Happy Terrill
1914 - Langford Terrill is born in Indiana.
1931 - 17-year-old Langford moves to Muncie, Indiana. He begins writing investigative stories for the Muncie Star.
1935 - 21-year-old Langford's column “Happy Terrill” becomes nationally syndicated. He begins to use the name Happy.
1938 - 24-year-old Happy Terrill accompanies Professor Dayzl in a weather balloon experiment into the upper atmosphere, testing his experimental new interspace communication device. As he climbs outside the gondola during an emergency to fix the balloon, the device triggers the dormant Martian interspatial communication arrays stationed through the solar system, triggering a pulse of pure alien energy from the sun to strike Langford. He falls from the balloon but discovers his new ability to control and manifest light energy, flying to safety. He embraces his new powers, becoming the Ray.
1945 - 31-year-old Happy has a final mission with the Freedom Fighters to destroy Vandal Savage's secret temporal laboratory. He successfully destroys their anti air cover and holds off their air fleet, but the temporal explosion of the lab hyper-accelerates his powers, evolving him into mass-bearing light. Unable to stop, he launches himself vertically, breaking planetary orbit.
25 years ago - Happy's highly elliptical orbit brings him back to Earth. He impacts in Oklahoma, his energy quickly dispersing across an unknown area. Grace Roberts, who was injured at the point of impact, discovers that she is pregnant. She gives birth to her son, Ray Roberts. Happy's consciousness begins slowly coalescing his energy.
8 years ago - Happy successfully manifests his body, his powers vastly expanded. He finds his son Ray Roberts, introducing him to his own powers, and invites him to join him in leading mankind to its own evolution. Ray resists, insisting that Happy’s intentions strip humanity of choice. Happy attempts to force Ray to see his way, but his son is able to stop him. Seeing that he has transcended his own humanity, Happy releases his corporeal form and becomes pure light, returning to the cosmos. Ray takes his last name to honor his father, taking up his mantle.
When adapting the original Freedom Fighters to our timeline, we're continually falling into the same trap; these characters are almost all relevant primarily because of the role they play in DC history, and as the founders of several different heroic legacies... but their individual comic stories are often not really given enough focus. Their Quality Comics adventures are sometimes a little quaint, but they are almost universally the best stories of the anthology books in which they appear... which is why they were selected out of the Quality catalog to BE part of the Freedom Fighters.
We imagine the fact that the Ray had such a unapologetically of-its-era design has made him always feel like an artifact, but thanks to both the role the Freedom Fighters were given in the world and the particularly timely solo series of his son, Happy Terrill has found a particular niche for himself in the tapestry of DC characters. We've made some fairly sizeable changes to his actual narrative, but I think we're actually getting even CLOSER to that niche.
We imagine the fact that the Ray had such a unapologetically of-its-era design has made him always feel like an artifact, but thanks to both the role the Freedom Fighters were given in the world and the particularly timely solo series of his son, Happy Terrill has found a particular niche for himself in the tapestry of DC characters. We've made some fairly sizeable changes to his actual narrative, but I think we're actually getting even CLOSER to that niche.
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Happy's Comic HistoryThe Ray debuted in Smash Comics #14 in 1940 by Quality Comics, one of the last stories in the issue. The character's superhero antics are fairly run-of-the-mill, but his origin story was pretty innovative (if vaguely familiar), with the hero climbing outside an experimental balloon into the stratosphere, Happy Terrill is exposed to a cosmic storm, infusing him with vaguely-defined cosmic powers. In subsequent issues Ray was quickly granted the privilege of pants, but his stories also developed a rather striking visual style, often using angular overlays of different-colored light to create some notably dynamic panels.
Ray starred in his own stories in Smash Comics, appearing in most issues and occasionally on the cover until 1943. The catalog of Quality Comics characters was purchased by DC in the mid-50s to acquire Plastic Man and the Blackhawks, and eventually they made a new team of former Quality characters that appeared in Justice League of America #107 in 1973, creating the Freedom Fighters, a group of heroes who fought Nazis in the Parallel world of Earth X. |
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The Freedom Fighters starred in their own series through the seventies, leaving behind Earth X and moving to Earth 1 (the main DC timeline). Later in the 80s they were swept up in the ongoing work of Roy Thomas in the pages of All-Star Squadron as he redefined and recontextualized a lot of DC's Golden Age stories. He introduced the idea that the Freedom Fighters were not in fact ORIGINALLY from Earth X, but in fact were Earth 2 heroes who had left for Earth X willingly to fight the Nazis there... but if that's the case why did they move to Earth 1 afterward? You can kind of see why they felt like they needed to clean all of this up.
Happy's next big role was actually in one of the first really high-profile attempts to create a new legacy version of a classic Golden Age hero. Ray Terrill, Happy's son, was the star of an extremely high-profile new series in 1993 by Jack Harras and future Marvel Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada. The new Ray's story is about his mysterious origin and destiny, and Happy shows up as a mysterious and untrustworthy mentor. It's loaded with great design and '90s angst in the best way, and Happy looks as good as he ever has, but it does redefine a lot of his narrative to make him feel less heroic, and perhaps even a little menacing. The new Ray has largely taken over as the primary carrier of the legacy, so when Happy appears now it's almost always in reference to his role as the father of the current hero. |
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Our Happy Terrill StoryThis was a tricky timeline to get right! As a character who has a modern legacy character, the initial plan was to make him part of the All-Star Squadron. The problem was that the canon explanation for his legacy gets pretty conspiracy-theory heavy thanks to the 90s series, making Happy a kind of sinister character. It just didn't work in a way we liked, so we needed to open the hood and rethink the hand-off of the Legacy of the Ray. What we found is that the original Golden Age character is way more enigmatically, cosmically powerful than we realized, carrying himself like the Spectre of Doctor Manhattan.
Leaning into that, we could choose to leave the canon story of lies and espionage behind, and instead make it be about Happy's powers evolving him into something beyond humanity, robbing him of his perspective as a hero, allowing Ray to have to try to stop his far more powerful and experienced father. It's a conflict, but it can be a conflict borne of a desire not to see the father he just met turn into something he knows he'd never want to be. We also had a really good time going back to Happy's origin and just giving it some more structure. Quality Comics never really seemed to worry about WHY their characters were superheroes (Miss America got her powers when the Statue of Liberty talked to her), and there just seemed to be room for a better explanation than 'strange space laser makes him a space-god". This may in fact actually be controversial, but we want the technology Professor Dayzl is testing to unknowingly interface with some dormant Martian technology left over from when the Martians were the dominant species in the Solar System, summoning alien energy from the Sun. This heightened level of complexity just makes the whole thing feel more impossible to recreate... and also introduces some fun ideas we might be able to use further down the line! |
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