Lucius Fox
59 years ago - Lucius Fox is born in Hub City.
41 years ago - 18-year-old Lucius attends Berkley College, double majoring in Engineering & Finance.
37 years ago - 22-year-old Lucius earns dual Bachelors Degrees in Engineering & Finance. He begins an advanced research program. Thomas Wayne reaches out to him after reading his proposed business and technology strategies, and makes arrangements to hire him when he finishes his program.
34 years ago - 25-year-old Lucius earns his masters degrees in engineering and business. He begins his career with Wayne Enterprises on the Board of Directors.
33 years ago - 26-year-old Lucius drafts plans for a new division of Wayne Enterprises; Waynetech. He presents his plans to the board of directors, but is met with pushback, especially from CEO Ferris Boyle.
31 years ago - 28-year-old Lucius is pushed from his position on the Wayne Enterprises Board of Directors by CEO Ferris Boyle after Thomas & Martha Wayne are murdered.
29 years ago - 30-year-old Lucius marries his wife Tanya.
27 years ago - 32-year-old Lucius's son Luke Fox is born.
26 years ago - 33-year-old Lucius leaves Wayne Enterprises for Atwater Air, a near-bankrupt aviation tech company, turning it around within eight months. He develops a reputation as a restorer of failing companies, working regularly in Europe while living in Gotham.
22 years ago - 37-year-old Lucius is saved from muggers in Paris by a young Bruce Wayne.
20 years ago - 39-year-old Lucius's daughter Tamara is born.
15 years ago - 44-year-old Lucius is sought out by Bruce Wayne as he retakes controlling interest in Wayne Enterprises. He becomes CEO of the newly-formed Waynetech, and takes Ferris Boyle's position on the Wayne Enterprises board of directors.
14 years ago - 45-year-old Lucius has Wayne Enterprises buy Sionis Chemicals, requiring the previous board of directors to step down.
8 years ago - 51-year-old Lucius is kidnapped by Kobra for ransom in Markovia. He is saved by the Outsiders.
7 years ago - 52-year-old Lucius disapproves of his son Luke Fox leaving MIT to work on his own tech startup. They stop speaking.
3 years ago - 56-year-old Lucius uses all the resources of Waynetech to rebuild Gotham when it is decimated in an earthquake but is outbid in several areas by Ferris Boyle's Goth-Corp, which begins construction of a dozen Mega-Towers. He speaks to his son Luke Fox when he moves his tech startup into the new Goth-Corp Mega-Towers, but they still can't find common ground. Lucius deduces Bruce Wayne's secret identity. He asks for a larger role in the world of Batman, but Bruce insists that he remains the legitimate face of Wayne Enterprises and Waynetech. He begins working on the Batwing armor.
Now - 59-year-old Lucius publicly speaks out against Goth-Corp rebranding their Mega-Towers as the tech enclave Neo-Gotham. He approaches his son Luke Fox when his technology is exploited by Goth-Corp, equipping him with the Batwing armor, working with him to fight the security systems of Neo-Gotham, and protecting Gotham in Bruce Wayne's absence.
Given the fact that Lucius Fox has been a featured character in some of the highest-grossing adaptations of Batman ever, he's an extremely well-known part of the mythology. What's interesting, however, is that the Morgan Freeman-flavored version of the character everyone knows is actually pretty heavily adapted from the comic for a very different role unique to those movies. The comic character has changed quite a bit in response. We've skewed closer to the original character, and we hope our reasoning makes sense.
Lucius Fox's Comic HistoryLucius Fox appeared for the first time in 1979, in Batman #307. It's not an incredibly dramatic debut, but rather is just an office meeting between Bruce and his "second-in-command" at the Wayne Foundation before getting on with the business of the episode. He was an invention of Len Wein and artist John Calnan, and served a really obvious-in-retrospect story role, allowing Bruce's business responsibilities to feature more directly in the plot because they had a character personifying them.
Lucius continued to appear through the rest of Wein's run and beyond, an accepted part of the world of Bruce Wayne. He was also, interestingly, occasionally cast in the role of damsel in need of rescue, captured by the likes of Black Masks False Face society and the like. Through all of this, however, it was clear that Fox's specialty was specifically in business. This all changed in 2005, when Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins seemed to take the stance that Batman couldn't possibly be responsible for his own technology, and needed a Q-like figure. Enter Freeman's Lucius Fox, serving as Bruce's gadgeteer. From this point forward you often see Fox depicted as developing the technology of Batman. |
Our Lucius Fox StoryAs I'm sure you've already managed to work out, we were much more interested in keeping Lucius closer to his original role in the story, representing Bruce's business responsibilities. We've built up his earlier career and relationship to Wayne Enterprises and Thomas Wayne, taking story beats from the Nolan movie, but keeping far removed from making him Bruce's Q. Building his own gadgets is one of the pillars of what makes Batman cool, and we don't really think that the fact that Chris Nolan didn't want to give us a complete version of Batman should mean we don't get one ourselves.
Our version of Gotham has undergone some big changes in the last few years since being decimated by an Earthquake, with Goth-Corp building up an area called Neo-Gotham. This is meant to evoke a certain futuristic version of Gotham, but letting it happen NOW, while Bruce is absent from modern Gotham, with Lucius's son Luke as a new hero, Batwing, acting with Lucius's help. The idea of moving that story to a modern timeline might seem counter-intuitive, but if you allow it to happen we believe it actually works within the current mythology really well. |