Calculator
37 years ago - Noah Kuttler is born.
31 years ago - 6-year-old Noah gets his first computer.
23 years ago - 14-year-old Noah takes over a television network. He is arrested and tried as juvenile, his records sealed.
19 years ago - 18-year-old Noah attends college, using their host servers as a data broker.
17 years ago - 20-year-old Noah steals millions and abandons his identity, moving his operations to his own servers in Gotham.
12 years ago - 25-year-old Noah hires operatives to challenge each member of the Justice League to collect data on them, beginning a comprehensive database on their abilities.
9 years ago - 28-year-old Noah's network is tracked down by Oliver Queen & Hal Jordan. He is shut down and imprisoned.
7 years ago - 30-year-old Noah is able to wipe his own criminal record and walks free.
5 years ago - 32-year-old Noah's networks are slowly dismantled by Oracle. He becomes obsessed with beating her.
3 years ago - 34-year-old Noah finds evidence that Oracle is targetting Roland Desmond, and partners with him to hunt her. When she uses a surplus submarine to take out their henchman and is able to spike and completely destroy his systems, He is left ruined.
2 years ago - 35-year-old Noah Kuttler hires Slade Wilson to attack the Justice League to rebuild his database.
Calculator as a character has such a borad place in the history of DC. He's a prime example of the problematic elements of two completely different eras. He's a goofy costumed villain from the seventies with barely any explanation at all of what he can do and why, the sort of character that so much work in the later decades went into justifying. His eventual redesign happened right in the midst of the 2000s, and he managed to become part of a lot of the more dour, less joyful stories of the era, and managed to become a bit of a bummer.
So why include him? Put simply, his redesign makes a lot of sense. In a world that includes Oracle, it would just be weird to NOT give her a villainous counterpart. Having Nuah Kuttler as part of the timeline does make the whole world a cooler. The question is really this; can we infuse this character with a little more fun just by drawing from that goofy seventies past? Let's see.
So why include him? Put simply, his redesign makes a lot of sense. In a world that includes Oracle, it would just be weird to NOT give her a villainous counterpart. Having Nuah Kuttler as part of the timeline does make the whole world a cooler. The question is really this; can we infuse this character with a little more fun just by drawing from that goofy seventies past? Let's see.
Calculator's Comic HistoryCalculator's original appearances were in a series of backup stories in Detective Comics in issues 463 - 368 in 1976 by Gerry Conway. Each story had Calculator going up against a different Justice League member. He regularly talked about having calculated just how he was going to beat them, using technology that allowed him to manifest physical objects specifically designed to counteract his opponent. Each story ended with him being caught, but laughing that his larger plan was coming together. By the last issue the story graduated to the feature, where Calculator went up against everyone he'd already fought, showing that he had made plans to fight everyone, making himself invincible until he's finally outsmarted by Batman.
This wasn't the only appearance of this classic version of Calculator. He showed up here and there through the eighties, but almost entirely in stories that were just referencing him as a throwback costumed villain and a bit of a joke, but notably he also was generally part of a crow of similar characters. He was just one more old unused character in a crowd. |
The leadup to 2005s Infinite Crisis included a collection of villains assembling a new Secret Society of Supervillains. Geoff Johns clearly saw that they needed their own computer specialist, and decided to use the old costumed character Calculator, reimagining him as a information broker. He was no longer wearing any sort of clever costume, he was just in a tie and suspenders... but he all of a sudden had a incredbly important role to play.
Following the crisis, this new version of the Calculator started to appear all over the place. Since he was an obvious villanous counterpart to Oracle, he would appear prolifically in Birds of Prey, where he was often depicted as being romantically obsessed with Barbara. Over in the pages of the Teen Titans, it was revealed that he was actually the father of the characters Marvin and Wendy, and quickly proved to be a wildly problematic parent. He basically just kept finding roles where he was cast as this wildly unplesant person. |
Our Calculator StoryThe main thing we want from our version of Calculator is to create a villanous information broker that can be part of the Legion of Doom, and can give Oracle her own pesudo-nemesis. He should be a self-serving, completely amoral thief with no loyalties or attachments, in that way that makes it so satisfying to watch him get what he has coming to him.
We mare him a part of the classic Birds of Prey story where Barbara is hunted by Blockbuster, making that all an effort by Noah to finally defeat her, and ultimately making her victory there a massive blow to him. We also did do a version of his original story, but rather than having him personally try to fight the Justice League to build his database on them, he hires his own thugs to do the work... and then later tries to do it again all at once with Deathstroke. |