Obscured Vision

Even allowing for the fact that he is prone to mental instability, Ultron’s plan regarding the Vision seems needlessly complicated and poorly thought out: he creates a super-powered android with uncontrollable human memories and sends him to destroy the Avengers, knowing he probably won’t do it, but instead lead the heroes back to Ultron, so he could destroy them? He never even seems to have considered the sudden betrayal that seems virtually inevitable between artificial beings and their creators (the unstated Finagle’s Law of Robotics), and he of all beings certainly should have! Still, it is quite possible that this plan wasn’t as inane as it seems, and that it wasn’t even Ultron’s.

At one time, it was believed that Vision was constructed from the damaged body of the original, android Human Torch. This origin was cast into doubt later, though Immortus revealed that he had created a temporal duplicate of the Human Torch, which became the Vision. Immortus’ general duplicitousness is enough reason to doubt his word--and in fact, he is lying, for inscrutable reasons of his own. The android body that the Mad Thinker directs Ultron to resembles the Human Torch, but is in fact a creation of the Manhunters.

The Manhunters were the first attempt by the Guardians of the Universe to create a cosmic police force. “Many light years away from possibility of corruption, grey and calm with inflexible authority,” the robotic Manhunters' narrow and pitiless view of justice came to trouble their creators. When the Guardians tried to rein in the Manhunters, the enforcers decided their masters were corrupt, too. The Manhunters' rebellion was put down, but they were never fully eradicated. They went underground, forming the Cult of the Manhunters to infiltrate and subvert other cultures, to build a secret army for their eventual coup attempt against the Guardians.

The Manhunters wanted an agent on the Avengers and Ultron was a convenient dupe. The Mad Thinker was either their agent or another unknowing instrument.

Vision served ably within the Avengers, until contact with another Manhunter agent, the AI ISAAC, led to the activation of his secret programming. The Vision was defeated, but the fact remained he had seized control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and SHIELD was taking no changes. Vision was kidnapped and dismantled, and his memories wiped clean.

His teammates on the West Coast Avengers were allowed to retrieved him, but it would be sometime before he regained anything resembling his former personality.

Incumbents are from Earth, Sivanas are from Venus

In September of 1936, all across America aircraft beginning dropping flyers proclaiming a new candidate for the highest office in the land. At the urging of her father, Beautia Sivana was running for President. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana planned to stage a coup once his daughter was in office. Hers was the most massive, multi-media, write-in campaign this country has ever seen. Her beautiful visage graced the covers of magazines and full page newspaper ads. Her captivating voice could be heard on radio addresses. Women were cool to her candidacy, but men were enthralled. Most men. Boy reporter, Billy Batson, wasn’t fooled one bit. His alter ego, Captain Marvel foiled the Sivanas’ plot and returned mad scientist and would-be president to Venus*, where Beautia would have to content herself with being Empress.

Ultimately, Beautia didn’t share her father’s devotion to evil and in fact pursued a career in social work upon her return to Earth, according to some accounts.

*Or what Sivana said was Venus. It is difficult to square the real planet with its depiction in this record.

Season of the Witch

Agatha Harkness, elderly former governess to Franklin Richards, was alive (according to some sources) well before the sinking of the last remnant of Atlantis. She is one of the homo magi, a subspecies of humanity with a greater facility at the magical arts. A witch, in other words, and one of the oldest still living. Mundane humanity has not always been kind to members of homo magi, and the witches and wizards have long sought an escape from persecution. Some sought refuge in other dimensions; Harkness and others hoped the New World would be a place of safety.

She and her coven contrived to bring a witch homeland into being through their actions in Salem village in Massachusetts in the late 17th century. The project is depicted in the television series Salem, albeit in a sensationalized and one-sided fashion. Mistakes were made, to be sure, and many of those could be blamed on Harkness’ son, who would begin calling himself Nicholas Scratch in mockery of the Puritans’ fear of the Devil. The Harknesses and their cover were forced to move on.

They found refuge in an isolated valley in the Rocky Mountains and founded the town of New Salem where they could live in peace. Once the town was well established, Agatha chose to return to the outside world, perhaps to search for other homo magi, perhaps to keep a closer eye on wider humanity. During World War II, she may have joined our magical practitioners in helping the Allies. She likely had a hand in helping to establish the national Council of Witches and Miss Robichaux's Academy in New Orleans to secretly nurture more attenuated homo magi bloodlines. Certainly, she would have checked in on the Spellmans, her descendants through her daughter, Abigail.

In her absence, Nicholas Scratch eventually took power. He fathered several children by several wives: those becoming the magically mutated individuals known as the Salem Seven, and at least one illegitimate child among another hidden sect of witches named Klarion Bleak. Eventually, Scratch and his children and followers in New Salem sought to move against Harkness. With the aid of the Fantastic Four he was defeated and vanished to another dimension, though he would continue to plague the Fantastic Four and his mother.

The settlement of New Salem does not survive the end of the 21st century. Its inhabitants will choose to join other homo magi refugees on the distant world of Zerox.

Cult of the Cobra

On May 25, 1953, one of a pair of twins was stolen from a New Delhi hospital by the shadowy Cobra Cult. Twenty-three years later, Jeffrey Burr ruled the cult as Kobra, and had transformed it into an international subversive organization.

In the next few years, his organization would see even greater expansion in Western hemisphere and pose a sufficiently serious threat to American interests that a special task force would be created to deal with them. The unlikely architect of this success was a recent convert to the cause: A former car salesman turned con man and anti-government agitator who would become known as Cobra Commander.

The key to the future Cobra Commander’s success seems to have lain in his ability credibly speak to the desires of angry political fringe of whatever persuasion. He could recruit from the United Freedom Front, Black Spectre, Posse Comitatus or the Sons of the Serpent, or keep things ideologically light and bring in disaffected members of strictly criminal groups. Cobra Commander’s only certain belief personally seems to have been in brokenness of the current system, and in the power of fascist symbols and pageantry. He tossed the snake-scale costumes and robes for a more imposing, paramilitary vision. Given the Commander’s success, Kobra allowed it.
It was quite a rise, but in the end too high and too quick. Kobra would not share the throne. In the mid-eighties, barely a decade into his meteoric rise, Cobra Commander was assassinated at Kobra’s command.

Silver Metal Lovers

There is no doubt that Henry Pym is a scientific genius, but advanced robotics and artificial intelligence is far afield from biochemistry and biophysics. The achievements in those areas credited to him (for contractual reasons) in Marvel Comics are actually the work of his friend, William Magnus.
Magnus was of old Dutch New York stock and his family knew the van Dynes socially (perhaps even dating Janet) before he became a student of Janet’s father, Vernon. Magnus surpassed his mentor at young age, had developed intelligent robots, the Metal Men, had an impressive list of patents and government contracts, and an advanced laboratory complex while Hank Pym was still falling into anthills.
There had been robots before, certainly, but Magnus was interested in his creations doing more than passing Turing’s test. He wanted emotive machines, something truly animate. Magnus was an esotericist as well as a man of science, and his theories on emotion were an odd mixture of alchemy and psychodynamics. He brought forth the traits than were already in the metal, he said. His nuclear-powered Philosopher’s Stones, the responsometers, were an attempt to model the mind or soul more than the brain. One of his Metal Men, Tina, made with platinum responses, fell hopelessly in love with him. For reasons conscious or unconscious, Magnus always told her this meant her responsometers were faulty.
For his second series of robots, he tried encoding the psyche of a human as a substrate. Ultron would be birthed from Hank Pym’s brow. This robot was self-evolving, and he transformed himself into an Oedipal monster who wished to kill Pym so it could have Janet van Dyne. Ultron’s reproduction has become almost viral. So many iterations have existed and become separate lines of evolution, he has proved impossible to eradicate.
When Ultron decided to build his own wife, he had Magnus aid him (perhaps with brainwashing, perhaps not). He wanted Janet van Dyne’s soul in a robot body. He named that new being “Jocasta.” His psychocircuits had surpassed any human concern with irony. Jocasta was as unlucky in love as any of her predecessors, dying at the hands of Ultron just when she found her feelings requited by Machine Man.

Boys of War

In 2007, the U.S. Veterans of Underage Military Service reported that most of their members had first served between the ages of 14 and 16, with twenty-nine active members entering service at 13. No report exists as to how many were in the so-called Young Allies, or as they were later and unofficially named, the Boy Commandos.

In 1941, after a few dedicated members of the Sentinels of Liberty (a patriotic youth organization and Captain America fan club) aided Bucky and Toro in defeating a group of would-be saboteurs in a Brooklyn shipyard, the United States government commissioned the formation of the “Young Allies,” a group of older youths that would help protect America’s shores against spies and saboteurs with there vigilance and prepare for military service should the need arise. A comic book was also commissioned that presented the boys in a more active role than they actually had (at least initially) and portrayed them as younger than they actually were for twofold propaganda purposes: to build support for war among young people and to ridicule the Axis powers by showing them defeated by children.

Not long after America’s entry into the war, members of the Young Allies were fighting overseas alongside Bucky and others, though their activities were directed more for publicity and propaganda purposes than military effectiveness. This “Boy Commando” unit (as it came to be called) was officially made up of boys of minimum legal military age. In fact, most were between 14 and 16, and conspicuously, all were orphans. This group allowed members from allied countries, including two from nations under German occupation.

Beyond the fictionalized incidents presented in comic books, a full accounting of the activities of these brave boy commandos has ever been given.

The Day It All (Didn't) Happen

We do not live in one of those universes where a teenage president was elected and set everything right, at least for a time. No youthful wave managed to get the Constitution amended so that eighteen year-olds could run for the highest office in the land. There was no teen President, but there was a Prez Rickard.

The young man from Steadfast who made the clocks run on time did spark a national movement. A protest, a bit of political theater, aimed at what he viewed as the corrupt system. Prez went through all the motions of running for president on a campaign of truth and love, just without officially being able to run.

He had been a legal candidate for a local office, hand picked by Boss Smiley who may have been a literal avatar of the political machine. At the very least, Boss Smiley represented it. Youth was the wave of the future, and he had the foresight to want to catch that wave for his own purposes.

Prez went around him and ran straight for the presidency. He named his mother his running mate (she had named him Prez, after all), and said he would appoint that shaman and amateur naturalist, Eagle Free as head of the FBI. He would not be shackled by the forces of Old and Evil.

They tried to stop him, of course. Years before they resorted to the madbomb to sweep the vestiges of democracy away, the Elite went after the Prez. Supergirl saved him from an assassin employing high technology and black magic. The Establishment meant business.

Everything came to a head in August of 1968. The Prez and his followers were in Chicago along with other youth activists. They held their own nominating convention where the Prez beat out Pigasus the Pig, who gave a gracious concession speech through his spokesman. Many historians cite the refusal of the Democratic Party to allow Prez to speak at the national convention as pivotal cause in the escalation of the protests and a factor in the violence that followed.

Big Heads

At the height of the Cold War, there was a strange arms race going on: the creation bio-computers via massive craniocererbal enlargement. The best evidence suggests that this unusual research began in China. Its first publicly known product was the Chinese agent and scientist codenamed in the West “Egg Fu” but in China (perhaps) known as Chang Tzu. Chang Tzu came to the attention of the U.S. government in the mid-60s when he was the leader of a military research installation on Oolong Island. The xenophobia of American comics in that era led to him being depicted as a ridiculous Yellow Peril caricature with a Charlie Chan speech pattern. The truth is that only the intervention of Wonder Woman stopped him from launching a deadly attack against the United States.

Wonder Woman later encountered a similar being who the comics called “Egg Fu V.” Another called “Dr. Yes” (Egg Fu’s twin brother, reportedly) tried to kidnap Dr. Magnus and his Metal Man. It seems likely these individuals represent a refinement of their process, but may have also been a further evolution of Chang Tzu.

Sometime during Chang Tzu’s tenure on Oolong Island, information about the process that created him appears to have gotten into the hands of the subversive group known as Advanced Idea Mechanics. It is possible that U.S. intelligence agencies provided this information to AIM either with or without their superiors’ knowledge, as AIM was at that point a branch or splinter group of HYDRA, who had heavily infiltrated the U.S. government. In the project dubbed “MODOC” (acronym for Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing), AIM experimented with the Chinese procedure and ultimately subjected a technician named George Tarleton to process.

Their hope was to create a computer capable of comprehending the Cosmic Cube, which they had recently created with recovered alien technology. Soon after the Tarleton-MODOC came online, he killed his creators and took control of the organization. He renamed himself MODOK (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing). MODOK controlled AIM for years, but was ultimately ousted due to the organization’s dissatisfaction with its lack scientific progress as he pursued increasingly personal vendettas against various members of the superhero community.

Perhaps as a contingency against MODOK, AIM agents within the Soviet military worked to give the Soviet’s their own bio-computer. SODAM (Specialized Organism Designed for Aggressive Maneuvers) later MODAM (Mental Organism Designed for Aggressive Maneuvers) was the result. The female agent originally claimed to be Maria Trovaya, Henry Pym’s supposedly deceased first wife, but this may have been psychological warfare. Later, she was identified as Olinka Barankova. Her allegiances were always murky, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, MODAM dropped any pretense of working for anyone other than AIM.

Further (or Furthur) Misadventures of a Battlin' Bowman

By 1964 and the age of 21, Clint Barton, the orphaned son of the original Green Arrow, had been a carnival performer, a criminal, and a superhero. Now he wasn’t feeling so super. What was a guy who was good with a bow and arrow compared to a thunder god or the living symbol of America? The drugs didn’t help. It was marijuana, mostly, but some Dexedrine, too (ironic that it was his older brother with the heroin habit who would use the name “Speedy” for a time). At the Peppermint Lounge, he met a go-go dancer and sometime model with similar hobbies. She called herself Athena Tremor and claimed to be the daughter of Wonder Woman. Given Barton’s experiences, that seemed vaguely plausible, thought he didn't much care.

Around the time of the World’s Fair, the two met Ken Kesey and Merry Pranksters out from California. In that group was Merryman, Myron Victor, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Patriot, but may actually have been the child of the 50s Captain America, William Burnside. In any case, Merryman was the leader of a Situationist superhero performance art troupe. Barton and Tremor joined in as "White Feather" and "Dumb Bunny," respectively, and the group began calling themselves the Inferior Five.

The two followed the Pranksters back to California. The Inferior Five were San Francisco’s unofficial and ineffectual protectors for a few years, but they were done before the Summer of Love.

Barton was on his own again. He looked up his old flame Natasha Romanov but found her living with another man—another superhero. He headed out into the Arizona desert with a young Native American named Eagle Free and a whole lot of mescaline to find the Miracle Mesa. Later, he would claim to have astrally projected to the Old West and met Two-Gun Kid and other famous gunslingers. Back to California.

Stoned out of his mind on a sail boat to Catalina Island, he fell overboard. Waking up the next morning on some small island, he ironically and unknowingly almost recapitulated one of the comics' fictional origins for his father. Using an improvised bow, he subdued a small group of fairly intoxicated drug smugglers who had otherwise refused to help him get off the island and threatened him with violence. He commandeered their boat (and a bit of their stash) and returned to the mainland, where he alerted the authorities to their location.

Then he got a haircut and called the lawyers for his father's estate. The island interlude and slapdash heroics was just what he needed to get him back in the game.

A new Green Arrow, sporting a van dyke and a new attitude would soon emerge.

Stray Bullets

Matt Liebowicz aka Matt Hawk was a Boston lawyer who, inspired by a dime novel character, took on the identity of a masked gunfighter for justice, the Two-Gun Kid. Matt Hawk was killed by the Two-Gun Kid on April 28, 1885 and the Kid died in July of that year. Except that they were one in the same man, and he did not died in 1885, but rather in 1887 in Wonderment, Wyoming, fighting alongside a number of colorful crimefighters of the Old West.

Unless he didn’t. In 1938, Dr. Thomas Holloway was tending a dying, elderly man who claimed to be the Two-Gun Kid. He seemed to know the future. He bequeathed Holloway a mask and a pair of six guns. Holloway would use these to become the vigilante called the Angel.

Two-Gun Kid visited the future at least twice, becoming an Avenger. Perhaps his timeline is as branched as Kangs? Here he went out in the blaze of gunfire, there he died in bed, there he visited his own grave, seventy years after his death.

Jonah Hex’s fate is more certain. Maybe. He was shot and killed by the coward George Barrow while playing cards in Cheyenne in 1904. Barrow opened fire with a shotgun while Hex fumbled with his glasses. His body was stolen by an unscrupulous wild west show promoter who had it stuffed and put on display.

Jonah Hex visited the future, too. Stolen from the year 1875 (or more likely 1878), he spent years in a nuclear war ravaged future. He also met the Justice League as a member of a group picked by the Lord of Time. Is it possible then, that the Jonah Hex whose stuff body was displayed in the Frontier City Amusement Park in Laramie, Wyoming, as late as 1987 (Hex had seen it himself in storage in the 2050s), was not Jonah Hex but an imposter? Hex knew the future needed a body, but did it need to be his body? Just who was George Barrow, really?

Whom Gods Destroy

Later she would claim to be named for a "cosmos-slithering dragon of interstellar legend" the hyper-Jormungandr of the time before the Old Gods died, but at first she called herself "Madame MacEvil." It had the ring of the menaces born in the fires of Apokolips: just ask Granny Goodness, Doctor Bedlam, or the Deep Six. Cosmic evil advertises and cares not if you think it banal. Madame McEvil, Moondragon, was not on the side of Apokolips, though. She mimed the madness of its minions as a sort of sympathetic magic, a way to bring down the dread Darkseid himself.

Or maybe she had just gone crazy. Being a mortal raised in a austere monastic tradition of the gods can do that. You cannot gaze upon the glory of Supertown and remain unchanged. Ask the boy who sampled the Forever Peoples' cosmic capsules.

"She Could Be You!"

That was the tagline on the later issues of the comic book based loosely on her adolescence and young adulthood that ran from when the actual Patsy Walker was barely in her teens until she was in her 30s. Her real life was far stranger than the fiction with time as a superhero, a second marriage to the literal son of the Devil (or a devil), mental illness, and then suicide (and then resurrection).

Viewed through the lens of the comics, Walker (who first appeared on the teen scene in the 40s) was a twenty-something when she and her best friend were at the front of the crowd to see Reed Richards and Susan Storm emerge as a married couple. In reality, she was in her early thirties, married, and dealing with an abusive husband. Buzz changed in Vietnam the comics said, but Vietnam was yet to come. Buzz's first war was Korea, and the truth is he didn't change much.

Buzz Baxter was mostly a nonentity in the Patsy Walker comics, but never one to let is girlfriend get the limelight ahead of him, Buzz had inked a deal for a comic based on him, too. Buzzy was even less truthful and only lasted half as long.

A chance meeting with the Beast would turn the abused housewife into a superhero, divorce Buzz Baxter, and expose corruption within the military contractor Brand Corporation. The early sixties were a different time.

When The (Star) Man Comes Around

Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.
Except that the planet of Daxam (or Dakkam in some dialects) wasn’t doomed, and the desperate scientist was wrong. He and his wife launched his last hope anyway, their son, just before government agents killed then. The tiny ship would carry this lost son of Daxam to earth where it crashed in the everglades. No kindly couple rescued the child, but he was safe there in the ship’s technological womb as he grew to physical adulthood over the next almost 20 years. When he emerged, he still had the mind of a child.

An encounter with the Man-Thing sent this strange visitor from another planet fleeing from the swamp. As fate would have it, he first encountered Superboy, Kal Kent, son of the original Superman. The alien clearly had abilities at a near Kryptonian level (in fact, the Daxamites maybe an offshoot of the Kryptonians), and Superboy assumed the newcomer was a refugee from that world. Remembering stories of his father’s encounter with the amnestic Halk Kar, Superboy called the alien “Mon-El” as his father had the last near-Kryptonian arrival.

Superboy lost track of “Mon-El” who eventually ended up in New York, just in time to encounter Ben Grimm leaving a showing of Five Fingers of Death. Grimm saved him from an attempted assassination by Daxamite agents. Ultimately, Grimm got the alien to Reed Richards who determined that Mon-El was sound of mind (though it was undeveloped) and that exposure to cosmic rays had altered his physiology in unforeseen ways, making him an energy dampener. He also noted lead levels building up within the alien’s system.

At Project PEGASUS (a military/industry partnership with the involvement of STAR Labs) for further testing, Mon-El encountered the Cosmic Cube, which sent him into a coma. When he emerged, he was no longer child-like. He was aware of who he was and his true name, Lar Gand. What’s more, he was spiritually transformed. He took the name Aquarian. He set out to wander the earth, bringing peace and enlightenment to the world. He gained something of a following, and more than one “spiritual program” arose in his name.

His ministry was cut short when lead poisoning began to kill him. Rather than some other form of suspended animation, he voluntarily chose exile in the Phantom Zone, hoping to bring some measure of peace to the criminals imprisoned there. He is said to have emerged again, after a millennium, a changed man, ready to embark on a new stage of his existence.

Bootstrap Paradox

More than once, accounts blithely relate that someone or another built a time machine, yet we seldom are shown or given details about the construction,,and this achievement is notably beyond the greatest geniuses like Reed Richards, Lex Luthor, or Tony Stark. Rip Hunter is in possession of two time ships which he keeps in working order, but we have never been privy to their design or development. Victor von Doom claims to have invented one, but we only ever see the finished product, and the exchange depicted above with Rama-Tut suggests some doubt about its origins. Rumors swirl that Doom made a deal with the Devil, or a devil at least, for the secrets of time travel, but where did Mephsito get them?

Was it the nameless (or more accurately, variously but unofficially identified) Traveler whose account H.G. Wells edited? Or perhaps from it was an outgrowth of the Philadelphia experiment that transport the USS Eldridge through time and space in 1943. Nathaniel Richards (another man later said to have invented a time machine) seems to have been involved in the planning stages of that experiment. If so, he would have been aware—and possible even provided oversight—to the secret project that followed to develop saucer-like time travel craft, based in the Rockies and led by Eldridge survivor Reno Franklin. Franklin’s team definitely developed time craft of a sort, so are they the original source? Or is all time travel technology a causal loop and an example of the bootstrap paradox?

Alligator People

The script writers must have had a source pretty close to the events, because the 1959 film gets a lot of details right, though the names and locations are changed. There were experimental treatments for limb regrowth being used on a veterans in a secluded clinic in the swamps, and it all ended in tragedy.

Not enough of a tragedy that after a little more work on his formula, Curtis Connors didn't try again, this time on himself. The results, unfortunately, were similar. He got his arm back, and much more than he wanted

What the movie doesn't say, what the filmmakers possibly didn't know, was the amnesiac nurse was pregnant. She wasn't driven into a fugue state by the transformation and death of her lover, but by the birth of a son that carried similar disfigurements, similar reptilian DNA.

The child was named Waylon Jones but as a criminal and assassin he was known as Killer Croc. The doctor's told the aunt that raised him he had a peculiar skin condition. No one ever side just how peculiar.

The Trail to Gorilla City

It’s been nearly two decades since Gorilla City petitioned for and was granted United Nations membership, but still the colony of super-intelligent apes remains mysterious.

Some accounts suggest that the city’s inhabitants are actually aliens, inadvertently brought to Earth by the actions of Green Lantern Hal Jordan from a world where apes evolved from man. Either Pierre Boulle’s novel carries some degree of truth, or this is a telepathic fiction created by Grodd or another of the apes for some purpose. Other accounts suggest they are terrestrial hominids, evolved by the actions of an alien visitor. It is possible (and some of the depictions of their physical characteristics support this) that they are not actually gorillas at all, but rather evolved Mangani, their ancestors cousins of the tribe that raised Tarzan.

More intriguingly, there seems to be (or have been) more than one gorilla city. In 1931, Tarzan discovered a replica of London, peopled by gorillas uplifted by a mad geneticist who called himself and was thought of by the apes as “God.” “God's” notes on hybridizing gorilla and human DNA were sought (and possibly found) by both Robert Yerkes and Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (and possibly Ivanov’s protégé Ivan Kragov, the Red Ghost).

Perhaps twenty years later, Congo Bill discovered a more primitive city of intelligent gorillas who claimed to be from a world with two moons. Bill took this description to mean Mars (an idea perhaps supported by the existence of an alternate earth where Martian apes ruled and were opposed by Jonathan Raven, Ape-Slayer), though perhaps it was Calor. The link between the current Gorilla City and these others is unclear; they may represent periods in the evolution of ape society or purposeful obfuscation of the gorillas’ true nature and history.

Icon

The first Kryptonian arrived on earth as infant, crashing not into a corn field in Kansas around the time of the first World War, but in a cottonfield in the American South prior to the Civil War. The last son of Vathlo Island was taken in and raised by slaves.

The boy would grow up to be known as Augustus Freeman, once the war was over and that surname meant something. He would never be as public as his fellow Kryptonian, Superman. Like Hugo Danner (whose abilities might stem from his father's isolation of genetic material from a sample of Freeman's blood), Freeman would struggle to find his place in the world , where his powers, great as they were put still woefully limited, might have some purpose.

It may be that he woke up amnesiac in a hospital in 1931 and was given the name "John Hancock." He may have spent the next few decades wondering from place to place and trying to out-drink his superhuman constitution.

Some accounts relate that he eventually recalled who he was, or at the very least was given a reason to return to heroic action, a chance to become the icon he was destine to be.