Dorian Gray - Immortal Villain

Dorian Gray could be described as the world's first "Omega" class villain. Dorian was born on November 30th, 1800. A gifted magician from an early age, Dorian was able to master a unique avenue of mysticism called "Chaos Magic". The difference between this form of magic compared to others at the time was a reliance on sigils and symbols as well as a lack of dependence on religious symbology or "the Gods". Dorian did not sell his soul so much as transfer and lock his soul into a totem object, the portrait of himself.

Once he reached puberty and determined the extent of his magical ability, he used his gifts to track down his deceased parents and claim their forgotten estate. He had no love or kindness toward their memory, in fact he resented the fact they had died and left him an orphan on the streets. Yet no matter how much of their fortune he squandered his wealth would continue to grow. As he indulged in every sin and vice available to him, he soon met Oscar Wilde who began writing a fictional account of his life. When Dorian learned of the "Great Binding" spell that would allow a person to hide within a work of fiction, he decided to use Wilde to bind him to his book. Like Alice Liddell, Frankenstein, Ebenezer Scrooge and Mowgli the Jungle King, Dorian was able to have his life captured in a book. The longer the book stayed in print and in the public conscience, the harder it would become for anyone to remember of prove that those people actually existed in the world. Although the spell has faded with the coming of the 21st century, Dorian is still immortal. Any wound he suffers appears on his portrait; every sin he commits is reflected in the paintings features.

John Henry Part 3

As the men worked deep into the mountain, digging and laying track, Crodes released the Steam Hammer Robot from the rails. It began slamming into the sides of the tunnel, threatening to bring it down around the men. Quick thinking John Henry and the Foreman were able to get most of the men out but the entrance collapsed on them, leaving John, the Foreman and the Steam Hammer Robot trapped. John had no choice but to confront the rampaging machine and destroy it, a two hour battle that shook the mountain itself. In order to clear the entrance that was blocked with rock, John had to dig with a pick and shovel for 36 hours. He finally managed to get himself and the Foreman out, but the work, the battle and John's age and size were finally catching up with him and his heart was feeling the strain.

Due to the accident the contract was awarded to C&O and Jim Crodes was asked to pack up his scrap metal and move on. John finished the rail line but died quietly in his sleep one night. The men who he had worked with over the years began to spread his story far and wide, particularly among the South where black men were still growing accustomed to freedom. In the end Jim Crodes was forced to find work where it was available, eventually forced to work as a shaker for a small construction firm. He died years later after a blow to the head when the hammer man he worked with missed the nail.

John Henry had a son who went on to have adventures of his own, one of the first black superheroes of the Western Frontier, the Black Rider.

John Henry Part 2

A hammer man always had a partner. The man who held the spike or drill when breaking large rocks was called a turner, shaker or "melon-head", because they were often the least intelligent men on the work crew. They were also called that because often the man swinging the hammer would miss and strike these poor workers in the head, bruising it like a melon. One of the reasons the men respected John Henry, besides his great strength, was the fact he had never struck a "melon-head" with his massive hammer. It was the rest of the crew who despised Jim Crodes when he arrived. John Henry was too good a man to sink to his level and simply returned the man's cruel barbs with kindness and respect, which of course only infuriated him further. His first night there he tried to make them men afraid of John Henry by pointing out the danger to the 'melon-heads' from John Henry's hammer.
"I see you brought your own hammer," Jim Crodes said. "But other than crushing a poor melon-head, what else can all those muscles do?" John Henry simply smiled at finished his meal of bread and beans. This continued, night after night, as John Henry worked to prove he was better than the Steam Hammer Robot. But even John was not without his limits and he began to tire, both of the pestering and the exertion. One evening Jim Crodes had stood behind John Henry as he worked, bragging about his intellect and taunting John constantly. Other men on the crew tried to shut Mr. Crodes up but John would shake his head no and the men would honor his request.

"You think you are so high and mighty with all those muscles, don't you boy?" Jim said. "But you are just a stereotype, another ignorant nigger who can't do nothin' but jump, swing and run, with no real brains in your head at all. Just another no-good cotton-picking nigger swinging a shovel and a pick or a hammer."

Well John Henry had finally had enough. Being called a nigger from white men was one thing, but to stand next to another black man like himself and hear those words was too much for his giant patience. John lifted his hammer high over his head and towered over Jim Crodes. The men gathered round expecting John to crush Mr. Crodes once and for all. Crodes threw up his hands, covering his head and kneeling on the ground, whimpering. John brought the hammer down on a tree stump next to the tracks beside Jim and it exploded into a shower of wooden chips. When the debris had cleared and Crodes stood up, all the men laughed when they saw the urine pouring down Jim Crodes leg. John merely smiled and walked away, but Jim swore that he would get revenge for being embarrassed, especially when the men nicknamed him Jimmy the Pisser.

It took a long time but eventually John and the Steam Hammer Robot arrived at the foot of the Appalachians in Virginia where the real challenge awaited him. The rail line had to twist north and follow the Appalachians north into Canada, beginning at the foot of a massive mountain known as Big Bend. John had outperformed the Steam Hammer by almost 20%, but getting through the rock, even with the help of a crew, was going to be a huge task.

Jim Crodes spent the early years of his life working on research for an "Iron Man Project". He was a laborer under Thomas Edison's "Steam Man" experiments on the prairies and had studied the works of scientist Frank Reade extensively. It was the stolen notes from Edison's "HADALY" research that got him the job with Chemical X Solutions in the first place. Edison had found a process, which Crodes perfected, of electrically imprinting instructions onto an artificial device that would then direct an attached machine to follow those instructions. It would take three years and a thousand men to complete the passage through the mountain, but only two years for the Steam Powered Robot. But by this point Crodes did not want to defeat John Henry, he wanted the big man dead and buried.

John William Henry Part 1

John Henry was a hammer swinging laborer in the 19th century who could be called the first real "superhero" of modern North America. His first memory was of watching the law pursue his father and his father telling him "Work hard son, be a man, not a thief or scoundrel, learn a skill, be the father I never was," before being dragged off by law men.

John was born a slave in the state of Missouri but John became a free man when his slave master became so afraid of his massive size and power that he released John and all his family. He was only 14 at the time and stood over six feet tall and weighed over 200lbs when the Civil War ended. It was because of his father's complete failure at everything he had done that John dedicated himself to doing right and working hard. He began working first for the C&O Railway company and later worked for C&W Railway in Alabama, which spread his legend as a steel driving man across the country.

In 1887 a very successful mining and manufacturing company named Chemical X Solutions proposed the idea of a 'Steam Hammer Robot' that would replace workers on the rail lines and in the mines. They believed if the Robot could drill steel spikes into the ground for the railroads and maneuver on the tracks, it could be implemented in the mines to drive dynamite deep into the rock and soil. Their plan was to lay track for the Canadian National Railway Line, from the coast of Seattle to Halifax. C&O Railway wanted the contract as well but could not convince the U.S. and Canadian governments to support them; the Steam Hammer Robot was just too impressive.

John had been serving time in prison in Virginia for an assault against a group of white men that would have been considered self-defense if John was not 6'8" and weighed over 300 pounds. Knowing his reputation, the share holders of C&O leased John from the prison under the condition that he would prove superior to the Steam Hammer Robot. John agreed, as long as C&O moved his wife and family nearby. They agreed and John was given a huge, expensive hammer.

In order to break open the rocks that would sometimes fall on the tracks, one man would have to hold a long steel nail while another swung the hammer. The goal was to strike the nail hard enough, in the most sensitive area, so that the rock would break apart. At the very least, a hole could be created to slip in a small stick of dynamite. CN Railway had a representative who worked for Chemical X as a liaison who was present at the competition. Canada and the Southern states were heavily competing for reconstruction jobs following the Civil War. Jim Crodes, the liason from Chemical X, came to see John Henry the night before to see what the real man was like. Jim was also a black man but one who had fought for the South for his own benefit. He had fled to the northern states to escape punishment from his neighbors and the freed slaves who saw him as the worst kind of traitor.

Ama-no-kagaseo: "The Mikaboshi"

The Mikaboshi are cursed wizards, mainly Japanese, who practice dark and evil magic. The first and most powerful of them would retain the title of "Mikaboshi" and rule over the others. They would use the spirits of the dead and the cursed to serve them, building massive armies of Oni in their hellish realms. By controlling the Kimon, or Demon Gate, Mikaboshi could summon their demon servants to Earth where they would plague the people of Japan.

The main power of the Mikaboshi lies in manipulating emotions. Their presence alone can push people to extreme behavior; love turns to hate or jealousy, anger into rage or fear, etc. Their magic is never used blatantly or obviously, except in the cases of direct demon summoning, they much prefer to simply create an environment around them that fosters hate and chaos. The last Mikaboshi was rumored to have died before the 19th century. In Japan a legend has started regarding a new Mikaboshi. The legend says that a powerful wizard used ancient runes and glyphs to harness the almost instantaneous deaths of the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That amount of sudden death-chi immediately transformed the wizard into a Mikaboshi and allowed him to control and access all Kimon. All traces of his runes disappeared although one reporter claimed to have found and photographed the apartment where the spell took place. These photographs are cursed and anyone who has seen them dies. Whether they are killed by the Mikaboshi, his Oni servants, or simply through curse or coincidence remains to be seen.

THOR