Edwin Alva
47 years ago - Edwin Alva is born in Dakota City.
32 years ago - 15-year-old Alva attends MIT.
30 years ago - 17-year-old Alva earns his bachelors degree in Applied Science.
25 years ago - 22-year-old Alva sells several tech startup companies, centralizing his work in one parent company.
22 years ago - 25-year-old Alva first incorporates Alva Technologies, becoming a global leader in developing tech.
19 years ago - 28-year-old Alva pays off Denise Young when she reveals that she is pregnant with his child Ed Young.
11 years ago - 36-year-old Alva becomes the legal guardian of his son Ed Young when his mother Denise dies unexpectedly, sending him to boarding school.
10 years ago - 37-year-old Alva moves all Alva Technologies research into his own in-house facilities in Dakota City when an experimental mutagenic compound is triggered during a break in by Joseph Martin at Star Labs. They being secretly testing the potential of the compound as a weapon.
8 years ago - 39-year-old Alva's Alva Technologies acquires a startup created by Karen Starr.
5 years ago - 42-year-old Edwin Alva's son Ed Alva Jr returens to Dakota City to live with him and attend public high school when he is kicked out of boarding school.
4 years ago - 43-year-old Alva's experimental gene-bomb is secretly detonated on a gathering of Dakota City street gangs as an illegal controlled experiment, resulting in the creation of several augmented humans locally called 'bang babies'. Alva Technologies begins secretly detaining & experimenting on them, regularly coming into conflict with new local hero Static.
3 years ago - 44-year-old Alva's son Ed Alva Jr steals several experimental single-use doses of Alva Technologies mutagenic compound, allowing him to change his shape and adapt powers at will, fighting Static before Alva Technologies captures him.
2 years ago - 45-year-old Alva & Alva Technologies unveil Ed Alva Jr as Omnifarious, their new branded superhero, but he soon loses control and goes on a rampage across Dakota City before he is stopped by Static. Alva Technologies secret detainment facilities are exposed by Frieda Goren's blog, and Edwin Alva flees the country to his chemical refining plants in Algeria, where Static & Anansi the Spider stop him from releasing his new Gene Bombs. He is extradited and imprisoned awaiting trial.
Edwin Alva's Comic HistoryIn the original Milestone comics, Edwin Alva was a mentor/antagonist to the very first Dakotaverse character, Hardware, in his debut comic from 1993. Alva was a wealthy tech industrialist that had taken young genius Curtis Metcalf under his wing, but would eventually prove to be exploiting him. Alva was in fact the head of a complex criminal empire, creating an elaborate relationship between the books hero and antagonist that persisted across it's publication.
Later, when Milestone was no longer publishing comics but creating it's incredibly popular Static Shock animated series, Alva was repurposed as the central villain, the man responsible for the accident that created Static and the other 'bang babies' of Dakota City. Just like in the original comic, Alva would occasionally show that he was at least somewhat redeemable, setting aside grievances under certain circumstances, but still serving as the main source of conflict across the series. |
Our Edwin Alva StoryIn building up the world around Static, we have to make a pretty obvious choice about just how much we want to follow the comics, vs following the animated series. In a lot of ways, this isn't a choice at all; over the years the comics have slowly morphed to look way more like the cartoon, bringing in most of their original characters and even the overall plot structure. From that perspective, Using Alva as Static's main villain is almost a no-brainer.
We did at least have a little bit of a pause, though, because by using Alva this way, we're more or less making a decision to not use Hardware. We all love the original Milestone Comics, and Hardware in particular absolutely rules. It's a great comic parable, but it's also really tight and self-contained, and I think it stands on it's own enough that it doesn't really need to be adapted. So we went ahead and folded Alva into the tapestry of our DC Timeline, so that he could be the corrupt industrialist behind the Bang Babies of Dakota City. |