Lobo
41 years ago - Lobo is born on Czarnia.
21 years ago - 20-year-old Lobo is responsible for the destruction of his home planet & the genocide of his species. The effects on him are uncertain.
17 years ago - 24-year-old Lobo takes a contract from the Godanians on Kalista, the rogue crown princess of Euphorix. He is outsmarted by Vril Drox & joins the Omega Men as a probationary member.
14 years ago - 27-year-old Lobo leaves the Omega Men, becoming an independant contractor.
11 years ago - 30-year-old Lobo takes a contract on Superman and fights him to a standstill. He ultimately agrees to stay off Earth, and kills the contact that gave him the job.
10 years ago - 31-year-old Lobo becomes the guardian of a pod of space dolphins.
8 years ago - 33-year-old Lobo claims to have died and been rejected by the afterlife, effectively becoming immortal.
5 years ago - 36-year-old Lobo mistakes Buddy Baker for a target. Koriand'r, Adam Strange & Alanna help defend him.
1 year ago - 40-year-old Lobo is forced into exile by Lady Styx after his space dolphins are threatened.
Lobo is a fan favorite character at this point. He's a major character who is going to appear in the new DC movie universe currently being created, and its safe to say even most casual fans know and love him. When he was being created however, he was this fascinating slow-evolving parody character... just slowly built bigger and bigger until it was like comics themselves couldn't contain him. You could very easily point to the early 90s self-titled Lobo miniseries as a turning point in the ongoing popularity of the 'gritty' comics of the 90s. From that point on, I think it stopped being just a normal trend in comics, and became a deliberate choice the comics of the era were making, because Lobo had drawn a line in the sand for just how over the top you could be... While still always maintaining a sense of tongue-in-cheek fun.
Lobo's Comic HistoryLobo, or at least the character that would one day be reinterpreted into Lobo, appeared for the first time in The Omega Men #3 in 1983, created by Keith Giffen and artist Roger Slifer. He was an intergalactic bounty hunter wearing a skin tight costume who was tasked with recovering the titular Omega Men, but was mercenary enough to also wind up working with them from time to time. You couldn't really point to anything about this character that would draw your attention, but there is at least a sense that Giffen liked him. He feels a little like his version of Boba Fett.
He would next appear in Justice League International, now wearing his leather jacket, riding his space hog, and even caring for his space dolphins. He crashed into the League headquarters and got into a brawl with everybody. Giffen brought Lobo back again in his L.E.G.I.O.N. series, which goes on for quite a long time. It's established that Lobo is the main bounty hunter employed by Darkseid, making him intergalactically famous, but when someone killed one of his beloved dolphins he started to work with Vril Dox and the rest of L.E.G.I.O.N. This is when Lobo first started being done by both Giffen and Alan Grant, the team that would really define the character moving forward. |
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After Lobo was refined over years in the pages of L.E.G.I.O.N., Giffen & Grant did the first Lobo miniseries in 1990, an absolute symphony of over-the top violence. This was followed by the Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special (where he's tasked to kill Santa by the Easter Bunny), Lobo's Back (Where Lobo goes to Heaven & Hell and is rejected from both), Lobo's Blazing Chain of Love (Where Lobo has a gratuitous gunfight in a space brothel).
It's a standing joke that Lobo was built to mock the ridiculous ultra-violence and hyper masculinity of the time, but wound up being so popular that he was one of the worst practitioners of it. The fact is, however, that there's a rare phenomenon when something manages to simultaneously be both spoof and homage. In a landscape littered with violent self-serious comics Lobo never took itself seriously. Even as the pages were splattered with gore it never stopped winking. You could laugh at it, and at yourself for liking it. In many ways, Lobo was a perfect blend of the Looney Tunes madcap fun of Deadpool, the musclebound fantasy of a Frank Frazetta painting and the epic scope of a bleak sci-fi space opera, all set to a Slayer album. How could it possibly NOT have been awesome? Lobo starred in his own ongoing series for most of the 90s, but also appeared in many other series. He threw down with the Demon, became a regularly recurring Superman foe, has even appeared in live action more than once. Lobo may be a parody character but at this point he's one of the big benchmark characters in DC. |
Our Lobo StorySo the question isn't are we going to include Lobo. That's a gimme. The question in what do we have to do to get him in here. As usual, whenever you add a character that is Superman-strong, how are we going to make sure they are unique, and in Lobo's case, how can we do that so that the maximum amount of his comics insanity functions? We're going to do it by actually being a little LESS clear than usual. In his own story, it's understood that Lobo is responsible for the genocide of his own people. We expanded that a tiny bit using this sentence: "The effects on him are uncertain."
We simply don't know WHAT he did to himself. Were other Czarnians this powerful? Is he insane? It infuses the character with an uncertainty that fundamentally informs everything else about him. Likewise, we can include the infamous 'Lobo's Back' story where he dies and kills his way out of the afterlife (becoming effectively immortal) by simply stating that this is something he CLAIMS happened. By incorporating these elements of narrative ambiguity we can imbue his story with the same sense of mania without sacrificing the tone of the overall timeline. Once that's in place, we can just zero in on the stories we most want to tell. Since we essentially combined the Omega Men and L.E.G.I.O.N. into one group, we can use both his initial task to collect a bounty on them AND his time on the team. He can fight Superman. He can even be an endgame tactic in the Omega Men's war with Lady Styx, turning him loose like a bomb being dropped on the enemy. |
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