inspired by Ultiman and the Knight Watchman, he was resolved to use the powers of his alien suit as a superhero and took Circle city as his customary city-of-focus.
An underdog in both size and general powers (shrinking doesn’t hold up that well compared to the powers of say so, the Blitz, the Beacon, Ultiman, etc), the Hummingbird got by on two-fisted grit, courage, and cool wits. He joined the RTA as a charter member during the Martian invasion and became jocular bodies with Robo-Hood, who developed several maneuvers with “the Hummer” involving him catching a ride on one of his arrows (BBC 33, Image). But the Hummingbird also fought crime solo and racked up a sizeable rouges gallery–Dr. Gulliver, the Dart (ouch!), the Red Giant, but none were deadlier than Garlon, the Rouge Sprite!
Summoned by the tiny, beautiful apparition of Lady Pellinore, who ruled the Land of the Sprites until they turned away from her ways of magic and embraced the ways of science aeons ago, the Hummingbird would be called to the Land of the Sprites, which existed in extradimensional space without dimensions, to battle Garlon time-and-time again (BBC 25).
One day, Garlon made a power-play, and conquered the entirety of the Land of the Sprites. Pellinore called Alan away for the greatest adventure of his life.
Telling Margaret good-bye, the Hummer left for a long adventure in the Land of the Sprites. It was a quest of magic and technology, of love and lost, of friends and enemies, and by the end of it had defeated Garlon once and for all and placed the exile Lady Pellinore back on the throne, The Land of the Sprites was at peace, magic balanced to technology, and Pellinore asked for Alan’s hand in marriage–which he had to refuse. Margaret was the only woman in his life.
Returning to local reality, he returned to Margaret to tell of his adventures…and found that she had left him for another man.
Devastated, Alan threw himself into superhero work. He tried to reinvent himself to forget his pain. He figured out how to return to normal size and also how to grow to the size of a giant (though he was unable to fly in giant form) and took the name Red Roc. Then he learned how to shrink to microscopic size and renamed himself the Microbe.
But in time, he returned to being the Hummingbird, and also returned to the Land of the Sprites.
The Hummingbird, more properly King Laurel, continues to rule the Land of the Sprites as a fair and benevolent monarch, a man of science wed to a woman of magic.
There are happily ever afters in the superhero business, and this is one of them.
Later RTA Members
Dr. Weird
In a possible future of Earth A which we record as the causally linked universe Earth A2000, in the year 2031, time traveler Rex Ward leaves for the distant past of 1941 and arrives…at the wrong place, and at the wrong time.
He had arrived in the middle of a house being burglarized, and the burglars, shocked by the sudden appearance of a man in a house they thought vacant, shot him dead.
As his soul ascended to the great beyond, he was stopped. A voice informed him that he was a being completely unique in all of creation, a being who had died before he had been born, and so, he could not enter the afterlife.
Rex Ward was tasked to be an agent of justice upon the Earth, a mystically empowered champion against evil, until the year 2031 rolled around and he could finally take his much-deserved rest.
As Dr. Weird, Rex would fight great, occult evil that lurked in the shadows beneath human notice. He fought vampires, demons, bizarre creatures from other realities, and other such creatures. He preferred to work in the shadows for he often dealt with things mankind was better off never knowing, though in 1965 he found himself thrust into the spotlight when he joined the RTA during the Criss-Cross-Crisis.
To combat this evil, the powers-that-be gave Rex incredible magical powers. He is, perhaps, the strongest hero on Earth-A, perhaps even greater than Ultiman, and has in fact, saved Ultiman’s life before (BBA 3). He can phase through matter, grow and shrink his ectoplasmic body, travel across time, space, and the multiverse, and generally use any superpower he needs. But there is one thing he can’t do–he can’t cheat his appointed hour. The powers-that-be have made it clear that Dr. Weird cannot simply time travel to 2031. He must go the long way or not at all.
Dr. Weird fights evil throughout the multiverse. He has fought evil on Earth A, Earth B, and in a reality of sword and spell whose name is as yet unknown to us. He comes when he is summoned and he does what must be done.
In 1966, Dr. Weird detected that something was very wrong with the multiverse and brought the Criss-Cross-Crisis to the notice of the RTA and the Knights of Justice, the RTA’s counterpart on Earth B. After the Crisis, Dr. Weird stayed with the RTA as a member.
Though Dr. Weird is able to travel freely between Earth A and Earth B, he seems to prefer living in Earth A. Maybe he likes that it’s 20 years closer to his appointed time?
During the late 1960’s Dr. Weird attempted to establish a human identity as Rex Ward, occult investigator, and went to work with assistants Becky and Raymond in an apartment building full of tenants that dismissed the routine weirdness happening around him as parlor tricks and swamp gas. Becky developed feelings for him and he for she, but she hated Dr. Weird because she mistakenly believed him responsible for her brother’s death and Dr. Weird feared that Becky could never love a dead man. So they made eyes at each other and sighed when they thought no one was looking and in the end their relationship never got off the ground, because how could it? But Dr. Weird’s relationship with Raymond ended far worse than his relationship with Becky. Unbeknownst to him, Raymond was in truth an evil warlock named Morlok who only used Dr. Weird to get close to mystic artifacts that he could steal. The revelation that his friend Raymond had always been evil hurt Dr. Weird in a way he had never been hurt before. He was glad that Count Dracula, lord of vampires, would become a persistent foe following Morlok’s destruction. He wanted to fight someone he could hate without reservation.
In the 1980’s, Dr. Weird moved to the Astral and became introspective. From a castle surrounded by a bottomless chasm that could only be traversed over a bridge of skulls, he reflected on his life and how his two most personal and human relationships had gone wrong in the case of Becky and horrifically wrong in the case of Raymond. He concluded that he had been blind to the feelings that lurked inside human hearts, particularly evil feelings, and decided to readjust his focus from external, occult evil to the internal evil of the human heart. He sought out men and women on the precipice like a guardian angel and urged them to turn away from their destructive impulses. In this way, he saved people that the old Dr. Weird would never have taken notice of.
In the 1990’s, Dr. Weird was tricked by Satan (yes, that Satan) and trapped in Hell. His only connection to outside reality came from a psychic named Ms. Eerie who established telepathic contact with Dr. Weird. She eventually helped Dr. Weird escape Hell, but in the process she lost control of her powers and became unhinged.
Ms. Eerie had been powered by the collective suffering of all women throughout history had experienced at the hands of violent men. She had been able to control this power to be a force of good and to strike out at men who would harm defenseless women, but after she rescued Dr. Weird she fell into insanity. Any violence a man dealt to a woman had to be punished by a swift and brutal death.
Dr. Weird had no choice but to escort the only voice he could hear in Hell to the afterlife, as gentle as he possibly could.
And he could do nothing when the gates were again shut in his face.
Dr. Weird continues his tireless fight against evil, and will continue to fight evil until his appointed hour.
Thunder Girl
Originally an inhabitant of Earth B, Thunder Girl gained her powers at a young age from Mother Nature herself.
In the 1940’s of Earth B (meaning the 1960’s of Earth A), 14 year old librarian Molly Wilson was staying after hours to make sure every book was in its proper place on the shelf. That was the kind of person Molly was. Though she lived at an orphanage, she did not let the circumstances of her life dim her bright spirit. Molly was a cheerful, helpful, girl, a girl with a pure heart.
While cleaning, Molly discovered that her library connected to the Annals of Time, a series of colorful hallways, doors, and bookshelves that led…everywhere, anywhere. The Annals of Time is analogous to what Universe 161 calls the Cosmic Core and what we call the Soul of Eternity. Through the Annals of Time one can go anywhere in the multiverse.
The ruler of the Annals of Time was none other than Mother Nature herself who appeared before Molly and told her that she had been chosen as her champion, as the champion of life and goodness against death and evil.
Out of all the heroes of Earth A and Earth B, with perhaps the exception of Dr. Weird, Molly has the greatest mandate and clearest authority. She has been chosen by nature herself as the champion of all that is good. Other heroes were empowered by accidents of birth or circumstance. She was chosen.
One can easily understand why someone as humble as Molly was chosen for such a prestigious position. She never makes a big deal out of appointment.
Mother Nature gave Molly a ring and a necklace, and when she touched the ring to the necklace and said the magic word ALAKAZAM, there would be a bolt of lightning, a peal of thunder, and then there would be…Thunder Girl!
As Thunder Girl, Mary was granted the powers of nature and animals. This most often took the form of a collection of animal powers–the flight of eagles, the wisdom of owls, the strength of elephants, the eyes of hawks, the skin of diamonds, and, of course, the power of thunderbolts. But Molly’s powers were virtually endless. If it could be tied to an animal or nature, she could do it. And if she ever needed more power, she could always ask Mother Nature for an extra boost of magic (BBC 1, Caliber). Thunder Girl was so powerful that she could fly straight through the planet and hurl objects into the sun (Ultiman Family 1).
Molly could also talk with animals, and it was one of her favorite powers, because animals, as it turned out, had quite an awful lot to say. She especially liked carrying on conversations with her cat Boo-Boo. One day, Molly accidentally transformed while holding Boo-Boo and thus was born Boom-Boom the Thunder Cat who shared many of Molly’s powers. From Boom-Boom, Molly learned that her powers could be shared, a fact that came in great use during the Moon Parasite incident (RTA: Fire on the Moon).
Thunder Girl fought a colorful parade of villains–Tornado Girl, Pandemonia, Zook the One-Man Zoo, but chief among her foes was Dr. Hy Q. Binana, a super-intelligent monkey empowered by Dr. Eureka. Though he might not have looked like much what with being a talking chimp and all, Binana was easily the world’s evilest primate and was responsible the Criss-Cross-Crisis which nearly destroyed Earth A and Earth B.
Though Dr. Binana was her most persistent foe, he was not, technically speaking, her greatest. That would be the Sinister Snake, who was the champion of evil in opposition to the champion of good, the ultimate adversary, Old Scratch, the Morning Star, the Devil. Rarely would the Sinister Snake ever fight directly with Thunder Girl. Rather, he would try to seduce souls to his side and Thunder Girl would foil him, appealing to the inner goodness of man
It is worth noting that years later in the 1990’s (Earth A time), Dr. Weird would be tricked by the Devil into becoming stranded in Hell. Perhaps the Devil went out of his way to mess with Dr. Weird because he was an ally of Thunder Girl?
Sometimes, Mother Nature would call Molly to the Annals of Time and send her on missions to other worlds, for you see, she wasn’t just a defender of Earth, or even the universe, but all of time and space. Mother Nature would send her across the multiverse to right wrongs and do goods. In worlds of swords and sorcery, in worlds of science and technology, in Teddy Bear World, in Nazarth, in Gigipal, help would arive in a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder. ALAKAZAM!
Molly wasn’t just a fighter against evil, she didn’t just wallop the bag guys whenever they turned up. She was also helpful, especially to the good-natured but absent-minded professor Eureka, and whenever his experiments went wrong. Though she had the power of a goddess, she was not above helping the little people with little problems, and she loved making the lives of those she met just a little brighter.
Molly joined the Knights of Justice, the premier superteam of her world (Big Bang Summer Special 1), and worked with them until the Criss-Cross-Crisis of 1946 (1966 on Earth A). She became stranded on Earth A after the Crisis along with her arch-foe Dr. Binana, and though she was offered membership with the RTA and help to get oriented to her new world, she declined and went her own way.
She immediately fell into complications. When she tried to change back to Molly Wilson, magical feedback generated a super-storm and gave her amnesia. When Ultiman responded to the storm, she saw a teenage girl walking around by her lonesome (he only knew Thunder Girl, not Molly Wilson) and after learning her name dropped her off at the Wilsons, who were overjoyed that the daughter they thought long dead was alive and well. Thunder Girl’s memories were restored and the super-storm dissipated, but her complications weren’t over. (Ultiman Giant Annual 1).
Thunder Girl could no longer transform into Molly without giving herself amnesia. Thus she spent her time pretending to be Molly Wilson and the Molly Wilson of another world, because she couldn’t bear telling the Wilsons the truth about their daughter.
Molly was no longer an orphan–in a sense. On Earth B, Molly Wilson lived and her parents died. On Earth A, Molly Wilson died and her parents lived–as well as her sister Eve, who Molly wasn’t sure ever existed on Earth B.
Whether Molly ever told her adopted family the truth about her existence is not known to us. We hope that she did so, and that they were understanding.
Eventually, Thunder Girl was able to change back to Molly Wilson, and once she was able to she got around to doing something she wanted to do for awhile–joining the Whiz Kids.
Earth A had something Earth B didn’t that Molly found fascinating–other teenage superheroes! She joined the Whiz Kids to be with superheroes her own age (at last!) and greatly liked her company. It was while with the Whiz Kids that Molly and Thunder Girl’s personalities started to bifurcate. Molly became meek and demure while Thunder Girl became bold and outgoing. Molly wouldn’t dare wear a bikini to the beach, but Thunder Girl would in a heartbeat (Whiz Kids 1).
Molly would eventually leave the Whiz Kids for the RTA and was instrumental in defeating both the Living Archetype (RTA: Personality Crisis) and the Moon Parasite (RTA: Fire on the Moon). Molly learned something about herself as she aged–she got older, but Thunder Girl didn’t. Molly observed herself age through her 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, etc, but Thunder Girl was frozen in time at age 18. It made turning back into Molly Wilson a pain. Not only did she go from powerful to powerless, but she went from supernaturally youthful and beautiful to a geriatric in a flash.
Thunder Girl continues to do good and right wrongs on Earth A. In 2019, she encountered the time traveler Berzerker and brawled with him. Showing that an old girl can still learn new tricks, she showed off a new power–the ability to create armor for herself–and sent Berzerker tumbling through time when a bolt of ALAKAZAM lightning activated the time circuits in his armor (BBA 1).
Venus
In the year 1977, it was the year 1957 on Earth B, where the calendars are always twenty years behind. The Korean War was over. The memorials had passed. The war has been won. But for a nurse named Vanessa DeMille, it was as if the world had ended, for the love of her life was dead (BBC 14).
Venus had been a member of the Knights of Justice, the Earth B version of the RTA, and had fought against the Axis and supervillains for years alongside Ultiman, Thunder Girl, Vita-man, and all the rest. But though she was good at fighting, she was at heart, not a fighter. Fighting was the office of Mars, and Mars was ever her enemy. So when the Korean war broke out, she entered not as soldier but as a nurse and used her powers to heal, not harm. It was in Korea that she met a field surgeon, like herself, a healer, and fell in love with him.
Though the goddess of love had had many loves throughout her life, mortal and immortal, this one was special.
She survived Korea, but her love fell to the sword of Mars.
Though she tried to suppress her despair for several years, in 1957 it became too much for her and she fled Earth for the godrealm, which Jupiter in his might had moved to the planet Jupiter long ago. The godrealm was an interdimensoinal realm that fell across the Jupiters of several realities.
As she rested, she was summoned by Jupiter for a mission of extreme importance–the belief of humans which had powered the gods for aeons had reached a critical ebb. They no longer believed, and now Jupiter was slowly killing himself to keep the beings of the godrealm from fading away. He tasked Venus to journey to the world of man and inspire them to believe in the gods once more. Adding to the danger, the chthonic gods Pluto and Mars were plotting to inspire man to greed and violence so that they and they alone could feed from their worship (BBC 34, Image).
She had her choice of where exactly in the world of man she began her quest, and she chose Earth A in the hopes that she could find the multiverse double, what we would call a Fox echo, of her lost love. So she jumped from 1957 to 1977.
The loss of her love and the direness of her mission had made Venus a little less gentle and a little less willing to talk things out with her opponents, but she was still Venus, goddess of laughter and love, and her mission remained one of peace over violence and understanding over hate.
Accompanying Venus to Earth would be her “son” Cupid, a stony-faced, foul-mouthed sharpshooter that played the Caliban to her Prospero. He was not truly her son (his father was Mars who Venus had divorced long ago and his mother was a serving girl Pan disguised as Venus with his magic) but he was a true ally.
Venus must have really enjoyed her time on the Knights of Justice, because she joined not only the RTA but the National Guardians. While serving as an Earth A superheroine, Venus struck up a brief fling with Ultiman (he wasn’t exclusive with Lori Lake), but this caused Jupiter to challenge Ultiman to 12 impossible tasks for the right to date his daughter, and though he succeeded, Ultiman was disgusted by the way her family had treated him and so broke it off.
Meeting the parents is always the hardest part, isn’t it?
Angered that Venus was chatting up mortals when she should be winning favor for the godrealm, Jupiter demoted her to the status of of a mortal woman, stripping her of her powers. Her period of powerlessness was brief, however, as the Fourth Dimensional War (one of those big cosmic apocalypses so common to superhero universes) broke out and Jupiter couldn’t afford to keep one of his strongest soldiers enfeebled.
Though Cupid was her tag-along, he wasn’t her sidekick. That would be the Vestal, who became a member of the Whiz Kids (BBA 14).
Venus continues as a hero of Earth A, still wondering if the mirror image of her true love isn’t out there somewhere…
Megaton
Matthew Scott was born with two hearts in his chest that supercharged his cardiovascular system. As a three year old child, he had the strength of a full-grown man!
While a child with the strength of a grown man isn’t impressive by superhero standards, it is by the standards of show biz, and Matthew supported himself and his mother as a celebrity. He started at the bottom as a sideshow in a small circus, but his career got a boost when he was discovered by Oscar Sherman, who would become his agent and friend for life.
Oscar got him a job as a performer in Barnum and Bailey’s, then as child star on various Disney television films (he played an alien child from a world where everyone had superstrength in Escape To Warlock Mountain), then as a teenage pop sensation. He became known as the “World’s Strongest Boy” and the money and celebrity came flowing in.
Oscar did right by Matthew and continues to treat his number 1 star well.
As a child celebrity, Matthew and his mother were kidnapped by gangsters who wanted to hold him for ransom. This would be his first brush with the dangerous world of superheroics, but the superhero that saved the day wasn’t Ultiman or the Knight Watchman, but his mother (BBA 5). This incident would inspire Matthew all the days of his life.
At the age of 17 he was promising movie star with a career just as promising as Stallone’s ahead of him, but that was when things went bad.
The human body wasn’t made to have two hearts. Though his hearts boosted his physical capabilities, they also gave him severe cardiovascular issues, and now the issues had caught up to him.
He was forced to roll the dice. His only hope was a mothballed government supersoldier project called Project Pulsar.
Project Pulsar was the brainchild of Dr. Wendall Pomeroy. It was designed to hyper-charge a subject’s metabolism, granting them increased physical abilities, but every test subject died from premature aging. Senescence would claim them in mere months. But Dr. Pomeroy believed that Matthew, with his two hearts, might be able to withstand the treatment…
Dr. Pomeroy was right, and now Matthew wasn’t just a little stronger than the average teen, he was superhumanly strong, strong enough to be a superhero, strong enough to be–Megaton!
Megaton continued to be a celebrity, but he felt he owed it to the world not to sit on his powers, and would join the Free Agents during the 90’s and enter into a relationship with Ultragirl, daughter of Ultiman.
His relationship with Ultragirl is complicated. They clearly like each other, but relationships between superheroes are rarely without their complications. They can best be described as “on-again, off-again.”
Recently, he’s been part of very interesting developments within the Ultiman family…(BBA 15).
Ultragirl
Another one of Earth A’s time travelers, Christine “Christie” Kelly was known to her father Ultiman before she was even conceived.
In the far future of 2965 (we record it as causally linked universe Earth A2900), Ultragirl is a member of the Pantheon of Heroes, the legacy of the RTA. The Pantheon includes…pretty much every superhero of that era.
Members of the Pantheon of Heroes includes:
Ultragirl
Gravity Girl
Ghost Girl
Photon (formerly Light Lass)
Snowstar
Telegirl
Golden Girl
The Titan Twins (Stacy and Tracy)
Butterfly Queen
Aviatrix
Jupiter Boy (his digitized self was a bit of a tool)
Anti-matter Lad
Laughing Boy
Lionclaw
Dragonfist (formerly Combat Kid)
Brain Boy
Clone Boy
Angelfish
Galactic Lad
Star
Blitz (who carries on the legacy of Jimmy Travis)
Zan
Nature Boy
Ant Boy
Robokid
Kid Warlock
Manta Rae
Omega Boy
That’s a lot of heroes! Apparently, the idea of centralization got very big in the future not just for planetary governments but for superteams.
Ultragirl was a an active member of the team and on missions to the past would meet Ultraman years before he became his father–and was always very careful not to tell him who her mother was. She had a meteoric but doomed romance with Jupiter Boy (Ultiman Family 1).
Back in the timeline of Earth A, Christine was born a normal, non-powered girl to Ultiman and Arlene Arliss in the 1980’s and was raised in a secret compound in the Rockies. Ultiman was in the middle of his retirement. He had put his powers aside both because of the growing danger his recharging sessions represented and also to raise a family. But the call of duty eventually proved too much for him, and he returned to active duty with the RTA in the 90’s. This led to his divorce with Arlene, as she wasn’t comfortable with the radiation and its potential deleterious effects, and they shared custody of Christine.
Christine was close to her father and admired him for his self-sacrifice. As she got older, she served as his nurse as his recharge sessions got worse and worse. She wasn’t in any hurry to develop superpowers as she learned about the history of 2965 from her future counterpart. What was history to the future was prophecy to the present, and the prophecy was this–Ultragirl would get her powers when Ultiman died!
But destiny would not be averted. One day, something went wrong with Ultiman’s recharge session, and the Ultranium meteor that he drew power from exploded. Ultiman vanished, presumed dead in the blast, and the superpowers that now coursed through Christine’s body were cold comfort for the absence of her father.
But Ultiman wasn’t dead.
He had survived the explosion, but it had corrupted him into a super-charged, berserk energy leech. He was compelled to try and drain the energy and life from her daughter and engaged her and the superhero Megaton in a brawl. Eventually, he got ahold of his senses, but found that his very presence sucked the life out of Christine.
There was an explosion as he tried to force himself away from Christine and Ultiman was assumed killed in the blast.
But Ultiman still wasn’t dead.
You don’t survive several decades as the Ultimate Human Being without being very hard to kill.
He had survived, but he feared what would happen if Christine tried to seek him out, and so asked Megaton to keep his survival secret–which was very hard to Megaton as he was Christine’s on-again off-again boyfriend (Megaton 7)!
The Whiz Kids
Galahad
Jerry Randall, son of the Knight Watchman’s brother Ted, urged his uncle to take him under his wing as a squire. After all, every knight needed a squire. Understanding the young man’s burning desire to strike back at the very criminals that took Ted’s life, the Knight Watchman accepted, and Jerry was knighted Kid Galahad, the original whiz kid!
Jerry was trained to use the same weapons and gadgets the Knight Watchman used–smoke bombs, communicator watches, and trick knight sticks. He became particularly fond of a taser equipped knight stick he named Excalibur.
As the years went by, Jerry changed his supername from Kid Galahad to Teen Galahad to just Galahad. He went to Memorial University for college where he solved the mystery of Jeremiah Merriweather’s hidden treasure, completely without the help of Knight Watchman (BBC 11, Image)!
As the most veteran of sidekicks, Galahad was the leader of the Whiz Kids, a superteam formed of himself, Cyclone (sidekick of the Blitz), and Moray (sidekick to the Atomic Sub). The team would grow throughout the years, first welcoming Thunder Girl (she was offered membership to the RTA but declined, preferring to spend time with superheroes her own age) and then a whole cast of teenage heroes, some sidekicks, some not. Though Galahad wasn’t always the leader of the Whiz Kids, more often then not, he was.
Members of the Whiz Kids included:
Galahad
Cyclone/Overdrive
Moray
Black Power
She-Borg
Totem
Hot Pink
Gargoyla
Vestal
Cosmica
Ogun
Zodiac
In the early 1970’s, the Knight Watchman started to feel his age, and turned the “day shift” of patrolling Midway city to Galahad. Galahad had the day and Knight Watchman had the night. In 1972, the Knight Watchman retired, and Galahad, ever the go-getter, took over both shifts and both identities.
Reid and Jerry disagreed on several aspects involving superheroics, but always respectfully so. Reid believed that the superhero lifestyle was too much to inflict on a spouse, Jerry got married and fathered a daughter. Reid believed in keeping the police at arm’s length, Jerry worked closely with the police and helped them develop the Badge program–a program to train elite policemen and equip them with electronic armor to make each a one-man SWAT team.
Unfortunately for Jerry, his program would be corrupted by the Pink Flamingo.
In the late 80’s, Galahad was hospitalized as part of the Badge program incident, but quickly recovered and teamed up with his mentor for one last 2-vs-1 against a Pink Flamingo kitted out in power armor (Knight Watchman 1-4).
In 1990, Galahad would go into semi-retirement, though he would still work with the Free Agents and go on patrol with the new Kid Galahad, his daughter Gwen, so as to train her for the day that she would take over as…the Knightwatch Woman? Perhaps?
Moray
Moray Talbot was an indefatigable fireball as a child, often getting into mischief with Bubbles the water-breathing chimp aboard the Pandora, the ocean research vessel watched over by her grandfather the Atomic Sub. She used hydroglycerine pills to gain the ability to function underwater for one hour per pill and in time joined the Whiz Kids alongside Kid Galahad and Cyclone (BBP 6).
When the Atomic Sub died saving two worlds during the Criss-Cross-Crisis, Moray vowed to live up to his legacy.
Following the death of Bubbles, who had been both her pet and her grandfather’s, Moray vanished without a trace, leaving her teammate Cyclone, who always carried a torch for her, to mourn.
Where did she go? What is she doing now? We have yet to have answers to these questions…
Cyclone/Overdrive
Marty Eastman was a high schooler known for two things–being a science whiz kid and being fat, and the kids at his school cared more about the later than the former. Seeking a way to thin himself down, he invented “rocket pills” which were supposed to increase his metabolism to burn out his fat stores. Instead, they gave him superspeed! But it’s hard not to use superspeed once you get it. Ever tried running on water? It’s the best! So Marty ended up thinning down just through good old fashioned exercise.
Marty became the sidekick of fellow superspeedster Jimmy Travis, the Blitz, though they didn’t get along well at first. Jimmy was often short tempered, and what was more, one of Jimmy’s many heartbroken paramours happened to be Marty’s older sister, but eventually the two became the best of friends.
Cyclone was a charter member of the Whiz Kids and had eyes for Moray. When she vanished without a trace, he was heartbroken and worried near to death, but he kept going as a superhero.
In the 1980’s, the Blitz fought with a giant energy-tornado monster. Cyclone ran to his aid, but the fastest boy alive wasn’t fast enough, and the Blitz vanished in an explosion, presumed dead…though you never can tell when there’s not a body.
Cyclone was caught in the blast and lost both his legs.
Driven to a deep depression by the loss of his powers, Moray, and Jimmy, it took some time for Cyclone to reemerge, but reemerge he did, and with cybernetic legs.
Though his cybernetic legs weren’t as good as his flesh-and-blood legs, they still allowed him to move at near the speed of sound, which was more than enough for him to be a superhero. He renamed himself Overdrive and joined the Free Agents, the not-RTA of the 1990’s (BBC 4, Caliber).
The trauma of losing Travis never fully left Overdrive, but he copes, though his coping mechanisms are sometimes maladaptive (he’s inherited his mentor’s notorious womanizing streak) (BBA 14). He remembers what his mentor taught him about racing–that it all came down to reaching the finish line–and that keeps him going.
Miscellaneous Superheroes
Jon Cosmos
Though an Earthman, Jon Cosmos was the greatest champion of Planet Omega, a secret member of the solar system which hides on the opposite side of the sun from Earth. When Jupiterian Gas Giants threatened Planet Omega and (temporarily) transformed his beloved Odyr into vapor, he enlisted the help of the RTA in order to free his planet (BBC 33, Image).
He and Odyr would have a child together, Cosmica, and she would go on to be a rowdy and boisterous member of the Whiz Kids, often sparring with Vestal (BBA 14).
The Spook
The very first superhero to protect Midway City, the Spook was a complete cipher. Most people doubted his existence, and the few that did know he was real didn’t know what to make of him. Was he vigilante cop? A very involved private eye? A mobster trying to thin out the competition? An actual ghost? All that was known about the Spook was that he walked the streets at night capturing crooks and solving crimes that were beyond the reach of the authorities (BBC 29, Image).
The second Knight Watchman would encounter the Spook, now elderly, during his investigation of giant cannibal zombie Red Ted. The Spook revealed that he had never left Midway. He had just been in the shadows where he had always been. The Spook teamed up with the Knight Watchman to capture Red Ted and in the process was injected with the same formula that turned Red Ted into a superzombie giving the Spook more strength than he had ever had in his life. When the building came down in flames around Red Ted and the Spook, neither body was recovered, leaving the ultimate fate of the Spook up in the air…(BBC 32, Image).
The Aquamarine
One of many supersoldiers created by the US government to fight the wars superheroes wouldn’t, the Aquamarine took time off from fighting in Vietnam to investigate a string of mysterious shark attacks on American beachgoers. He encountered the Whiz Kids and butted heads with them, though they were ultimately after the same supervillain, even if the didn’t know it (Whiz
The Berzerker
In 1980, Alexander Kirk became America’s first chononaut, beating out Rex Ward by several years. Stepping into an experimental time sphere, he vanished into the future.
The future he found was not a good one.
The year was 2280. And mankind had just lost the war against the machines.
Where were the heroes? Killed, perhaps. Exiled, maybe. But wherever they were, they weren’t on Earth.
The future was a dark place. From his palace at Mechanopolis, Lord Anthrax ruled over a world where mankind either served as slaves, underwent cyborg conversion and become low-class semi-citizens, or fight back and die.
Alex Kirk chose to fight back and die, and die he did.
Though he rallied many to his side, though he brought hope to a world where there was none, he was no match for the machines and so was killed.
But Lord Anthrax decided that death was not enough of a punishment for one who had so sorely opposed him.
He had Alex’s body converted into the ultimate cybernetic killing machine, what they called a Berzerker.
Combining the best aspects of nature and machinery, Berzerkers were stronger than any pure human or pure machine. A computerized nervous system monitored their condition and injected hormones and combat drugs to strengthen the body in time with machine augmentation. The result was that Berzerkers entered a state of pure reflex and instinct. They would move, act, and strike before any man or computer could formulate a counter-move. It was this berskerker state that gave the Berzerkers their namesake.
Lord Anthrax had a good laugh watching the body of Alex Kirk slay and capture those he had once fought alongside, but then something unexpected happened–Alex Kirk rebelled against orders.
This was something entirely unprecedented, and it frightened and intrigued Lord Anthrax, who had gotten rathe bored with always winning.
And because it was an unprecedented problem, it called for an unprecedented solution.
Lord Anthrax created a clone of Alex Kirk to hunt down and kill the Berzerker. This clone was a perfect genetic double of the original with all the skills and memories–but none of the soul. This Alex Kirk had no love for humanity. He lived only to hunt down and kill the Berzerker.
Hunted by his shadow, the Berzerker vowed that neither he nor anyone else was Alex Kirk. Alex Kirk was dead. There was only…Berzerker!
No longer acknowledging the name or identity of Alex Kirk by determined to see the man’s mission through, Berzerker sought for and found a way to return to the past so that he might prevent the horrible future of Mechanopolis from ever occuring.
Berzerker and the clone of Alex Kirk arrived in the 90’s where a misunderstanding resulted in Berzerker brawling with the alien hero Vanguard. During the battle, Berzerker’s time sphere was damaged, and he was sent careening through the timestream (Vanguard 4, 5, Image).
The damaged time sphere brought the Berzerker to 2019 where he fought Thunder Girl over a misunderstanding (all she knew about him was that he was a killer robot from the future who fought Vanguard back in the 90’s). Thunder Girl go the best of him by using a new trick of hers–summonable battle armor (though the standard costume still looks better in ARGO’s opinion) and with a blast of ALAKAZAM lightning, activated the circuitry in the Berzerker’s armor sending him….somewhere in time (BBA 1).
Our probes are likely to pick him up sooner or later. If its one thing we know for sure about the Berzerker is that he doesn’t stop–ever.
Vanguard
Vanguard–“Van” to his friends–is a Kalyptan, a member of a race embroiled in galactic war. Out of fear that their enemies may try and invade lesser-developed worlds and plunder them for resources, they have dispatched members of their race to watch over and protect these worlds from possible alien invasion (Vanguard 1).
In this respect, the Kalyptans are similar to the stellar judges of the Yarven Star Unity. Both the Yarven and the Kalyptans seek to protect vulnerable civlizations from interstellar invasion, though for the Kalptans the impetus for doing so is less philosophical and more tactical.
It may come as a surprise to some readers that the Kalyptans think Earth is in need of protection with its many superhuman protectors and long history of repelling alien invasions, but the fact of the matter is, they didn’t know much about Earth. Earth was to them just a mark in their galactic ledger. It’s position relative to its lifestar, relative age, and gravity suggested a planet of primitive weaklings.
Vanguard was quite surprised to find the planet filled with the likes of Beacon and Ultiman.
Arriving in the 90’s (though some reports say that he arrived earlier but ran afoul of a red and white being of supreme power who hurled him back into deep space), Van watched over the Earth from his orbiting starship maintained by his robot pal Wally (who developed a crippling addiction to pop culture by tapping into television signals, who was equipped with an energy blaster and teleporter that could move objects from one side of the sun to the other. Van’s starship was equipped with a detachment of morphlings, semi-sentient, programable artificials that could take whatever form their masters desired. Wally affectionately named one Lurch after the butler from the Adams’ Family.
Van himself was equipped with a special suit that enhanced his natural Kalyptan strength and came with several features and weapons–boot jets (unlike other superstrong alien species, Kalyptans cannot naturally fly), a telepathic translator helmet which both converts his speech and the speech of others (it is possibly based on the same technology used in the Hummingbird’s Kr’Wallian helmet), a teleportation marker which allowed Wally to lock-on to his location, and a built-in air supply.
During his stay on Earth, Van’s teleportation technology hit the fritz (Vanguard 3), affecting the lives of two women. The first was a research scientist who activated an experimental teleportation device just as Wally activated his. This resulted in a macropatial warp that discorporated her being. Becoming one with the warp and weft of the cosmos, she became Modem, a being of electrical impulses who believed erroneously that Van had tried to kill her. She tried to take her revenge by hacking Wally but was defeated when Van had his starship broadcast a burst of white noise, flushing Modem from his starship’s systems and exiling her to a disembodied existence in deep space.
Modem would re-incorporate herself (Vanguard: Strange Visitors 1) but would have no greater success in killing Van.
The second woman was journalist Roxanne Wells of News 8 who found herself accidentally teleported aboard Van’s starship. Unlike Modem, she didn’t want to kill Van, and instead befriended him. Their relationship would turn romantic quickly.
Vanguard would encounter and fight with the time traveler Berzerker as he was chased by a ruthless clone of Alexander Kirk (Vangaurd 4, 5) and damage Vanguard caused to Berzerker’s time sphere would send him traveling forward in time to 2019 where he would encounter, of all people, Thunder Girl (BBA 1).
Van continues to date Roxanne and watch over the Earth–though Earth might end up needing more protecting from terrestrial threats than extraterrestrial ones!
Thunder Girl Supervillains
Dr. Hy Q. Binanna
Originally a resident of Earth B along with his arch-foe Thunder Girl, Dr. Hy Q. Binana is, as the name suggests, a monkey, a chimpanzee to be specific. And he’s a very bad monkey.
Dr. Binana was once the humble pet monkey of Thunder Girl’s friend Professor Eureka until a brain expander experiment worked all too well. It elevated Dr. Binana from simian intellect all right, but it made him even more intelligent than the Professor, and when Dr. Binana realized it he escaped captivity, subdued the professor, stole his sci-fi tools, and embarked on a giant robot assisted crime spree. (BBC 0, Caliber Press)
He was stopped, of course, but he would prove to be Thunder Girl’s most persistent enemy. She would always capture him and place him in zoo (where else would you keep him?) but he would always escape.
His most infamous crime was causing the Criss-Cross-Crisis (BBC 3, Caliber Press) in an attempt to destroy not only his Earth, but another separate Earth for bonus points.
He was a very, very bad monkey.
Dr. Binana’s intelligence continues to grow, and each new scheme seems more creative than the last. His mind is so advanced that he is able to dominate the minds of others…so long as they’re also apes. He used this skill to press the Hyper-Ape and his mate, Mrs. Hyper-Ape, into service as his minions (BBA 2).
Tornado Girl
When notorious gangster couple Penny and Claude were pinned down by police, Dr. Binana came to their rescue in exchange for Penny joining a very risky experiment. By exposing Penny to a cyclotron, Dr. Binana gave her the ability to transform into Tornado Girl, Thunder Girl’s evil double…with the caveat being that she could only stay as Tornado Girl for certain amount of time, lest she risk a fatal overdose of cosmic energy (BBC 3, Image).
Pandemonia
Spoiled heiress Mabel Brewster became the heiress to the legacy of Pandora when she, in a fit of exasperation and jealous envy, smashed opened Pandora’s box (well, Pandora’s pithos, if you want to be accurate). She became Pandemonia, armed with the powers of bedlam, chaos, confusion, mayhem, fury, tumult, etc, etc (BBA 4).
Though the spirits of the pithos wanted to take over the world with her, she had other, more petty ideas. She wanted to upstage Thunder Girl, and to that end tried to win people over to her side with gifts and favors, but gifts and favors from the powers of pithos always carried a price (for instance, a free buffet driving those that partake into mad fits of gluttony), necessitating Thunder Girl intervening again and again.
Zook the One-Man Zoo
A tragic villain, Zook was once a kind zoo keeper who was caught in the radiation of an exploding watch factory (they were glow-in-the-dark watches, you see). His animal friends perished, but he did not. Inheriting the powers and forms of his animals, he became a one-man zoo and turned to a life of thievery out of despair. He felt that the life of a supervillain was all that he could possibly do, though Thunder Girl consoled him that he could be a great actor with his shapeshifting powers (BBA 2).
Zook the One-Man Zoo is not truly a bad person, and rehabilitation seems likely.
Hydro
A long-term enemy of Thunder Girl, though certainly not the brightest (doesn’t he know what happens when lightning hits water?), Hydro is what we would term a water quasimorph. He is a being composed entirely out of water who wears a suit of armor built by Dr. Binana to help him maintain a coherent, human shape much in the same way members of our Hydromen Navy worse translite suits during the Worlds War.
He once stole a squid from an aquarium and put it in a fountain to get the attention of Thunder Girl, so he gets points for imagination. A less imaginative water-themed villain would have just tried to flood the city (BBA 13).
Ultiman Supervillains
Dexter Cortex
A revenge-obsessed mad scientist and the ultimate foe of Ultiman. Obsessed with his intelligence and spurred by constant failures against Ultiman, Dexter gradually upgraded his mind first through cybernetic enhancements to his brain (the weird metal pins sticking out of his head in various mugshots) and then by converting himself into a purely digital being who can transfer his mind across multiple android bodies, each capable of throwing down with Ultiman when push comes to shove–and it often does as no matter how many times he upgrades himself he still can’t hold a candle to the Ultimate Human Being.
Reverso
When Ultiman’s arch-foe Dexter Cortex fired his latest death-ray at Ultiman, it had predictable results in that it did nothing to the Ultimate Human Being but melt the brick wall behind him into a pane of glass, but it also had unpredictable results in that it created a portal to the Mirrorworld, the strange world behind all reflections in the multiverse, a world best known from Through the Looking Glass, but recall the legend of the Chinese Emperor Huangdi who once repelled an invasion of look-alikes from the other side of the mirror.
Reverso may have looked like Ultiman, but his morals were the reverse. He nearly drove Ultiman to kill himself fearing that he had gone mad because he would see on the news himself doing horrible acts without any recollection of having done so. Reverso even killed Ultiman’s loyal robot, Robot #1 (BBC 3, Image).
It was Ultiman’s friend Knight Watchman who saved the day by revealing to Ultiman that it was Reverso, not himself, who had been behind the crimes. One superpowered dust-up later and Reverso was returned to the Mirrorworld.
Was Reverso truly evil, or was he merely reacting normally in an alien environment? Either way, he belongs on his side of the mirror just as we belong on our side.
Knight Watchman Supervillains
The Pink Flamingo
The Knight Watchman’s oldest and ultimate foe, Pinkerton Fleming, alias the Pink Flamingo, is a flamboyant criminal mastermind known for schemes that are at once brilliant and outlandish. He delights in the spotlight and understands the fundamental truth of supervillainy–it all comes down to presentation.
He is shockingly, bizarrely multi-talented. Not only is he skilled in the managerial side of organized crime, he is a skilled biologist and chemist and once devised a chemical that could grant him the animal powers of an…eagle (BBC 22, Image) a gifted engineer who created super-durable bubbles that could either be shot from a gun to form obstacles or, if you can believe it, assembled into a robotic bubble-being (BBC 28, Image), and a prodigy of hypnotism who, in his first crime spree, killed his victims by making them believe that they could jump from their windows and fly with the help of a “magic pink feather” (BBC 29, Image).
His flamingo headed cane always conceals a surprise, most often a cane sword, but on occasion he uses more exotic tricks like a helicopter cane.
He’s organized not only men to commit crimes, but adolescents as well, and once suckered in an an amnesiac Kid Galahad under his thrall (BBC 25, Image) and created a series of “pigeon” sidekicks (Knight Watchman 2).
The Pink Flamingo is very skilled in gaming the legal system. Though he’s been caught and convicted of several crimes, he always finds a way to get off “for good behavior,” often reinventing his persona as soon as he’s on the other side of the bars. Case in point, the time in the seventies where he reinvented himself as Dr. Pink, beatnik, and opened his own popart coffee shop…which was, no surprise, a cover for a plot to drill into the Wertham museum next door (BBC 32, Image).
His greatest crime was perhaps the Badge Program incident, an incident that occurred three years into the career of the second Knight Watchman, the no-longer kid Kid Galahad. The Flamingo had accrued so much power behind the scenes of Midway that he was able to subvert the second Knight Watchman’s “supercop” Badge Program, a program which transformed elite officers into one-man SWAT teams through performance-enhancing power armor, put the mayor and Galahad in the hospital, frame the original Knight Watchman for murder, and kidnaped the second Knight Watchman’s daughter Gwen (Knight Watchman 1-4).
The incident concluded in a brawl between the Flamingo in Badge armor on one side and Galahad and his old mentor on the other, and though the Knight Watchman had the opportunity to end the threat of the Pink Flamingo forever, he relented, for he knew that it was never a knight’s place to play executioner.
Whether the old bird is finally behind bars for good remains to be seen…
Grandfather Clock
A rotund mastermind obsessed with times and time, Grandfather Clock was in many ways the ideal supervillain. He had an obsession and he stuck to it from his name to his crime. He ran up against the Knight Watchman when he organized a gang from out of an abandoned watch factory to rob time-locked vaults, but though he was brought to justice, he would return like clockwork time and time again to menace the Knight (BBC 0, Caliber Press).
You might assume that his advanced age would prevent him from reaching the ranks of other Knight foes like the Pink Flamingo, but you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong.
Grandfather Clock figured out how to upgrade from time-themed to time-controlling. He became (was/is/will become) a time traveler and even created “time bomb” devices which could propel a person across the timestream (BBC 12, Image).
Not only that, but when one of these time bombs blew up in his face, it created a chronal duplicate of Grandfather Clock, a being frozen in a single instant, a being whose existence, whose body, was the singular moment in time that he existed in. Over aeons, this being learned how to stretch, to grow himself across time itself, to go from existing for an instant, to two, to three, to four, until he was time and time was he. This being, this Time Being, set up a base at the End of Time and kidnapped Clone Boy of the Pantheon of Heroes to produce clones of Ultiman again and again and again so that he could harness the energy of countless Ultimen through an artifact called the Infinity Orb and create a new Big Bang, consuming the universe in cosmic fire so that he could rebuild reality in his image (BBC 17, Image).
Not bad for a dude that started with clock puns.
Mr. Mask
When chemist Hal Owen’s rubber mask formula was ripped off by Jolly Joe novelties company, he decided to get even by destroying their factory with a chemical bomb. But he crossed his wires and got himself crossed in the blast. Fortunately for him, the Knight Watchman was passing by and rescued him from the resulting fire. Burned by flame and chemicals, Hal found that his face had transformed into something like rubber (BBC 1, Caliber Press).
He could stretch his facial features into the perfect facsimiles of others’ faces. How this also allowed him to change the color of his features isn’t clear, but superpowers always leave more questions than answers. How does the Blitz breathe and talk when he runs?
Hal took the visage of his doctor and planned to not only escape justice but launch a career of evil as Mr. Mask, but he was foiled by the matchless guile of the Knight Watchman. Owen would vow vengeance on the Knight–some people have no sense of gratitude–but though he would try again and again, he was never able to kill the Knight, not even when he used an entire wax museum (BBC 7, Image), not even when he disguised himself as an old lady (BBC 15, Image).
During the career of the second Knight Watchman, Mr. Mask would get much more weird and much more dangerous. When Wertham Asylum attempted to cure his elasticity (and thus eliminate his shapeshifting) through drug treatment, the result was that his entire body became like rubber. What was more, he gained the ability to interface his DNA with that of others and absorb it–in short, he could consume people, devouring them within his mass. And he needed to consume people, because a viral infection within his DNA caused his flesh to break down. If he didn’t consistently replenish his flesh, he would melt away and die.
Using his old gun mol Ms. Mask, who had similar powers to him and was believed to be dead, Mr. Mask would sneak out at night to absorb others. But he discovered something during his first feast–when he absorbed Dr. Emil Zuma, Emil Zuma’s mind was absorbed with his flesh. The resulting gestalt was no longer Hal Owen. Dr. Zuma’s willpower had overpowered Owen’s own and shoved him down into the gestalt’s unconscious mind.
But though Zuma believed himself in control, Hal Owen’s psychotic mind still bubbled beneath the surface. This new being was in truth neither Owen nor Zuma. Mr. Mask was no more. In his place was–Bodybag (Knight Watchman: Skeletons in the Closet).
Quizmaster
The question writer of the game show What Do You Know? was long angered by how his questions were upstaged by the contestants, but the last straw came when popular crime fighters Knight Watchman and Kid Galahad were invited onto the show. He sent the chivalrous duo a warning under the alias Quizmaster–if they went on the show, they would not only be humiliated but their secret identities would be revealed in front of the entire world!
The heroes called out the Quizmaster, who responded by kidnapping Kid Galahad and taking him to a secret second television studio (he had been planning a descent into supervillainy for quite some time). Quizmaster hoped to force the Knight to spill his secrets on pain of Kid Galahad suffering a fatal electric shock, but not only did the Knight and Kid Galahad apprehend the Quizmaster, the Knight was able to answer all his questions without revealing a thing. That’s skill. (BBC 1, Image).
The Quizmaster would return to quiz the Knight, but never could the villain stump him.
Faulty Towers
F. Roark Towers was once a brilliant and well-respected architect in Midway City and the designer behind several of its celebrated buildings, but when one of his buildings crashed and killed hundreds, the media was quick to blame him, though an investigation identified poor construction materials as the true cause. The papers called him “Faulty Towers,” and the shame shattered his mind. Driven insane, Towers vowed to destroy every single building he had designed. If he was Faulty Towers, he would truly be Faulty Towers, and none of his towers would stand.
Faulty Towers was one of the Knight Watchman’s more technically adept foes. He kitted himself out with a suit of armor with a jetpack, energy blaster, and various architecture themed (he wouldn’t be a Knight Watchman villain if he didn’t stick close to his theme) weaponry such as technical pens that contained poison instead of ink which could be thrown like shuriken and a razor-sharp drawing compass (BBC 11, Image)
Red Ted
Red Ted McKenna was a legbreaker for the mob. An absolute goliath of a man, he was built for the job and did it well, but perhaps too well, for his underworld handlers decided that he was too much of a potential threat and had him whacked. Fortunately for him, unfortunately for everyone else, the old superhero the Spook found him close to death and brought him to a shady but brilliant underworld surgeon in the hopes that experimental surgery could save Red Ted’s life (BBC 28, 29, 32, Image).
The surgery was a success…in the worst possible sense. Red Ted became a zombie-like freak, nearly indestructible and with a hunger for human flesh that could only be barely controlled through routine chemical injections.
Wanting payback, he started taking a bite out of the mob–quite literally–which brought him to the notice of the second Knight Watchman. With the aid of the Spook, Knight Watchman was able to discover Red Ted’s origins, but the adventure concluded with the Spook and Red Ted grappling in the middle of a collapsing burning building and when the dust was cleared neither body could be found.
Whether this means Red Ted is dead for good remains to be seen…
Knight-Sprite
A little imp who lives to play jester to Kid Galahad and Knight Watchman’s chevaliers, the Knight Sprite hails from the strange and uncharted Dimension X. With nigh-omnipotent power, the Knight-Sprite could be a major threat, but he limits his actions to mischief and pranks. However, his pranks can sometimes go a little too far, as was the case during one of Kid Galahad’s birthdays when he transported the young hero to Dimension X where he saw a duplicate of the Knight Watchman perish before his eyes. (BBC 31, Image)
The Amerikkkan
A foe of the second Knight, the Amerikkkan (how do you pronounce that, anyway?) is a horrible throwback to Antebellum hatred. An ex army-ranger who uses the skills he learned in the name of racial hatred, he’s by far one of the more odious members of the Knight’s rouges gallery (BBA 1).
Polecat
There’s one in every large rouges’ gallery–the one the hero doesn’t want to bring home to mother.
Polecat was a thief and routine adversary of the second Knight Watchman (lucky guy) who used a mind-controlling parfume to bend victims to her will. After a stint in jail, she’s trying her hardest to walk the straight and narrow as a bounty hunter (BBA 1).
She’s a bad girl, but she’s trying to be good, and that just makes her relationship with the Knight Watchman all the more complicated.
El Diablo
An arsonist for hire armed with a flame-spewing pitchfork, explosives, smoke bombs, a flame retardant suit, and the attitude of a consummate professional. El Diablo is popular among the underworld for his professionalism. Even when a job is no longer profitable for him, he will see it through to the end out of pride. In a pinch, he’s not afraid to set himself on fire to get an advantage over an opponent.
El Diablo fought the first Knight Watchman (BBA 4) and recently a second El Diablo claiming to to be the son of the first has menaced Empire City and Ultiman. This El Diablo seems more ruthless than the first and isn’t adverse to putting innocents in danger to cover his escape (BBA 1).
The Killer Shark
A loan shark shark-man armed with robot sharks!
Daniel Sharkton was the greatest loan shark in Midway City in his day–unfortunately for him, he went up against the greatest sleuth of his day, the Knight Watchman (BBA 9)!
Blitz Supervillains
Pain Glass
While working on a new kind of glass to be used in space exploration, chemist Elmer Payne of the Horning Glass Company was caught in a chemical explosion that covered him in molten, radioactive glass. He emerged as a living being made out of class, what we would term a silicate quasimorph, and turned to a life of crime. When the Blitz first encountered him, Pane Glass served him a swift and inglorious defeat by creating a transparent pane of glass between him and the Blitz so that the Blitz ran right into it, knocking himself out. That was round one, but you know how the rematches between superheroes and supervillains go…(BBC 9, Image).
Atomic Sub Supervillains
The Four Seahorsemen
When the Atomic Sub’s friends aboard the sea exploration vehicle Pandora discovered a strange chest in the middle of the ocean, Bubbles the Chimp unleashed four Atlantean spirits of the Apocalypse in a fit of typical but sorely unwanted curiosity (BBC 9, Image).
A box of evil spirits, claimed by the Pandora, making it Pandora’s box, was opened by a curious individual…was destiny at work? Quite possibly.
Bonded to four medallions, the spirits took over the bodies of the Sub’s friends, transforming them into aquatic seahorse riders. The Sub was in for a hard fight as he didn’t want to hurt his friends, but hard fights were always the Atomic Sub’s specialty!
The Squid
An enemy of the Atomic Sub, armed with a keen hatred and an arsenal of gadgets. His glider allows him to keep up even with the Sub’s atomic jet and his ink gun was particularly effective in mediums through which it could disperse such as in bodies of water (BBP 6)
All-in-all, he was a fairly minor foe of the Atomic Sub when compared to beings like the Ancient Mariner and Sub-Human.
The Ancient Mariner
A sometimes-ally sometimes-enemy of the Atomic Sub since the Sub discovered Atlantis back in 1940, the Ancient Mariner is a Merman named Rymer who was granted a mystic trident by Neptune himself by which he rules the Earth’s hydrosphere. When discovered in 1940, the Ancient Mariner declared war upon the surface, but was talked into a treaty by the Atomic Sub, then the Human Sub.
In the 1960’s, when the United States accidentally annihilated one of Atlantis’ six cities in a nuclear weapons test, the Ancient Mariner retaliated by attempting to thaw the polar icecaps with nukes stolen from the Potemkin and his Neptune staff (BBP 6). He was fortunately convinced of the error of his ways by the Sub.
The Sub-Human
An old cybernetic foe of the Atomic Sub, the Sub-Human lived up to his name not just in his appearance but in his behavior. He was thought dead after an incident in the 1960’s, but emerged in the 1990’s armed with upgraded hardware typical of that era. Just as insane as ever, he sought out his old foe the Atomic Sub, not knowing that he had perished decades earlier in the Criss-Cross-Crisis, and attacked the RTA museum at the Hall of Heroes to try and draw him out (BBC 4, Caliber)
His infamy was cemented when, during his rampage, he killed the retired Beacon. He was eventually brought to justice by the combined efforts of the Free Agents, the 90’s incarnation of the RTA.
Hummingbird Supervillains
Garlon
When the rouge Sprite Garlon seized control of the pixies, their lost leader Lady Pellinore recruited the Hummingbird to save her people from the mad tyrant. Garlon was a tricky foe and his pixie science allowed him to project energy he called “starlight” that he could fashion into whatever shape he desired, but the Hummingbird got the better of him in the end (BBC 25, Image).
Venus Supervillains
The Underworld Gods
When Jupiter used his cosmic powers to move the entire godrealm to the planet Jupiter, he took with him all the gods–even those not amicable to his ideas. The gods of darkness and death created an underworld beneath his realm where they ruled, and where they plotted. As the gods reached a crisis of faith and the well of worship that once flowed from man dried up, the chthonic lords drafted a solution–for their side. They would encourage man’s natural tendency for self destruction and force them to worship at the alters of greed, violence, and war. Opposing them is the chosen of Jupiter–Venus, goddess of laughter and love (BBC 34, Image).
Dr. Weird Supervillains
Uttarak
When Dr. Weird was betrayed by his assistant Raymond Reynolds, he used the Malachon Artifact to open a portal to the dimension of Uttarak in search for the Wand of H’Wodlens which would grant him nigh-omnipotent power (BBP 6).
As Dr. Weird battled demons that flooded into local reality from the portal, Raymond searched for the wand–and found the grand demon who gave his name to the dimension!
The Ghost Master
A man who meddled in forces beyond his kin, the self-styled Ghost Master used an infernal amulet which bound ghosts to his service–in particular Aaron Burr, Cleopatra, and Tecumseh. Being ghosts, the Ghost Master’s servants were able to harm Dr. Weird…until he turned corporeal, which caused their attacks to pass through him harmlessly and his hand to reach out and take the amulet from the Ghost Master (Big Bang Comics 1, Image).
Dr. Weird released the weary ghosts from servitude, and they did about what you would expect angry ghosts would do to someone that dared to enslave them.
Baron Kristoff Von Gerhardt
An enemy Dr. Weird has fought throughout the ages, Baron Kristoff Von Gerhardt has been involved in many human atrocities–the French Revolution, the Ripper Slayings, and the Nazi Concentration Camps just to name a few. He manufactures bloodshed so that he can harvest life-force through his enchanted Dagger of Destiny to keep himself immortal.
When he cut Ultiman with the Dagger of Destiny, the Baron was not only rejuvenated but empowered with the gifts of the Ultimate Human Being. Armed with the powers of Ultiman, the Baron gave Dr. Weird one of the greatest fights of his afterlife (BBA 3).
RTA Supervillains
Gas Giants
Though large, fearsome, and armed with the ability to reduce any living being to vapor with a touch, even Ultiman, these beings were not actually evil, and were in fact, heroic, in the end. They were forced against their will to serve as Black Corona’s soldiers against Planet X, but in the end were instrumental in defeating him (BBC 33, Image).
Black Corona
One of the most evil villains the RTA has ever faced, Black Corona was an energy-absorbing space alien who exploded solar systems to feast on the resultant energy–and upon the despair of countless innocents facing their inevitable doom. He once attempted to destroy Planet X and used an army of Jupiterean Gas Giants as a smoke screen for his attack (BBC 33, Image).
The Moon Parasite
When Ultiman investigated a fire on the moon in the 90’s, he found an astronaut possessed by a strange energy parasite–who jumped into his body turning him into a being of pure, unrestrained Id (RTA: Fire on the Moon).
With the entire world threatened by a rampaging, insane Ultiman, the RTA pushed themselves to their limits and beyond to subdue their friend. Eventually, they were able to get the moon parasite out of Ultiman and capture it.
Is the parasite itself evil? Does it pilot its host like one would drive a vehicle? Or does it simply re-arrange the host’s brain so that impulses that would otherwise be controlled come screaming to the surface?
Either way, its staying in that jar forever.
The Living Archetype
The ultimate form of Dr. Archimedes E. Tipe, a mad psychiatrist who menaced the RTA throughout the years with weaponized Jungian philosophy. With the ability to tap into the Universal Unconscious and summon archetypes to fight the RTA, he was easily one of the most powerful foes to ever menace Earth A (RTA: Personality Crisis).
Whiz Kids Supervillains
The Great Black Shark
Black supremacist and deep sea diver Johnny Reed discovered an aquatic farm once used by Atlantis as a slave labor farm and repurposed it to create Terra Firma, his vision of racial justice where Blacks ruled and Whites picked the food. Using an army of robot sharks, he kidnapped White beach goers until he was stopped by the Whiz Kids with a little help from the Aquamarine (Whiz Kids 1).
Terra Firma was completely destroyed in an explosion. It seems the way of things that Atlantean ruins don’t last long. Terra Firma, the Atlantean city destroyed in an atomic test, even the Atomic Sub wasn’t long for this world after he upgraded himself with Atlantean technology.
Pantheon of Superheroes Supervillains
Legion
When an attempt to give the digitized DNA thought-patterns of Pantheon member Jupiter Boy goes horribly wrong, the result is a collection of history’s greatest monsters being given corporeal form. Though composed of all the collective unconscious of all stored DNA thought-patterns in Valhalla Enterprises’ database, the bad one happened to be the ones in the driver’s seat, in particular Adolf Hitler!
Something weird always happens to that tinpot no matter the universe he’s in.
He is called Legion, for he is many (Ultiman Family 1)!
I was wondering why it was taking you longer then usual for you to do another blogs, you’ve been cooking up a big one
It’s kinda ironic you bring up a retro superhero universe since I was thinking of superhero writing a universe that was a homeage to the golden and silver ages
Wait until you see Earth B!
I gotta see which ones are for download first, we don’t have good postal service where I live. Do you know which ones are?
Big Bang Adventures are all available for download at Indyplanet.
https://www.indyplanet.com/big-bang-adventures-15
Just click the arrow next to “print on-demand” and select digital download.