Accomplished Perfect Physician
33 years ago - Yao Fei is born dirt poor in Anhui Province, China.
15 years ago - 18-year-old Yao Fei joins the People's Liberation Army in hopes of becoming a doctor.
12 years ago - 21-year-old Yao Fei helps suppress an uprising in Gyantze, Tibet, and kills a monk named Tenzin Cering. Horrified, he deserts and is shot by his superior officer. He is saved by Tenzin's father, who forces him to take his son's place as the 17th incarnation of the Accomplished Perfect Physician. He begins living as an outlaw.
10 years ago - 23-year-old Yao Fei first fights Fang Zhifu.
6 years ago - 27-year-old Yao Fei surrenders to the Chinese Government, becoming a Super-Functionary and a member of the Great Ten, allowing him to work in the open.
The Great Ten represent one of my all-time favorite Grant Morrison creations. They did more than just build a new team of original Superheroes (Or Super-Functionaries, in this case), but they built a whole history around them, giving each character a truly unique story and sense of place, and structured it all around the history and politics and culture of a very real-world take on China and all it's complexity. It's an incredible piece of worldbuilding, and while it's tragic that they don't have that many appearances, it's also very understandable, because they are such an intricately woven tapestry, I can see why it would be difficult for other writers to pick them up.
Yao Fei's StoryAccomplished Perfect Physician is perhaps the best example of the truly impressive amount of worldbuilding at play with the Great Ten. Simply on the surface level, Yai Fei has a great origin and story. He feels like a classic comic book character; the seventeenth incarnation of an ancient herbalist who broke free of the cycle of life and death, developing a system that uses sounds to redirect energies, allowing him to heal previously unhealable maladies, but also to affect the world around him. He feels like a character that would be right at home alongside Doctor Fate or Zatana.
Thats not really the story though. Because Yai achieved this power by accidentally killing the monk that was meant to become the new Accomplished Perfect Physician as part of an army action against an uprising in Tibet. He is now a deserter, working to protect people in a place of vast civil unrest. He's a profoundly complex character built from a profoundly complex place. |