Major Disaster

41 years ago - Paul Booker is born.

22 years ago - 19-year-old Paul becomes a golden gloves champion boxer.

19 years ago - 22-year-old Paul is arrested for assault. He becomes a mob enforcer to pay his gambling debts.

18 years ago - 23-year-old Paul is caught by Hal Jordan and sent to prison.

17 years ago - 24-year-old Paul is released from prison. He discovers the location of Abin Sur's ship, and steals an alien weapon that absorbs energy directly from the planet to make him stronger. He attacks Hal Jordan, but in their fight the weapon is broken, and he is subjected to a cosmic causality wave binding him to the energy fields of the planet, enabling him to manipulate it's natural energies and force enviormental reactions. He again fights Hal, taking the name becomes Major Disaster.

15 years ago - 26-year-old Paul is broken out of prison by William Asmodeus Zard to join his Injustice Gang as a foil for Hal Jordan.

8 years ago - 33-year-old Paul is defeated by Wally West. He is sent to prison.

4 years ago - 37-year-old Paul is granted a legal pardon thanks to Manchester Black. He is recruited into the Elite, which brings him into conflict with Superman. In the aftermath of their battle, he's imprisoned again.

3 years ago - 38-year-old Paul is freed from prison by Manchester Black, but rejects his demand that he join him. Instead, he joins Vera Black's Elite and helps defeat Manchester, killing the Hat with Pamela Sonjia. Wanting to better control his abilities, he joins the Doom Patrol.

2 years ago - 39-year-old Paul ventues into the Paths Beyond with the Doom Patrol to save Rebis & Danny the Street from the Key after the death of Niles Caulder, and chooses to stay with the new Doom Patrol.

Major Diaster is an interesting little story artifact that grew almost entirely from the work of just one creator. While the bulk of this character's history is as an even-more-generic-than usual Silver Age villain, he just seemed to have landed a role within the work of one of the most underrated Justice League writers, and for whatever reason was built up into a cool creation with a unique energy that we absolutely want to use in out timeline. I think we found a really cool role for him, and I hope you agree!

Major Disaster's Comic History

Technically, Major Disaster first appeared way back in Green Lantern #43 in 1966, but the character introduced here would go through quite an evolution over the years. Originally he was a fairly boilerplate Gardner Fox villain; just a career criminal planning bank robberies who would create natural disasters as distractions for the heroes. How he actually produces those natural disasters is glossed over pretty hard... generally there is at lease some reference to the villain having created some sort of device that lets him defy physics, but Major Disaster wasn't even doing that; it was just implied that he had them made for him.

Like lots of villains of this era he would bounce around making occasional minor appearances here or there, but he was such a thoroughly generic baddie that he reallty left no impression at all. In the eighties, during the JM Dematteis & Keith Giffen Justice League a group of C and D level supervillains came together as the Injustice League, and later started to actually work as a parody team of wannabe heroes, the Justice League of Antartica. This group was mostly played for laughts, but Major Disaster was the leader of that team, and was depicted as a fairly traditional megalomaniacal evil mastermind.

The beginnings of the changes to this character happened during the 90's series Underworld Unleashed, where lots of villians sold their souls for power upgrades. Disaster was given actual powers, meaning he was no longer using poorly definded technology. This didn't exactly represent a huge change for the character, he was still a fairly generic, underused villain, but he at least had an impressive set of powers that gave him a role to play.

The biggest change for the character came about because of one guy. Joe Kelly's 2000s run on Action Comics is best remembered for issue # 775 "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?", which is widely considered one of the best Superman comics ever written, but his run is actually loaded with incredilbe issues that dive deep into the idea of what makes Superman great. one such issue #783, "The Gift".

The issue intercuts images of Superman engaging in four seperate fights with four different supervillains, using two parrallel narrations. One is a story written by Clark Kent, describing a lesson he learned from his father about how important it is to give people a second chance, even when they don't deserve it. The other is Superman talking to someone, basically calling them out on the pointlessness of using their powers for destruction when they could be making a difference, pointing out that someday they're going to die like this and they would be nothing when they could be so much more. It's made clear that this is a chance for redemption that he is offering to all these different villains, and over and over, his offer is rejected. He keeps offering it, though, because giving someone a chance is worth it. In the end... one of them finally does. Major Disaster.

Kelly actually follows through with this; when he builds a replacement team in his run on JLA, Booker steps up and winds up staying on the League for Kelly's entire run, and then moving over to his follow up series, Justice League Elite.

Our Major Disaster Story

A lot of Joe Kelly's contributions to DC are very self-contained within his own work; he has a complex eye for characters, and the intricacies of his creations don't really hold up under other creators. His take on Major Disaster was incredibly fun. Booker was never apologetic about his past; he was what he was, but he was earnestly trying to be make a positive impact on the world, to earn the chance Superman had given him.

We want to use that characterization, but of course to get there, we need to expand the idea of what he WAS. We're making his original empowerment come from a "causality wave" from a destroyed alien weapon he was using to fight Hal Jordan, and giving him a brief turn as part of the original Injustice Gang, but we're also giving him more to do by tying him in with another Joe Kelly creation; the original Elite. He fits in with that group exceptionally well, and it also brings him into conflict with Superman, who can be responsible for giving him the perspective he needs to eventually reject Manchester Black and try to be a better person.

Major Disaster's Future

We are throwing a bit of a curveball with Booker here, because while it would make a lot of sense to keep him as part of the Elite, we actually have a different idea in mind for him. We want to lean into the idea that his powers are evolving, that his connection to the energies of the Earth that allow him to maniplate the planet and wield natural disasters as weapons is becoming something more complex. There are references to him starting to become a human Earth Elemental... and that sort of weirdness really can only be explored in one place.

We're making Booker part of the new Doom Patrol. it just seems to be the ideal place for someone like him, who's powers are so barely understood, whose body is likely to start changing right along with them... and as a former villain who is legitimately trying to do good, he has the sense of tragic outsider-ness that fits the Doom Patrol so well. It also lets us really lean into the idea that he's not quite really a superhero, really... He's a guy WORKING with superheroes.

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