Ace Morgan
78 years ago - Kyle Morgan is born, the heir to the Morgan fortune.
64 years ago - 14-year-old Kyle Morgan's mother dies due to medical complications during pregnancy.
62 years ago - 16-year-old Kyle Morgan becomes the sole owner of the Morgan Tool Company after the death of his father. He becomes an emancipated minor.
61 years ago - 17-year-old Kyle Morgan starts Morgan Aviation.
60 years ago - 18-year-old Kyle Morgan joins the Air Force. He earns the mocking nickname 'Ace' during flight school at Sheppard AFB.
57 years ago - 21-year-old Ace Morgan, the last survivor of his wing, shoots down four enemy planes on bombing runs at a carrier, saving hundreds of lives.
53 years ago - 25-year-old Ace Morgan transitions to civilian life. He builds Morgan Aviation's experimental division.
50 years ago - 28-year-old Ace Morgan, June Robbins, Red Ryan, Rocky Davis, and Professor Walter Haley, survive a plane crash on a volcanic island when their B-47 Stratojet transpacific flight encounters an unexplained spatial phenomenon. They bond over the belief that they had escaped death and felt driven to make something of their borrowed time. Upon returning to civilization, they begin an Adventure Club, The Challengers of the Unknown.
32 years ago - 46-year old Ace Morgan and The Challengers of the Unknown are trapped in a rigged-to-explode Challengers Mountain along with a group of hostages when it is sabotaged by Hunzar Manning. Professor Walter Haley sacrifices himself, gunned down by Manning's men, to reconnect Ultivac to its body. Ultivac sacrifices itself to save everyone, proving itself an honorary Challenger. Ace, June Robbins, & Rocky Davis choose to go their separate ways, honoring their roles as the surviving Challengers in their own ways.
30 years ago - 48-year-old Ace Morgan rebuilds Morgan Aviation, providing aviation mechanics to research labs and charitable organizations.
25 years ago - 53-year-old Ace Morgan's Morgan Aviation becomes the primary contractor for S.T.A.R. Labs Aerospace.
19 years ago - 59-year-old Ace Morgan is aboard the international space station when it's hull integrity starts to fail. He is able to save everyone on the station, sacrificing himself in the process.
The individual members of the Challengers do have their own personalities and specialties, but what they don't really have is their own STORY. They all exist, more or less, just as a function of the whole. So it follows that we're going to need to take the fairly bare-bones idea of each of these characters and see what we can build from them.
Ace Morgan's StoryAce is effectively the leader of the Challengers. This isn't actually established in story at first; you could argue that Ace & the Professor traded off the role, but Ace is actually chosen as the leader in a contest set up by June in issue #46 (although this is so far past the original Jack Kirby stories I'd argue that most of the events of the book at that point are pretty irrelevant.) Ace's character is elaborated on a LOT in Darwin Cooke's non-canon New Frontier story, where we see that he's a mentor figure for Hal Jordan.
We tried to build our take on the Challengers by loosely basing them on real-life people, and in Ace's case, we wanted him to not just be the person most responsible for directing the Challengers to become the dramatic "Adventure Club" of the comics, but also the one responsible for funding their whole endeavor. To that end, we tried to model him after Howard Hughes, suggesting that he was the heir to a fortune based on creating and leasing tools for major industries, became an emancipated minor after the death of his parents, and used his vast income to create an aviation company. We gave him a career in the Air Force, as that's an important part of Ace's comic canon, and borrowed the same heroic action performed by George Bailey's brother in It's a Wonderful Life. When the Challengers experience their accident, he's the one who comes up with the idea of making their 'borrowed time' count. After the end of the Challengers, we tried to make it clear that he continues to perform similar heroics on his own, right up until he sacrifices himself to save the people in the space station. This feels to me like a pretty classic adventure serial character, which is exactly what the Challengers should be built around. |
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