Clock King
49 years ago - William Tockman is born in Star City, the son of a stick-up man who was regularly in and out of jail.
35 years ago - 14-year-old Tockman starts to secretly sell the elaborate heist plans online under the dark web handle the Clock King.
32 years ago - 17-year-old Tockman studies accounting at Star City Central College.
28 years ago - 21-year-old Tockman graduates & begins working for the Star City Public Utilities office. He uses his connections to design even higher quality heist plans that require far more precision.
27 years ago - 22-year-old Tockman, seeing the unification of organized crime in Star City under Chien Na Wei, begins building plans for the future
26 years ago - 23-year-old Tockman passes the Uniform Exam to become a CPA.
24 years ago - 25-year-old Tockman creates a new costumed identity as the Clock King to execute his own heists, building a presence among the organized crime of Star City. He uses the alias Temple Fugate, and takes on Danny Brickwell as an enforcer.
20 years ago - 29-year-old Tockman incorporates Tockman Inc, his accounting firm. He quickly becomes an indispensable part of almost all legitimate and illegitimate business in Star City. He provides financial backing for Danny Brickwell to start building his own criminal organizations, allowing him to remain completely clean.
18 years ago - 31-year-old Tockman uses the activity of the new vigilante Green Arrow to his advantage, negotiating a new drug market with Chien Na Wei as her other contacts are dismantled. They agree to use Danny Brickwell's organization for distribution.
15 years ago - 34-year-old Tockman supports Danny Brickwell as he builds alliances in the aftermath of the downfall of Chien Na Wei, anticipating the inevitable war for power.
14 years ago - 35-year-old Tockman hires Malcolm Merlyn to kill Chien Na Wei during her federal extradition to prevent her from revealing what she knows about him. Danny Brickwell assumes power as the new crime boss of Star City
13 years ago - 36-year-old Tockman secretly funds Eric Needham's vigilantism to take out Danny Brickwell's competition for the drug trade in Star City.
10 years ago - 39-year-old Tockman secures Danny Brickwell's organization when he is captured by Green Arrow, Speedy & Black Canary. He stops secretly funding Eric Needham, but he continues his crusade against the drug trade of Star City.
9 years ago - 40-year-old Tockman takes control of Danny Brickwell's organization with Green Arrow away from Star City. He pays to alter Werner Vertiz's implant, granting him broad-spectrum disorientation abilities and retaining his services, makes Lester Buchinski his chief enforcer, and has Brick killed in prison. The new team the Outlaws attempt to stop him but he systematically picks them apart.
7 years ago - 42-year-old Tockman discovers the identity of Green Arrow as Oliver Queen begins using his wealth to provide free services across Star City.
4 years ago - 45-year-old Tockman is caught unprepared by the new Green Arrow as his organizations are systematically dismantled. He retaliates by destroying Oliver Queen's penthouse in Star City and Dinah Lance’s flower shop in Manhattan. He frees Werner Vertiz to attack Green Arrow.
2 years ago - 47-year-old Tockman attempts to undermine the mayoral election of Star City with staged violent protests, but he is stopped by Arsenal, Speedy, and Wildcard.
now - 49-year old Tockman is hospitalized by newcomer Drakon, who takes over the cities drug trade.
Clock King is one of those characters that is a hold over to a very different time in comics. He was never a major character, basically appearing in back-up stories in anthology books, back with the fruit pie ads. Still, he hung on long enough to make an impression, even if it was largely based on how completely ridiculous his costume was. Just like a lot of those old ideas he's been reimagined in some very innovative ways over the years, and within that there is a character we can use to fulfill a very cool role on the world of Green Arrow.
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Clock King's Comic HistoryClock King appeared for the first time in World's Finest Comics #111 in 1960, literally the last of seven stories. He was, simply, a crook who liked clocks and themed his crimes around them. That was it. He appeared two more times in the next twenty years, all in back-up stories of World's Finest. One appearance attempted to give him a backstory, but only just barely. The character might have been forgotten completely but for the mid-80's invention of the Injustice Gang. The mid 80's Justice League by J.M. Dematteis and Keith Giffen was notably written for laughs, and they created a group of forgotten and largely forgettable villains to form their own butt-of-the-joke team of bad guys. As goofy as this sounds, the book and the idea were popular, and it increased visibility on these old characters enough that many of them have, in the years since, been rewritten or redesigned and actually become cool, useful characters.
In the case of Clock King, this happened in an episode of Batman The Animated Series. The show had already established just how staggeringly good it was at redesigning old characters in new and compelling ways, and with Clock King they were just showing off. The new design and motivations of the character were extremely well received and all at once the whole concept was updated. While the classic ridiculous character still occasionally makes an appearance, the comics just as often reference the animated series version. |
Our Clock King StoryWhile at first glance, the Clock King seems like a very odd, cart-before-the-horse character to try to include in our timeline, the revisions made to the character have turned him into someone that will fill a very useful role in our new timeline. The adapted take on Tockman changes him from an absolute joke of a costumed criminal into a very solid crime boss archetype.
Thanks to the work of Mike Grell, Green Arrow is meant to be a liberal anti-establishment hero, deliberately protecting the downtrodden people of Star City from the powerful elite. The main thing missing from this, from an entirely comic book perspective, is a character personifying those powerful elite. Clock King's whole deal is that he understands and exploits complex systems, making him a perfect reflection of the sort of powerful wealthy people Green Arrow is meant to be fighting. This is exactly the character that should be running organized crime in Star City. He fits that role so well it seems a shame that he wasn't there from the very beginning. We really drive this home by having Tockman be responsible for permanently shutting down the Outlaws, a whole team of promising teen heroes. |
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Clock King's CostumeThe redesign of Clock King for the Batman Animated Series is one of those benchmarks in creative thinking that really makes you love the whole medium of superheroes. He becomes almost the complete opposite of the classic clock-masked crazy Silver Age villain, and several versions of this character have appeared in comics making him seem at turns cold and calculating or manic and dangerous.
At the same time, however, the original Silver Age design is just SO much fun. It's something that could only happen in comics, and when treated with real creativity (like in this appearance from the series Chase), it actually looks like something you might actually see a supervillain wear, albeit a supervillain with a real eye for theatrics. That's actually where these ideas cross, actually, because in our timeline Tockman spends a while in his early career just executing heists, and during that time, in the years before he becomes a dangerous crime boss, it actually does track that he might create an elaborate supervillain identity for himself. So in that way, we can kind of get away with using BOTH designs! |
Clock King's FutureWe've set up Tockman's timeline so that he's largely operating behind the scenes, because we really like the idea of him always being one step ahead of Oliver. For him to be a character in the comic, Oliver needs to be aware of him, of course, but there's actually a lot of precedent in comics for crime boss characters that the hero can simply never bring in because they're too good at keeping their hands clean, and Clock King would obviously be perfect for that. This effectively turns him into Star Cities Lex Luthor. Instead of being a tech billionaire or genius scientist or something, he works entirely in finance, making him a perfect foil for Green Arrow.
The more we incorporate him into the timeline, the more prolific a villain he seems to become. We tied him into the ongoing development of organized crime in Star City practically from the beginning, extending his influence, always in the background, over practically everything, right up until the downfall of his protégé Brick, leading right to Oliver spending time away from Star City, opening it up for Tockman to control. This also sets him up beautifully when Connor takes over as Green Arrow. We want to show him really excelling in the role, and we get to do that by suddenly making him a real threat to Tockman's organization in a way Oliver never was. We used this as a catalyst for the attack on Black Canary's Flower shop, but this means we get to start setting up a real battle between Tockman and Connor. He'll need some more fantastical henchman to actually send after the hero, but this feels like a great place to start in the career of the new Green Arrow. |
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