Amos Fortune
1884 - Amos Fortune is born in Chicago.
1900 - 16-year-old Amos Fortune starts making money playing poker against older kids in his neighborhood.
1901 - 17-year-old Amos Fortune gets beat up and robbed. He starts recruiting tough kids from his neighborhood to serve as bodyguards.
1908 - 24-year-old Amos Fortune takes a loan from gangster Jimmy the Gent.
1912 - 28-year-old Amos Fortune's luck runs out. He stops winning, loses his bodyguards, and is soon living out of boxcars.
1917 - 33-year old Amos Fortune, completely destitute, leaves Chicago to fight on the western front. He steals a handful of gold coins from a home in France, and finds that as long as he carries them, his luck heeps him alive.
1918 - 34-year-old Amos Fortune returns to Chicago and begins winning at poker, building his empire, all fueled by his good luck coins.
1921 - 37-year-old Amos Fortune is threatened by Jimmy the Gent. He brings together his old gang, adding broadway actress Queenie Dillon, to take out his organization. They call themselves the Royal Flush Gang, and take over his territory.
1936 - 52-year-old Amos Fortune realizes that he is down to his last lucky coin. He tries to protect himself, pushing away everyone he trusts. In the end the coin is stolen, and he's killed by Queenie.
We are taking some pretty drastic liberties with Amos Fortune, a character with a pretty minimal number of appearances and who, we'd argue, never really had anyone sit down and create a definitive version of him. For one thing, this character is traditionally a Justice League villain, and we're moving him so far back in the timeline that he predates even the Justice Society. He's just a gangster, albeit one who has a thing for gambling and luck. Putting him here helps us build the Royal Flush Gang's history so it can play out in our modern timeline, however, so we think this is a good add.
Our Amos Fortune StoryProfessor Amos Fortune was an early Justice League villain, debuting in issue #6 in 1961. He wore a white and black robe, and talked endlessly about the science of luck, about people's 'luck glands' that focus 'stelleration' and the 'luck magic' of the stars. It never really gelled into a coherent concept, and was mostly an excuse to superimpose his picture over a giant spinning wheel with the Justice League strapped to it. Eventually, he became the founder of the earliest versions of the Royal Flush Gang and even lead them as the first Ace. Eventually the Royal Flush Gang evolved into its own thing that operated without the involvement of Amos Fortune
We wanted to give our version of the Royal Flush Gang an origin story, and wanted it to give them some history so they could have spend a few generations becoming a family organization. To that end, we had our version of Fortune start his gang all the way back in the 20s. While the comic character has all sorts of weird pseudo-science babble about luck, we wanted to make it much simpler, so we just made him an inveterate gambler who comes into possession of luck-altering magic coins, and who parlays that luck into his own criminal empire... right up until his coins, his luck, his fortune, and his life run out. This is a pretty complete revision of a very underdeveloped character, but we think this gives some structure we wouldn't have had otherwise. |