Black Condor
1911 - John Trugillo is born to the Southern Paiute Tribe.
1926 - 15-year-old John vision-quests in the ancient Manitou caves. The Manitou stone activates his latent metagene, empowering him as a rudimentary elemental of earth & sky.
1931 - 20-year-old John assumes the mantle of Black Condor, becoming a protector of the earth and a predator of evil.
1945 - 34-year-old John sacrifices himself to save the imprisoned scientists in Vandal Savage's secret labratories..
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Black Condor was one of the Quality Comics characters that were placed into the wartime team the Freedom Fighters after they were acquired by DC. The original character, Richard Grey Jr, was basically a riff on Tarzan. He was a orphaned child that was raised by Condors, which of course allowed him to develop the ability to fly. Golden Age comics are gloriously ridiculous.
A later version of the character was Ryan Kendall, who gained flight, telekinesis & healing powers thanks to his grandfather's experiments. He was a character tailor made for nineties era comics, isolationist and aggressive, but he went on to represent himself admirably, joining the modern era Freedom Fighters, Primal Force, and even serving in the Justice League. |
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John Trugillo debuted in Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray's Crisis Aftermath: Battle for Bludhaven, along with several new versions of the classic Freedom Fighters. He was a Native American that was granted his powers by a Mayan spider goddess. This is a odd origin, but the result is absolutely, unabashedly amazing. He was a hugely powerful character with one of the absolute best designs modern comics have put forward. There is little to no connection between the different versions of Black Condor, so there's no reason for us to include any more than one of them, but its a no-brainer that the John Trugillo version of the character is the one we should use.
In expanding the character concept, we needed to build up his origins, and decided to connect him to a new legacy of characters we've created associated with the various Native American heroes in DC. By making him empowered by the Manitou Stone, he's connected to Manitou Raven, as wells as future heroes Super-Chief and Longshadow, giving a larger sense of the connection between these characters. It's definitely worth spending a little time researching the actual tribal nations of these characters. We so often assume that "Native American" is an adequate description, but there are whole nations that existed in the Americas, and if you're going to create a character of Native American origin, then you should at least understand the tribe they come from. Manitou is actually an Algonquian word for an omnipresent spiritual lifeforce, but the Algonquian people primarily lived along the Atlantic coast, around the great lakes and into eastern Canada. John is meant to be a character primarily working in western US, so we've made him a Southern Paiute, a tribe from Nevada, California, Utah and Arizona. |
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