Manchester Black
36 years ago - Chester Black is born in Manchester, England.
23 years ago - 13-year-old Chester Black runs away from his abusive household, immersing himself in the underground punk culture of Blackpool, where he is given the nickname Manchester.
20 years ago - 16-year-old Manchester Black is attacked in the Blackpool train maintenance depo by criminals he owes money to. His telekinetic powers manifest during the fight and he destroys the depot, killing his attackers. He goes on the run, but is found by Jenny Sparks, who brings him in as a Checkmate asset, helping train him to control his vast psychic potential.
13 years ago - 23-year-old Manchester Black is part of a small group of powered operatives assembled by Jenny Sparks. When several of them prove to be homicidal, Jenny and Black are forced to kill them. They resign from Checkmate with Jenny returning to America and Black becoming a Black-Ops British Intelligence Operative.
5 years ago - 31-year-old Manchester Black discovers an rift in spacetime during a mission, and traces it back to an abandoned orbital Voidship, locked in an Earth orbit in otherdimensional space, a remnant of a long-extinct extradimensional empire. Cutting ties with his handlers, he tracks supporters who can help him activate the Voidship, naming it Bunny. They use it as a headquarters to become a new superhuman collective, the Elite. Black pushes them to be more proactive, ending threats before they happen.
4 years ago - 32-year-old Manchester Black's more violent, proactive approach brings the Elite into conflict with Superman. Black pushes back hard, insisting that Superman is obsolete. Black challenges Superman to a fight to the death against the Elite on the moon, and it appears that Superman sinks to his level to kill his followers and lobotomize Black, but he reveals that it was all staged, that Superman's dedication to hope is harder but ultimately never obsolete. While his powers are temporarily deactivated, Black is taken into custody by Checkmate and imprisoned.
3 years ago - 33-year-old Manchester Black's powers return. He escapes the Checkmate facility imprisoning him, and attempts to reassemble the Elite so they can kill Superman. Bunny's reactivation allows Jenny Sparks and Zealot to return to this dimension, where Jenny wrests control of the Voidship, using it to assemble a new Stormwatch. The Elite are fractured, and Black takes his own life.
Working to incorporate elements of Wildstorm into the DC Continuity is a little tricky, because they aren't necessarily telling the same types of stories. The absolute best tool in your toolbox is a particular story from 2001 that created an interpretation of Wildstorm inside the world of DC, and articulated exactly what that would look like. The main character from that story, the character who personifies everything about DC and Wildstorm's relationship, is Manchester Black.
Manchester Black's Comic HistoryManchester Black holds a very distinct place in DC's history. Created by Joe Kelley for Action Comics #775, he and his team of superheroes the Elite were meant as commentary on the Authority, the incredibly popular Wildstorm team that depicted a Justice League allegory operating without any restraint, saving the world by exerting their near god-like powers in so brutal and effective a way that they were claiming abject moral authority over the entire world. This single issue was meant as an answer, and firmly re-established that, rather than a relic of modern times, Superman was actually still the bastion of what a superhero should aspire to be.
It was an incredibly successful comic. A delight to read (even more so if you knew the context), the source material for one of DC's better animated films, and managed to say something very profound about the overall tone of modern comics. Manchester might have been a character that would have starred in his own comic anywhere else, but in the pages of DC he was a bad guy. Characters, even super-powered characters, don't get to claim moral authority over a world where Superman and the Justice League are there to stop you. |
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He did come back again later in the Joe Kelley run, continuing to menace Superman in some more traditional ways, but in the end he wound up thoroughly defeated and ultimately took his own life, which is a pretty severe length for his story to go.
It's only a few years later when Joe Kelly came back to this idea after his JLA run when he created a new version of the Elite being lead by a new character Vera Black, Manchester's sister. He appeared in flashback in her story a few times, but this also went on to define more of Manchester Black's backstory, because now he had a little sister; who notably had no arms. Manchester has returned to comics in the post 52 in the pages of a Grant Morrison story called Superman and the Authority, in which he's actually now working WITH Superman. He's also starting to appear in more extended media, including a season of Supergirl. The Authority are expected to play a role in the new (as of this writing) DCU, and I would be willing to wager that Manchester Black is going to have a role in it. |
Our Manchester Black StoryThe big thing we have to do here is be wary of the fact that we're actually doing both the Elite AND some actual Wildstorm characters. We're doing a lot of work to make those characters feel like they belong in DC (In a way that I would argue they never really did canonically), and we want to find a way to make Manchester Black feel distinct and relevant, given that the character he's based on, Jenny Sparks, is also in here. We give the two of them a really obvious, deliberate history together to explain their similarities, but also we can take advantage of the fact that they both exist to highlight their differences. It lets us very clearly articulate what Jenny and Stormwatch are and how they are categorically NOT the Elite.
That done, the timeline we put together here was actually much simpler than we initially thought it would need to be. The main thing is to show his connection to the the seedy world of underground punk, and then show his recruitment by Jenny and his development into the character we now recognize. There was a little bit if a question as to whether or not depicting his ultimate fate was appropriate... maybe we could keep him around longer since he is a viable enemy of Superman, someone we could bring back later. Ultimately, He does sort of suffer the same problem as Doomsday or Bane, in that he's so clearly built to tell one specific story. While you COULD keep using them... sometimes it's best to let them be what they were built to be. |
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