Doctor Love
71 years ago - Benjamin Love is born with a genetic blood disorder.
55 years ago - 16-year-old Benjamin Love, obsessed with passing on healthy versions of his own genes, begins studying evolutionary genetics.
53 years ago - 18-year-old Benjamin Love begins college. Because of his unorthodox field of study, he enrolls in the University of the Republic in Uruguay.
48 years ago - 23-year-old Benjamin Love earns his bachelors and begins his doctoral research. All his published work is considered extremely controversial and is often rejected by the science community at large.
45 years ago - 26-year-old Benjamin Love earns his doctorate in evolutionary genetics. He is selected to head one of S.H.A.D.E.'s metagene labs.
42 years ago - 29-year-old Benjamin Love's lab holds an imprisoned Eel O'Brian. He tries to find ways to measure or replicate his biology, but Eel soon escapes.
41 years ago - 30-year-old Benjamin Love sends S.H.A.D.E. agents to collect a sample of Eel O'Brian's body. Eel recovers his sample before it can be used, but Love attempts to replicate Eel's powers on himself, rendering his flesh as a bloodless biological plastic. His blood disorder is gone and he no longer ages, but he is now sterile and his genetics are no longer compatible with human DNA.
40 years ago - 31-year-old Benjamin Love conducts a series of in utero experiments on several unwitting pregnant women's fetuses, which are shut down by Laurel Drake. Staging the children's deaths he brings them to his S.H.A.D.E. labs to raise as part of his experiment, including Bones.
22 years ago - 49-year-old Benjamin Love's labs use of homeless volunteers makes it the target of protesters. The Doom Patrol attempt to stop the protesters until former subject Kate Godwin reveals that the labs are keeping some subjects as prisoners. Doctor Love's S.H.A.D.E. labs are closed, and he departs for Uruguay, bringing his surviving subjects with him, including Bones.
19 years ago - 52-year-old Benjamin Love collects old experimental subjects and brings them to his South American Labs. They are found by the Doom Patrol when Kate Godwin tracks him down. They are confronted by Bones, but Cliff Steele convinces him to turn on his creator and try to make the world better. Doctor Love is extradited to the US.
10 years ago - 61-year-old Benjamin Love's crimes are expunged with help from the new H.I.V.E. by a loophole when Uruguay fails to pass legal protection for Metahumans. He is released and begins working in their labs.
6 years ago - 65-year-old Benjamin Love joins the lab staff of Thomas Oscar Morrow's Oolong Island labs.
4 years ago - 67-year-old Benjamin Love attempts to usurp Oolong Island from Thomas Oscar Morrow using his mass-cloned mutates, but is defeated by Will Magnus and his Metal Men. He is subjected to his own mutogenic weapon, rendering him inert.
Doctor Love's StoryDoctor Love originally appeared in flashback in Infinity Inc #18 from 1985. The book was introducing Helix, a new group of characters meant to operate as pseudo antagonists for the titular team. They were an interesting bunch; clearly being conceived as visual components first, particularly with the character Bones seemingly custom-built for the books young new artist Todd McFarlane. They weren't given individual backstories, rather they were all the results of in utero experiments by an enigmatic scientist, Doctor Love. Supposedly, they came together specifically because of Love's death, but later when Bones is becoming a more central character and joining the main team we discover that Love is still alive and manipulating him from the background.
Really, the main utility of Doctor Love is as an explanation of Bones, who would go on to become the DEO's director. That wasn't enough of a reason to give him his own timeline, but we kept finding small uses for him as we built out other characters. He's a great new origin source for Kate Godwin. The visuals we used for his page seemed to naturally lend him to a role as a Plastic Man villain. His status as a classic mad scientist set him up to interact with both S.H.A.D.E. and H.I.V.E. We also used him to create the circumstances on Oolong Island that lead to Will Magnus taking ownership of the Island from T.O. Morrow. For a character that started as an incredibly minor background element of a cool but minor character, we are really pleased with just how much utility we found here! |
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