Eclipso

3000 BCE - Eclipso, the manifestation of the Wrath of God, floods the Tigris & Euphrates rivers, drowning thousands. The local leaders write a pact with god to never again incur his wrath, Eclipso refuses to honor the pact, and is banished from Earth, forced to reside on the moon.

2600 BCE - Eclipso forges the Heart of Darkness, a cursed black diamond that allows him to possess a human host during a lunar eclipse. His influence helps found the Sacred City of Caral-Supe in modern day Peru.

2560 BCE - Eclipso's avatar in Caral-Supe is overthrown and killed by the people of the city. The Heart of Darkness is taken deep into the Amazon and hidden in a temple.

37 years ago - Bruce Gordon is born.

19 years ago - 18-year-old Bruce Gordon goes to college to study archeology.

15 years ago - 22-year-old Bruce Gordon earns his bachelor's degree & begins his graduate studies of the Archaic period of South America.

12 years ago - 25-year-old Bruce Gordon earns his masters degree and joins a South American expedition into the Amazon.

11 years ago - 26-year-old Bruce Gordon discovers the Heart of Darkness in it's temple in Peru. He is possessed by Eclipso, who kills the rest of the expedition and returns to the States where he starts a terror campaign to attract the Justice League so he can usurp their seats as modern gods. They defeat Eclipso, and Bruce Gordon is imprisoned.

6 years ago - 31-year-old Bruce Gordon is again possessed by Eclipso, who escapes and destroys the experimental Solar City, absorbing it's full energy. He is able to expand his influence, possessing both Superman and Wonder Woman. The Justice League battle him on his palace on the surface of the moon, where David Knight is killed. Bruce Gordon is finally freed of the influence of Eclipso, but the Heart of Darkness falls back to Earth.

4 years ago - Eclipso possesses a Columbian farmer that discovers the Heart of Darkness in his field, and is passed from host to host until he is able to possess a local cartel leader, consolidating power and beginning to corrupt the drugs shipped from his village to exert his influence on the world. He is tracked down and stopped by the Global Guardians. They take possession of the Heart of Darkness, which is sent to a stateside Star Labs fascility run by Ray Palmer.

2 years ago - Eclipso's influence on Jean Loring leads her to attempt to murder Sue Dibny before she becomes the his new host. She attempts to flee to space, but is confronted by the Justice League and the Shadowpact, who seperate her from the Heart of Darkness and cast it into the Paths Beyond.

1 year ago - Eclipso begins a campaign of conquest across Gemworld when the Heart of Darkness manifests there. He is able to take control of armies, striking down whole kingdoms & blinding Topaz. He is stopped by Amy Winston, whose newfound mastery of the Elemental magic of Gemworld allows her to strip his influence and finally reduce the Heart of Darkness to a harmless gemstone, ending the threat of Eclipso.

There is so much ground to cover with Eclipso. He's a wildly prolific character, and while we're treating him as Justice League villain, the truth is that every time he appears he always feels just a little odd, like he doesn't quite fit into other characters stories EXACTLY, like there's something else going on with him that just seems slightly off center.

The fact is, Eclispo is a villain that didn't debut in ANY hero's story. He happened all on his own, and might be unique in that way. DC has found so many ways to use this character, and we actually wound up playing with a lot more of them than we were planning to. This timeline is a complex one, and we would all really appreciate hearing what you think of it!

Eclipso's Comic History

Eclipso has a pretty weird origin. He debuted in the anthology series House of Secrets #61 in 1963, a creation of Bob Haney, the man responsible for characters like Metamorpho and the Doom Patrol. The title card for that original story read; "the amazing man that is both hero and villain.. Eclipso, the genius who fought himself" The idea of the story clearly being that we were meant to enjoy watching Bruce Gordon try to outthink his villainous other half.

In the first issue we meet Gordon, a solar scientist about to unveil his crowning achievement, Solar City. His experiments with a mysterious Black Diamond lead to him being overtaken by a malevolent alter ego during a solar eclipse. Eclipso quickly dons a costume and sabotages Solar City causing some pretty extreme destruction before setting traps to catch Gordon when he takes over, and hiding the Black Diamond so that Gordon can't do anything to stop him in the future.

As their appearances in House of Secrets went on both sides go to some pretty wild lengths to outsmart the other. If you're an anime fan at all it might actually remind you of the constant one-upmanship of Light & L over in Death Note. They would try to strand each other at the bottom of the ocean, or outside a space shuttle, sometimes posing as each other to trick the people around them. It was a pretty innovative concept that ran for a full 19 issues, often getting the cover.

Even after their run in the anthology series ended, Eclipso continued to appear in other series like Brave and the Bold, Metal Men, Adventure Comics, Green Lantern, or even the Justice League of America. Eclipso was clearly a visually interesting character and had the distinction of being one of the few villains to actually have come from his own story, so he was free to adapt to a lot of different characters. this continued right past the Crisis of Infinite Earths, as he continued to appear in the Outsiders, Phantom Stranger, Starman... he was quickly becoming one of DC's most versatile and prolific antagonists.

This all came to a HUGE peak in 1992, when Keith Giffen plotted a massive crossover that started in it's own standalone book, Eclipso: the Darkness Within, and then continued in no less that twenty different series annuals. This story revolved around Eclipso discovering that he can use the many shards of the Heart of Darkness to take over different superheroes as hosts, leading to a huge crossover battle on the surface of the moon. He is ultimately defeated here thanks to the sacrifice of the David Knight Starman, but even then he wasn't fully defeated. This crossover was followed up by Eclipso actually getting his own ongoing series, the very first actualy tried and true villain to do so in DC. The book leaned HARD into that esthetic, giving you some real 90s shock value, but also quite a few just downright fantastic comics. This is an severely underrated series.

The late 90s Spectre series would further elaborate on who the original Eclipso entity is, drawing biblical distinctions between the two entities, establishing that Eclipso was in fact the original manifestation of the wrath of god before the Spectre.

Eclipso eventually returned in the pages of Geoff John's JSA, where we meet a whole new host; Alex Montez, the cousin of the female Wildcat that was killed during Eclipso's solo series. Alex uses an elaborate plan involving tribal containment tattoos and liquifying and injecting the black diamonds into himself to make sure he retains control of Eclipso, although eventually he lost control and was forced to kill himself to keep from freeing him.

Of course, perhaps the most infamous appearance of Eclipso is shortly after the series Identity Crisis, where Ray Palmer's ex-wife Jean Loring was revealed to be the murderer of Sue Dibny. In the pages of the Infinite Crisis tie-in Day of Vengance, we discover that Eclipso has taken her as his new host.

Eclipso continues to appear in the post-52 DC, but perhaps the most relevant appearance for us is in the pages of the launch series Sword of Sorcery, where it is suddenly established that Eclipso is a lost prince of Gemworld?

Our Eclipso Story

Eclipso is such a widely prolific character, with appearances everywhere that subtly shift the nature of his story, that we really need to start out by just defining exactly who this character is and how he's going to work for us. The understanding that he is the original manifestation of the Wrath of God has worked really well for the character. We're not sure if it has ever been canon to tie that change to the biblical flood it immediately made sense in the context of our story.

We wanted to establish that while Eclipso himself is banished to the moon, his creation of the Heart of Darkness allows him to take hosts that walk the Earth, and wanted to establish this in ancient South America so the stone could later be found there, and decided to link this to one of the oldest known civilizations in South America, the Sacred City of Caral-Supe. His host could have played a role in the construction of the city, but could also have been so cruel that the people eventually kill the host and are able to take the gem deep into the Amazon, where it would rest dormant until one day being found by Bruce Gordon.

We're making some specific changes to Gordon, making him an archeologist instead of a 'solar scientist', although we are making reference to Solar City. While the comic had an ongoing game of cat and mouse between Gordon and his alter ego, we're focusing on just a few specific stories. We're going to make a looser, simpler versions of the huge Darkness Within story, just having the destruction of Solar City empower Eclipso enough that he can take multiple hosts, and of course he goes straight for Superman and Wonder Woman, leading to the story where the League battles him on the moon, saved only by the sacrifice of Starnan.

From there we're actually going to refence a few of our favorite takes on the character. The ridiculously over-the-top violence of his solo series began as he took over a drug cartel, and we're referencing that story in our timeline, bringing out the Global Guardians to stop him. We're also going to use the story of Jean Loring being effected by Eclipso to actually explain her behavior in the attack on Sue Dibny. There's a way for these events to unfold that just works better for all these characters, and we have the privledge of being able to reassemble them all so they work better.

Finally... we actually decided to use Eclipso's excursion into Gemworld as a way to trigger Amy's evolution into the far more powerful Elemental Sorceress of Gemworld that she became in her later series, allowing her role in the world to pass on to her young daughter. We are doing a LOT with Eclipso, but that's kind of the point of the character. He's such a strange, singular concept of a villain, but if you use him right every story just feels better for having him.

Related Characters