Damage

1944 - 27-year-old Delores Winters uses biological samples from Al Pratt, Roy Lincoln & Iron Munro to create 100 superhuman embryos. They are recoved and placed into storage by S.H.A.D.E.

21 years ago - Grant Emerson is born when S.H.A.D.E. scientists are able to grow the single remaining embryo from the Ultra-Humanite's experiements.

14 years ago - 7-year-old Grant Emerson's mother Kate Emerson goes on the run, trying to keep him away from S.H.A.D.E.

10 years ago - 11-year-old Grant Emerson's mother Kate Emerson successfully fakes his death, putting him into foster care before she is killed by S.H.A.D.E. agents.

5 years ago - 16-year-old Grant Emerson is located by Kobra agents who attempt to kidnap him. He is able to access his powers and fight them, but in doing so he destroys his high school. He is arrested, but approached by Roy Harper and remanded into the custody of the Titans.

4 years ago - 17-year-old Grant Emerson is brought into space by Rip Hunter to help Kyle Rayner stop Hal Jordan from breaking time. He is able to absorb all the ambient energy from the Planetary Quantum Tesseract and destroy it before he is killed by Hal.

While there are definitely some elements of the mid-90s DC that will always be fun, there were also many new books and characters added to the line-up that were pretty clearly attempts to chase trends set by both Marvel and, perhaps even moreso at the time, Image comics. Many of these characters simply vanished without leaving much of a mark, but Damage seemed for at least a while to have withstood the test of time. He was a regularly featured character in a lot of different teams, even though his own personal story never seemed to really gain much traction.

We're going to be using him for a very specific purpose, based very specifically on his early involvement in one of DCs lesser-known major crossovers. See if you can guess which one we mean.

Damage's Comic History

Damage appeared for the first time Damage #1, the first issue of his own series, in 1994. He was originally a creation of associate editor Bill Kaplan, who invisioned him as a character named 'Nuke', although they had to change the name since Marvel already had a character with that name.

Grant Emerson was introduced as a teenager who was developing explosive powers that allowed him to absorb ambient energy and radiation and process it as vast physical strength, but also as dangerous and potentially explosive energy. When his powers manifest, he's quickly thrust into a world of intrigue as various forces vie to control him while he quickly finds himself on the run thanks to his destructive powers.

Notably, Bill Kaplan actually left DC before the series published, with editorial responsibilities taken over by Jim Spivey. It's hard to say exactly, but there's a sense when reading the series that it had lost the creative impetus that originally drove the character, making it read a little more like a generic combination of era-specific tropes than like a showcase for a innovative new original character like Grant was clearly intended to be.

Despite being cancelled within it's second year, the character of Damage actually went on to be incredibly prolific. Having already played a major roll in the 1994 DC crossover event Zero Hour, Grant would join the Teen Titans and serve across several series, including the final storyarcs of the New Teen Titans, and in the Devan Grayson Titans run, while also making appearances in the pages of the Dan Jurgens TItans and in Young Justice. After serving briefly on a short-lived version of the Freedom Fighters, Grant became a member of the new Justice Society of America when the series was relaunched in 2007. This team essentially defined his story from this point forward.

At this point, while it was understood that he was in fact the biological son of the Golden Age Atom Al Pratt, he was aslo the result of genetic experiments performed by Vandal Savage, blending genetics from a veritable who's who of Golden and Silver Age heroes. This gave him connections to characters from every corner of the DC catalog, but it was such a broad stroke it wound up not actually meaning that much. Damage was killed during the events of the Darkest Night crossover in 2010, and has largely been absent from DC ever sense.

Our Damage Story

First, we wanted to find a slightly more unique setup for this character. His origins being tied to a creepy mad scientist breeding experiment actually feels like it gives him a unique starting point, especially since we can use our timeline setup to make that original experiment be set way back during wartime, and have him be the result of S.H.A.D.E. experiments to gestate the enhanced embryos created by the Ultra-Humanite. Rather than feeling like a tacked on excuse of a backstory, we agreed that this make him feel like a much more interesting and volatile character.

Admittedly, We hadn't planed to include him, but we did find one very important role that he is absolutely perfect for. While we're not adapting any of the Crisis crossovers, let alone the generally poorly recieved Zero Hour, we are going to be doing an event in which Hal Jordan needs to be stopped from reproducing the time travel science of Krona, and certain elements of that story actually do draw loosely from that series. The ultimate solution involved Grant; having him absorb all the ambient energy of the event and exploding, resetting the universe. In our story, this can actually be how the heroes finally stop Hal.

Also, in Zero Hour, it's only after he sees Hal kill a time-displaced Barbara Gordon that Oliver finally understand that his friend can't be saved, and shoots him. We wanted that in our timeline, which means we needed a scrappy young hero Oliver could identify with, and whose death can lead him to have to finally take the life of his best friend.

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