Floronic Man
53 years ago - Jason Woodrue is born.
35 years ago - 18-year-old Jason Woodrue goes to college to study botany.
32 years ago - 21-year-old Jason Woodrue has Phillip Sylvian as a professor, learning from his work on Adaptive Plant Morpology.
31 years ago - 22-year-old Jason Woodrue begins grad school.
29 years ago - 24-year-old Jason Woodrue begins his doctoral work in Adaptive Plant Morpology.
27 years ago - 26-year-old Jason Woodrue has Alex Holland & Linda Olsen Ridge as students. They meet in his class.
26 years ago - 27-year-old Jason Woodrue is a founding member of H.I.V.E.
20 years ago - 33-year-old Jason Woodrue has Pamela Isley as a student. She volunteers as a subject in some of his experiments, altering her biochemistry.
17 years ago - 36-year-old Jason Woodrue leaves H.I.V.E. as its leadership changes.
13 years ago - 40-year-old Jason Woodrue acquires some of the plants affected by Blackbriar Thorn, revolutionizing his research.
12 years ago - 41-year-old Jason Woodrue is hired by Avery Sunderland to conduct an autopsy on the remains of Alec Holland, only to discover that the Swamp Thing is not in fact Alec Holland, but instead plant matter affected by Holland's formula that has absorbed his memories. Seeing a path to immortality, Woodrue sets up Sunderland to be killed by Swamp Thing when he awakens and learns the truth, and adapts his own biology to become Floronic Man.
8 years ago - 45-year-old Jason Woodrue attempts to usurp Swamp Thing's role as the defender of the Parliament of Trees. He is stopped by Swamp Thing and Pamela Isley.
4 years ago - 49-year-old Jason Woodrue attempts to unify the plant population of the planet and eradicate all non-plant life. He is stopped by the Justice League & Swamp Thing.
1 year ago - 52-year-old Jason Woodrue is reconstituted by Gorilla Grodd and brought into the Legion of Doom.
Floronic Man's role in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is a huge deal. It's one of the best comics DC has ever published, and by virtue of his appearance there, Jason Woodrue is an incredibly important character in DC's mythology. However, outside of that story, he's largely been an afterthought among DC's catalog of characters. We're obviously largely basing our take on the character on his Swamp Thing appearances, but that doesn't mean we won't have fun going over his history.
Jason Woodrue's Comic HistoryJason Woodrue first showed up in The Atom #1 in 1966. The Atom himself had actually been around for quite some time at this point; like many of the new Silver Age heroes, he'd actually debuted in Showcase comics and then become a regular part of the Justice League before ever getting his own series. His very first self-titled solo issue saw him going up against what at least appeared to be a classic mad scientist character in Jason Woodrue, who was apparently using his control over plants to rob banks. Even back then, however, Woodrue was pretty weird. Among the plants he controlled were tiny little forest sprites. We soon learn that he's actually imprisoned an extradimensional faerie queen, and is himself a refugee of yet another extra-dimension that had been banished for his wicked deeds. Twice.
I haven't found a single reference to this original origin as a refugee from an alternate dimension anywhere else; From here forward, he's always just been a human mad scientist. |
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The next time we see Jason Woodrue is more than a decade later, in Flash # 245, in a backup story starring Green Lantern. Here, Jason Woodrue takes an 'elixir' to give himself supreme mastery over plants. It also transforms him so his body is now MADE of plants, making him Floronic Man. This becomes his moniker for the rest of his appearances.
For the next decade or so, Floronic Man would crop up occasionally as a baddie in pretty much anyone's book, just one more potential villain in a DC writer's Grab bag. His profile changed quite a bit, however, in 1984, when Alan Moore used Jason Woodrue as the scientist performing the autopsy on Swamp Thing in the debut story arc on his legendary run on the character. Woodrue would go on to become a recurring enemy in the series. This wasn't the end of strange appearances for this character. He was inexplicably a member of the short-lived team the New Guardians in the series of the same name, which is now most famous for including DC's first attempt at a gay character with the wildly offensive stereotype character Extrano, as well as perhaps the most meme-ed character in the entire DC canon; Snowflame. I have no idea what Jason was doing there. We also learned in flashback that Jason Woodrue was in some way responsible for the experiments that altered Poison Ivy to make her part plant... which is why we got this gem of a live-action performance. |
Our Floronic Man StoryWhile both Jason Woodrue and the Floronic man have a good number of appearances under their belt, make no mistake here, the most important role for this character is the one he played in the pages of Swamp Thing. The reveal that Alec Holland was in fact already dead, and that Swamp Thing was just vegetation that had his memories... it's a seminal moment in comic history, and Jason Woodrue is central to that story. We're actually doubling down on that moment in several ways, by suggesting that before this discovery, Woodrue actually hadn't yet made the changes to his own body yet to make him a plant hybrid. We're giving him a very full career up until that point, making him an early member of H.I.V.E. like all the other mad scientists of that era, and also making him the teacher of pretty much every character to one day involve themselves in the science of turning people into plants, from Alec Holland himself to Phillip Sylvain, the man responsible for Black Orchid. We're also including his relationship with Pamela Isley, although we're making her a willing volunteer in his experiments.
Once he makes the change and becomes Floronic Man, it's really just a matter of finding his best stories and putting them in play. We eventually step him up to challenge the entire Justice League, but for our purposes, he's always going to be an enemy of our favorite Swamp Monster. |
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