Avery Sunderland
69 years ago - Avery Sunderland is born, heir to the Sunderland Munitions empire.
51 years ago - 18-year-old Sunderland attends college, and participates in the ROTC program.
47 years ago - 22-year-old Sunderland graduates college & becomes an Army Second Lieutenant.
41 years ago - 28-year-old Sunderland leaves the Army to attend Business School.
39 years ago - 30-year-old Sunderland earns his MBA, and takes on an executive position within Sunderland Munitions, beginning to expand them into volatile chemicals.
32 years ago - 37-year-old Sunderland becomes the new CEO of Sunderland Munitions, restructuring into the Sunderland Corporation.
26 years ago - 43-year-old Sunderland is one of the earliest investors in H.I.V.E., making a fortune.
22 years ago - 47-year-old Sunderland funds the labs of Doctors Linda & Alec Holland as they work on his Bio-restorative Formula in his Louisiana labs.
20 years ago - 49-year-old Sunderland, seeing the potential use of Alec Holland's Bio-restorative Formula and not wanting anyone else to have access to it, sends men to steal it from Holland's labs, resulting in an explosion that kills both Alec & Linda Holland.
17 years ago - 52-year-old Sunderland is approached by the mysterious Eric Loveday, who is secretly Anton Arcane. He reveals that the Swamp Thing may be a result of Alec Holland's Bio-restorative Formula. Sunderland funds Loveday's laboratories, all designed to capture the Swamp Thing and reveal the secrets of his transformation.
14 years ago - 55-year-old Sunderland, reasoning that Linda Holland was subjected to the same stimulus as Alec Holland before his transformation and therefore must have been similarly mutated, has her grave unearned and remains stolen. No trace of mutation is found, suggesting that something unique happened to Holland.
12 years ago - 57-year-old Sunderland, no longer willing to wait to learn the truth of Alec Holland's transformation, has his men raize the swamp to trap and kill Swamp Thing. He brings in former H.I.V.E. scientist Jason Woodrue to conduct the autopsy of Holland, only to discover that he is in fact not Alec Holland, but instead plant matter affected by Holland's formula that has absorbed his memories. When the Swamp Thing awakens and learns the truth, it kills Sunderland in a rage.
Avery Sunderland is a fascinating relic of a character, appearing in a series of stories that are often considered so inconsequential that they are regularly ignored when examining the larger DC continuity, but he does play one role in one particular issue that is SO important that it is absolutely impossible to leave him out. You'll see what I mean.
Avery Sunderland's Comic HistoryWhen a new Swamp Thing series was introduced in 1982 in conjunction with the Wes Craven movie the series spend the first year or so really lost in a complex web of subplots involving a fairly large supporting cast, leaving Swamp Thing himself kind of lost in the shuffle. One of those characters, we learn, is General Sunderland, the government contractor whose organization was originally responsible for setting up the labs where Alec & Linda Holland were doing their experiments, and who is also working behind the scenes to control all the results of that experiment, including capturing Swamp Thing himself.
These early stories are all still canon, but are generally breezed over on the way to Alan Moore's takeover of the book. While this technically happened in issue #20, when we see Sunderland's men finally killing Swamp Thing and claiming his body, it really truly begins with issue #21, The Anatomy Lesson, where Sunderland hires Jason Woodrue to perform an autopsy to recover the secrets of Holland's Bio-restorative Formula, only to discover that this was never Holland, only plants with his memories. This particular issue begins the incredible odyssey of Moore's Swamp Thing, and does so entirely by using this character as its framing device, therefore permanently cementing him into the core of DCs character lexicon. |
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Our Avery Sunderland StoryWe are of course adapting the Anatomy Lesson almost verbatim, although in our timeline this actually happens much later in Swamp Thing's story. This means that Avery Sunderland will actually be around for quite a bit longer, and gives us an opportunity to use him quite a bit more.
Just by incorporating Sunderland into our story, we get a much cleaner framework for many of the classic Swamp Thing stories, even including his origins. It all actually does make a lot more sense if there is some entity or agency manipulating events in the background, and that is literally what the Sunderland Corporation was invented for. All of that is essentially taken from existing canon, but we're also going a bit further. Since we're constructing a version of events where Anton Arcane comes to Louisiana posing as a wealthy scientist trying to capture Swamp Thing, it makes perfect sense that he would have reached out to Sunderland to fund his plan. Then, of course, Sunderland can get to the real business at hand; being the man responsible for revealing the truth about Swamp Thing. |