Doctor Destiny
51 years ago - John Dee is born the son of Ethel Dee, a smuggler and con artist.
43 years ago - 8-year-old John Dee's mother comes into possession of a ruby pendant that she wears for luck.
38 years ago - 13-year-old John Dee steals his mother's pendant for the first time, his obsession deepening.
34 years ago - 17-year-old John Dee goes to college.
30 years ago - 21-year-old John Dee graduates with a double major in chemistry and philosophy.
25 years ago - 26-year-old John Dee earns a doctorate in Hermetic Philosophy.
23 years ago - 28-year-old John Dee gets his mother's Ruby when she dies, and begins performing experiments on it.
19 years ago - 32-year-old John Dee manages to unlock the remains of Garrett Sanford's Dream Dome via his experiments with his mother's ruby. With the technology there, he is able to manipulate the ruby, changing it's resonance and forcing flaws into it, using it to power his dream manipulation technology.
15 years ago - 36-year-old John Dee uses his invention, the Materioptikon, to convert dreams to matter. He confronts the Justice League, twisting them against their own identities, but Arthur Curry defeats him by not having an alter ego.
12 years ago - 39-year-old John Dee is able to manifest the powers of the Materioptikon from his Arkham cell, attacking the Justice League in their dreams. He is defeated when they are able to follow him back into the Dream Dome, severing him from his technology and taking the ruby that powers it. He is returned to Arkham no longer able to dream, his body wasting away.
9 years ago - 42-year-old John Dee finds that he is able to draw on the power of his ruby and escapes Arkham, taking it from it's secure storage in Mayhew, New York, finding it far more powerful than ever before. He uses the ruby to torture several bystanders, bringing their darkest nightmares to the surface before he is stopped by the newly-freed Morpheus of the Endless. His ruby is destroyed, he is returned to Arkham.
1 year ago - 50-year-old John Dee is freed from Arkham by Gorilla Grodd to join the Legion of Doom. He sets to work milking his own dreams for residual energy to fuel a smaller, more contained Materioptikon.
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Doctor Destiny's Comic HistoryDoctor Destiny is one of the classic mad scientist characters from the original Justice League of America comics, debuting all the way back in 1961s issue #5. His original issue involved him posing as Green Lantern, and using 'gravity control disks' and a 'will-deadening beam'. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill Silver Age issue, but if you didn't know that this random mad scientist would one day be a walking horror movie, you'd never have guessed it.
Doctor Destiny would appear several more times over the next few decades as a fairly run-of-the-mill mad scientist, but over time his specific claim to fame was 'the Materioptikon', an invention that let him manifest people's dreams as reality This let him be the catalyst for some of those weird Silver Age comic covers. He was still just a weird mad scientist up until 1978, in a period where lots of classic comic characters were getting totally new looks to make them stand out. We actually get one panel that very thoroughly explains his whole story up until that point and also explains that since his last appearance he's lost his ability to dream, which has caused his new gaunt skull-like appearance. (This is four years before the first appearance of Skeletor, by the way.) |
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Those few Justice League issues account for pretty much all of Doctor Destiny's appearances Pre-Crisis. The mid-eighties were full of new designs and re-structured stories as DC rebuilt itself into a single continuity. Lots of those classic Justice League baddies were grabbed up by one story or another and reimagined for the new timeline. Doctor Destiny just happened to be picked up in one of the best comic series ever.
Sandman's first couple arcs included some quick dips into the regular DC continuity, whether to perform small retcons on existing stories or just to have Morpheus show up in the middle of the night in the Justice League embassy. One reference was the inclusion of Doctor Destiny. We learn his real name, John Dee. We learn that the ruby he used as his Materioptikon was actually one of the tools of Dream himself, stolen from him when he was imprisoned at the start of the story, and altered by Dee so it only responds to him. We also see the idea presented in the earlier Justice League series, that his inability to dream is driving him mad drawn to a horrifying extent. Before he confronts Morpheus, we're treated to Sandman #6, easily one of the most terrifying horror comics I've ever read, as he uses his dream powers to torture a diner full of innocent bystanders. He is defeated by Morpheus and returned to Arkham, but the character is forever going to be associated with this story. It was Dan Jurgens who returned Doctor Destiny to regular comic book continuity during his very underrated run on Justice League, finding a way to take this horror character and make him work in a world of superheroes. |
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Our Doctor Destiny StoryThis was actually a really tricky timeline to get right. We absolutely wanted to include Destiny's role in the Sandman, but also make him a recurring Justice League villain. There were some competing thematic ideas at play if we wanted to get the character to function in both stories.
For the most part we followed his Sandman origins. Because of the nature of our timeline we can't specifically say that his mother collected the ruby from Roderick Burgess first or even second hand, so instead we make her a smuggler and con artist to suggest that she acquired the ruby through whatever black markets she runs. Perhaps more importantly, we wanted to find ways to create space in this story for him to be a slightly more comic book-ish villain before his turn in the Diner, so we first established that he is a Hermetic Philosopher, as Sandman suggested, and then make the Materioptikon a separate invention from the ruby itself, which is now the power source for his device... we also added a connection to the Garrett Sanford Sandman, saying that Destiny has used his abandoned technology to make his device. The ruby grows in power when Morpheus is freed, allowing the events of Sandman to play out. We then took a cue from Dan Jurgens to bring him back into the world of superheroes. He has to function entirely from the residual energy of the now-destroyed crystal, but even in this form, he's a great inclusion in the Legion of Doom. |