Immortal Man in Darkness
29 years ago - Chen Nuo is born in Nanchang.
14 years ago - The Qinghai Incident. The Chinese Government begins reverse engineering a Durlan ship.
10 years ago - 19-year-old Chen Nuo enlists in the People's Liberation Army, enrolling in flight school.
8 years ago - Immortal Man in Darkness, pilot of the Dragonwing, is one of the founding Super-Functionaries of the newly revealed Great Ten.
7 years ago - 22-year-old Chen achieves the most elite flight status in China's Air Force.
5 years ago - 24-year-old Chen becomes a candidate to be the next Immortal Man in Darkness.
3 years ago - 26-year-old Chen becomes the newest Immortal Man in Darkness, joining the Great Ten.
The Great Ten represent one of my all-time favorite Grant Morrison creations. They did more than just build a new team of original Superheroes (Or Super-Functionaries, in this case), but they built a whole history around them, giving each character a truly unique story and sense of place, and structured it all around the history and politics and culture of a very real-world take on China and all it's complexity. It's an incredible piece of worldbuilding, and while it's tragic that they don't have that many appearances, it's also very understandable, because they are such an intricately woven tapestry, I can see why it would be difficult for other writers to pick them up.
Chen Nuo's StoryImmortal Man in Darkness represents some real outside-the-box thinking about what constitutes a Superhero. China absolutely has a storied connection to the concept of manmade flying objects and to manned flight, and much of it's modern military might is associated with it's air force, but for Morrison to have taken that idea and conceptualized a superhero whose abilities stem from their status as the pilot of a superpowered plane is really genius.
We learn quite a bit about the Dragonwing during the course of their appearances; it's alive... its pulse evident to the touch. It can shapeshift, allowing Its pilot to easily enter and exit the plane mid-flight. It can extrude over fifty different weapons packages. The pilot sits in a blister of amniotic fluid, literally merged with the plane. It has a ten-strong flock of small sister-ships all controlled by the same pilot. Oh, and flying her is lethal. This is perhaps the big reveal about Immortal Man in Darkness; that he is actually a new person every few years, all chosen from the best pilots China has to offer, all eager to embrace death for the chance to fly the most advanced plane in existence. The current Immortal Man in Darkness, Chen Nuo, is the man whose timeline we follow, and we've chosen to make his time a little longer, implying that perhaps there is something special about this one... |
|
Allies & Teams
