Klarion the Witch Boy
1680 - Klarion is born to a protestant woman in Salem, Mass. He is the illegitimate son of Jason Blood, conceived under the influence of Etrigan.
1687 - 7-year-old Klarion begins summoning spirits with other children, clearly under demonic influence.
1693 - 13-year-old Klarion is burned at the stake.
1700 - Klarion uses deceipt to overcome a minor lord of hell, becoming a half-human demon.
1761 - Klarion is cast from hell, trapped in Limbo Town, a small extraplanar dimension with other damned from the protestant colonies, where he is barred from practicing magic. He continues to study in secret.
48 years ago - Klarion escapes Limbo Town, and tries to hide with Jason Blood, using his magic to take control of Etrigan. Jason manages to outwit & banish him.
11 years ago - Klarion kidnaps Etta Candy to draw out Jason Blood and escape his banishment, but is defeated when Diana Prince joins Jason in purgatory to save her.
7 years ago - Klarion is freed from banishment by Circe to create the summoning spells to initiate the Godwar.
So much of Jack Kirby's DC contributions are just left of the regular DC story, but Klarion is part of the world of Etrigan, which puts him dead center in the main continuity, and that is a WEIRD place for such a bizarre Kirby creation to be. Still, Klarion has obviously managed to carve out his own niche; you see him all over the place. He appears regularly in the animated Young Justice, in Justice League Action, and in the DCAU. Still, this is a particularly odd character to try to work into the regular continuity and we've made a few changes so that he feels at home in the story we're trying to tell.
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Klarion's Comic HistoryAs truely bizarre a creation as Klarion might be, he does actually make some degree of sense when you realize he started out in the world of Jack Kirby's Demon, specifically in issue #3 in 1973. The series had a very particular strangeness where having a haunted little weirdo dressed in protestant garb and casting weird sorcery actually fits. At first Klarion posed as an ally to Jason & his friends, coming to them to help escape the elders from his mysterious home, but as it is revealed that his spellcasting ability is strong enough to actually summon Etrigan and put Jason under his control, it becomes clear that he's far more of a threat than an ally. Later in the series, as he conjurs a doppleganger for Etrigan and forces them to fight, he earned his place as the most memorable enemy Jason and his friends faced in the original series.
Like a lot of Jack Kirby creations, Klarion was an acknowledged part of the DC story, but it was pretty hard to actually find a place for him to appear. For some time, you didn't see much of him, although he did make a pretty cool appearance in Wonder Woman in the early 80s, kidnapping Etta Candy in a ploy to get Diana to track down Jason Blood, and to bring him into the open to get revenge. While it was already established that Etrigan could interact with the rest of DC fairly seemlessly, this showed that even the particular oddity of Klarion wasn't out of place. |
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Klarion's biggest return to comics was in the pages of the Alan Grant Demon series of the 90s. He was largely redesigned as a much much cherubic character, although he was often responsible for some of the series signature gratuitous violence. His pet cat Teekl was also reimagined, often turning into a anthromorphic female catgirl who danced with her victims before evicerating them. Klarion actually shows up in this series more than in any other, although he didn't continue to appear once the series was passed to Garth Ennis.
This version of Klarion made a few more appearances, most notably in the pages of Young Justice, before he was again re-imagined in Grant Morrison's miniseries Seven Soldiers of Victory. His people were now blue-skinned descendants of the lost colony of Roanoke, living in their magical underground home of Limbo Town, half-human and half Sheeda, the weird future people and antagonists of the series. This version of Klarion was steeped in that unmistakeable Grant Morrison weirdness, and while his subsequent appearances would revert back to his more traditional appearance, a lot of the ideas presented here would remain. Klarion has gone on to appear regularly in lots of outside DC media and in the New 52. New concepts, like the idea that he is actually a Lord of Chaos, have been introduced in that time. |
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Our Klarion StoryKlarion has become a very regularly occuring part of almost any version of DC in larger media worth following, and he's become so ubiquitous that its very easy to forget just how incredibly strange this little weirdo is. He's had a bunch of different origins, but we all agreed that none of them have really given sufficient explanation for how very particular Klarion's design is. We decided on two pretty major additions to his backstory. First, we decided to make him a demonically influenced child from Salem, Mass that was burned at the stake for witchcraft before claiming a role in Hell as a half-demon (we specifically chose Salem over Roanoke, by the way, because Klarion's whole vibe has always been Protestant New England, and while the lost colony is a cool plot element, it's also off by about two centuries)
Second, since we wanted Klarion born with demonic influence, and because Jason Blood spend centuries lost between lives and unaware of Etrigan's influence, we decided to go ahead and make him Klarion's father. It's a departure from comic cannon, but we all agreed it makes a lot of sense. Beyond that, we just focused on bringing in a few of the stories we enjoyed that used our favorite weird little demon kid. |