Big Words
1918 - Anthony Rodriguez is born in Metropolis, Suicide Slums.
1925 - 6-year-old Anthony Rodriguez is left to fend for himself as his parents engage in petty crime. He spends his time in the library, trying to learn as much as he can.
1929 - 11-year-old Anthony Rodriguez becomes a newsboy for the Daily Planet. He gets the nickname 'Big Words".
1931 - 13-year-old Anthony Rodriguez and his fellow newsboys, when they are confronted for protection money by local organized crime, choose to stand up to them with all sorts of hijinks. They are assisted by the Guardian, a new vigilante, who dubs them the Newsboy Legion.
1933 - 15-year-old Anthony Rodriguez and the Newsboy Legion discover Jim Harper's identity as the Guardian, and agree to keep it secret.
1937 - 19-year-old Anthony Rodriguez and the Newsboy Legion stand up to Intergang with the help of Jim Harper.
1938 - 20-year-old Anthony Rodriguez earns a full-ride scholarship to Metropolis University.
1940 - 22-year-old Anthony Rodriguez wants to leave school to enlist along with the other Newsboys, but they insist he stays and contributes through his work in the sciences.
1942 - 24-year-old Anthony Rodriguez begins his graduate work in Genetics. He is invited to participate in a government genetics program called Project M.
1943 - 25-year-old Anthony Rodriguez attends the ceremony posthumously awarding Tommy Thompkins Congressional Medal of Honor.
1946 - 28-year-old Anthony Rodriguez meets with Jim Harper when he returns after the war. They drink to the memory of the Newsboy Legion, but discover that there are new groups of kids thriving in Suicide Slums using the name. Earning his doctorate for his work with Project M, he helps found a new research facility dedicated to researching genetic engineering, named Cadmus.
1951 - 33-year-old Anthony Rodriguez purchases several buildings in Metropolis Suicide Slums, building up their subbasements so the Newsboy Legion can use them as headquarters to start their underground newspaper The Guardian.
1964 - 46-year-old Anthony Rodriguez is exposed to a lethal infectious pathogen in a lab accident. He leaves his estate to the Newsboy Legion.
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Big Word's StoryOf the original four Newsboys of the Newsboy Legion, Big Words is probably the most unique, and our timeline reflect that. First of all he's the tallest, which is something, but obviously he's the big brain scientist character, a regular Kirby archetype the examples of which you're already naming. The existence of Big Words is kind of prophetic, because without him the later resurgence of the Newsboy Legion doesn't actually work nearly as well... with him we can have DNAliens and The Habitat and the Whiz Wagon, and it all makes a certain amount of sense. One wonders if that's in fact why Kirby puts these guys in place in the first place.
Of the four original Newsboys, Big Words is the one guy we did not have serve in World War II, and for a very particular reason. There's precedent for it, first of all, in the idea that he could contribute to the war effort through his research rather than by serving. He works more in genetics than physics, so this was a place where we could actually introduce Project M into our version of continuity. Also, but having him be the one original Newsboy to survive, we get this pipeline to the future, where he sets up resources that Newsboy organizations can continue to operate in Metropolis. Because of this, we get to lay groundwork for possible future versions of the Newsboys that we'd never have without him. |