Kanjar Ro

"The chocolate."

59 years ago - Kanjar Ro is born in Citadel Space.

36 years ago - 23-year-old Kanjar Ro joins the Citadel Navy.

29 years ago - 30-year-old Kanjar Ro goes awol from the Citadel Navy, stealing a starship and joining a pirate fleet, but is not permitted a captaincy of his own.

25 years ago - 34-year-old Kanjar Ro mutinies and takes his own ship, beginning a war among the pirate fleets.

22 years ago - 37-year-old Kanjar Ro assists the regime on Korugar. His favor with Sinestro allows him to gain the upper hand in the pirate war and become the most powerful pirate in the galaxy.

17 years ago - 42-year-old Kanjar Ro looses his connections to the Korugar regime when Sinestro is exposed. He is determined to undermine the authority of the Green Latern Corps, staging hit and run raids on the home planets of several Green Lanterns.

16 years ago - 43-year-old Kanjar Ro stages a raid on Earth, and is defeated by Hal Jordan in a battle over Eastern Europe & imprisoned on Earth.

13 years ago - 46-year-old Kanjar Ro constructs the Gamma Gong, allowing him to escape prison and rob the Earth of it's riches until he is stopped by the Justice League. He escapes to space, but has lost his pirate fleet.

10 years ago - 49-year-old Kanjar Ro helps the Manhunters frame John Stewart of the Green Lanterns for the destruction of Xanchi. When he is exposed he's tried as a war criminal, but escapes to rebuild his fleet. Staging raids on Citadel Space using crews of mind controlled slaves.

9 years ago - 50-year-old Kanjar Ro attempts to raid Rann. He is stopped by Adam Strange and Alanna.

6 years ago - 53-year-old Kanjar Ro's pirates are defeated by Komand'r who stops his raids on Citadel Space and takes his ship. She casts him into deep space in a small life-vessel and begins her own fleet with Citadel authority.

2 years ago - 57-year-old Kanjar Ro is found by Lady Styx, and becomes her agent.

Kanjar Ro is probably best known as something of a chameleon, appearing in a wide variety of animated media in a number of different roles. He's a character with a very old history, but who has always been more in service to the larger story than to serve as a major antagonist himself. This gives us a unique opportunity to make him serve OUR story without having to worry too much about getting his comic continuity correct.

Kanjar Ro's Comic History

Kanjar Ro was one of the eariest enemies of the Justice League, debuting in issue #3 in 1961. He isn't their first alien enemy... Despero and Starro both predate him, but he does seem to be their first enemy for whom his whole gimick is simply that he's from an alien culture, and using spacey technology.

He summons the League by sabatoging their signaling devices, and then uses his 'gamma gong' to freeze the population of Earth, a condition that can only be undone if his name is spoken at once by all three of his rival planetary rulers, making it necessary for the League to capture them for him. He convinces them to row his strange interplanetary slave galley to his home system where they fight and capture his enemies. Kanjar Ro freezes his enemies so they can't speak his name and free humanity from the effects of the Gamma Gong, but the League anticipated his treachery and recorded them. With his plan defeated, Kanjar Ro is imprisoned by his rivals.

Ro's next appearance was in Mystery in Space, going up against Adam Strange. He would go on to show up several more times in the Justice League, always in issues featuring Strange as a guest star.

Kanjar Ro wasn't a big enough recurring character to have a major redesign after 1985's Crisis, but he did eventually turn up in an interesting place. In the continuity scrambling 1990 ongoing Hawkworld series, an entirely new version of Kanjar appears as the Adjutant of Earth Affairs on Thanagar.

This version of the character is a sniveling, hand-wringing beaurcrat, which is certainly several steps removed from the criminal-for-criminality-sake baddie he was in the Silver Age, but it really was a very small role in a series without a lot of readers. Still, the huge change between depictions of these characters does open up the character quite a bit, allowing other comic version of him (or appearances in other media) to have a broad spectrum of utility, giving rise to a whole smorgasborg of takes on the character.

While most audiences will now be more familiar with Kanjar from his appearances in various animated series and movies, we did get one final redesign of the character in the early 2000s that I think doesn't get appreciated enough. This take originally appears in Action Comics #786 in 2002 by the always fantastic Joe Kelly. It's a version of his classic wannabe tyrant personality but on a far grander scale, taking over planets with vast, strange technology, with a very clever new design that really made him pop off the page. He served as the catalyst of a great Superman story as Clark inspired a population to stand up for themselves.

Kelly used his new version of Kanjar Ro again during his vastly underappreciated run in JLA the next year in issues 78 & 79, a story called 'Rules of Engagement', where the League chooses to involve themselves in a conflict between distant planets where no one asked for their help, and find themselves caught up in a no-win scenerio. I won't spoil how it works out, because it is absolutely worth reading, but It's also definitely the most fantastic version of Kanjar Ro you're ever going to see; he's dangerous and violent, although clearly not any sort of match for the League, challenging them more through his political machinations than any physical threat.

Our Kanjar Ro Story

For our take on Kanjar Ro, we actually had quite a few potential verisons of the character to draw on, and what it came down to was what role would best serve the rest of the story. We wanted him to regularly attack other planets or species so we could include his stories on Earth or Adam Strange's Raan, but didn't want him to be too overly threatening.

While we have plenty of intergalactic dictators and conquerors, we wound up taking our cue from the animated series (where he was voice by Odo himself, René Auberjonois) and make him a space pirate. This take gave us some huge utility, letting us get him embroiled in stories all over the place.

We do also lean into the later Joe Kelly take on Kanjar, making him a scarrier despot, by ending out timeline with him becoming an agent of Lady Styx. This allows him to lead a much more dangerous crew, making him a player in the grand space opera that will be coming as her forces go up against the Omega Men.

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