Josiah Power
45 years ago - Josiah Power is born in Chicago.
27 years ago - 18-year-old Josiah attends the University of Chicago, studying Pre-Law
23 years ago - 22-year-old Josiah begins Howard University School of Law
20 years ago - 25-year-old Josiah graduates & passes the bar exam. He begins working for a law firm specializing in metahuman law.
12 years ago - 33-year-old Josiah is one of the few victims of the Pax Parasites to survive, his latent metagene activated and mutated. He takes on the heroic identity Joe Public, but his legal experience quickly proves more valuable than his powers. He creates his own firm, the Power Company.
9 years ago - 36-year-old Josiah first works with Cole Cash, another survivor of the Pax Parasites, using him as a privately funded international operative.
4 years ago - 41-year-old Josiah moves to Power Company to San Francisco, moving to Marin County with his partner Rupert.
1 year ago - 44-year-old Josiah is contacted by Koriand'r, Atlee & Buddy Baker to help find investment capital for her Haven Project, a refuge and school for displaced non-humans. He becomes their main donor, his private operative Cole Cash often assisting them.
Josiah Power is a really interesting little slice of DC history. He continues to exist as part of their regular continuity, and he's a particularly well imagined and executed character, but he comes from such a very particular story innovation that he's only very recently started to appear outside of it. Using the character in our timeline was always going to mean either reproducing that exact same innovation, or else finding a role that managed to emulate that utility. We hope you like our take on the character, but even more we hope you enjoy the character enough to check out his original comic appearances, because they are very cool.
Josiah Power's Comic HistoryJosiah Power debuted along with the rest of the Power Company, in a promotional preview in JLA #61 in 2002 in advance of their standalone ongoing series. Each of the seven main characters got their own one-shot in advance of the ongoing Power Company series, which lasted for 18 issues.
What makes Power Company unique is not just it's gimmick as a superhero team that operates like a law firm, but that it was an extremely long-gestating idea in the mind of fan favorite writer Kurt Busiek. He had the original idea back in 1983, and had designed it without a specific comic company in mind, so the characters all feel like they could kind of be plunked into ANY comic book universe and thrive, even if Busiek did take advantage of the particulars of the DC universe when he finally penned the actual comic. This is probably most obvious with the inclusion of the Kirk DePaul Manhunter, but Josiah Power also has some direct ties to DC Lore. A huge, incredibly powerful metahuman who prefers to let his team do the superheroics while he focuses on the behind-the-scenes details, Josiah was actually retroactively empowered by the gene bomb from the Invasion! crossover storyline a full 12 years earlier. We've continued to see Josiah crop up occasionally, most commonly just in references to the idea that the Power Company still operates in the background, but he's also started to appear in newer comics suggesting that several modern heroes of color could assemble into an entirely new Power Company. |
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Our Josiah Power StoryWhile we're actually using several members of the Power Company comic in other places in our timeline, we actually really like the idea of Josiah actually just continuing to work as a lawyer. In the comics his career ended with the reveal that he's a metahuman, but in the world of DC that doesn't seem like it should be a dealbreaker. So in our timeline, Josiah continues to run the Power Company, but it is literally a firm specializing in cases associated with metahumans. We're also adjusting his origin slightly; we're not using the invasion storyline, but that is just one of several major events that were used to introduce groups of new powered individuals, and among those, one of the easiest to integrate into our timeline is the Bloodlines crossover with its deadly Pax Parasites, so we're using that as Josiah's origin. We're even making him briefly operate as one of the original Bloodlines characters, Joe Public, who actually sounds like a superhero built by a lawyer, and would actually look really cool as a young, beardless, flat-topped Josiah.
With those changes in place, we're going to have Josiah operate similarly to how he does in the comics, just on a smaller scale at first, retaining the services of Cole Cash as his own privately-funded operative so he can actively do some good in the world, until he is approached by Starfire to help her build her Haven Project. He's sort of ideal for this, someone who operates as a broker of power and influence, but who we know Starfire can trust. What we wind up with is a version of Josiah Power that feels like all the best parts of his comic appearances, while also uniquely suited to the story we're trying to tell. |