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 on Vril Drox, but winds up becoming a part-time operative of the Omega Men.
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, effictively 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 exhile by Lady Styx after his space dolphins are threatened.
Lobo began his existance as a pretty forgettable character in L.E.G.I.O.N., a book that is pretty cool but so under the radar that most causal fans haven't heard of it.
Keith Giffen brought the character up out of obscurity as a very deliberate pastiche of the absurd ultraviolence in modern comics. the 90's were an really weird time for comics; the industry was collapsing and sustaining itself almost entirely through collectors markets and the stories were being written almost exclusively for teenage boys. More specifically; teenage boys that apparently had emotional issues. Even now, looking at my own comic collection from that era, I see a lot of stuff that I don't think I'd be comfortable carrying in public today. It's a standing joke that Lobo was built to mock the rediculous ultra-violence and hyper masculinty 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. Lobo never had an ongoing series, but he was featured in several specials and miniseries, all of them absolutely hilarious. In many ways, Lobo was a perfect blend of the Looney Tunes madcap fun of Deadpool, the musclebound fantasy of a Frank Franzetta painting and the epic scope of a bleak sci-fi space opera, all set to a Slayer album. How could it possbly NOT have been awesome? |
As is often the case when a comic meant to wink at the audience is blended into the mainstream universe, a strait translation isn't completely possible. Lobo has shown up a few times, primarily as a pretty fantastic Superman foil, but you can never REALLY use the Lobo from his own comics because there's just a little bit too much lunacy. Also, it's always a challenge when you include an alien character with Superman-level strength, because then you have to somehow explain why that entire population isn't out in the universe; it's vital that each character is in some way unique.
All that said, not including Lobo in our timeline would be just downright dumb, and we actually think we found a way to bring him in that actually allows the maxium level of the insanity from his comics to function. 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 sentance: "The effects on him are uncertain." We simply don't know WHAT he did to himself. Are other Czarnians this powerful? Is he insane? It infuses the character with a uniqueness that fundamentally informs everything else about him. Likewise, we can include the infameous '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 incorperating these elements of narrative uncertainty we can imbue his story with the same sense of mania without sacrificing the tone of the overall timeline. |