Mano
2968 - Mano is born a mutant on Angtu.
2976 - 8-year-old Mano's incredibly dangerous mutant powers manifest. Rather than try to help him, his people lock him away.
2991 - 23-year-old Mano learns to manipulate his powers so that he can no longer be held in a traditional prison. He escapes, and murders countless people before he is finally stopped and put into stasis by the Legion.
2995 - 27-year-old Mano is released by Rokk Krinn to join Tharok's team to help stop a rogue Sun-Eater. They are able to escape, becoming the Fatal Five
2997 - 29-year-old Mano & the Fatal Five attempt to assault Legion headquarters. They are defeated by Val Armorr single-handedly & imprisoned.
3003 - 35-year-old Mano & the Fatal Five escape from prison and begin rebuilding their criminal empire.
3006 - 38-year-old Mano & the Fatal Five wage all-out war with the reunited Legion, and are eventually defeated.
The world of the Legion of Superheroes has perhaps born the brunt of DC's penchant for continuity shenanigans more than any other part of it's history, so when you add to that the tendancy to completely rethink villains with most of their appearances, it actually becomes almost impossible to nail down any sense of the Fatal Five having any consistent story at all. Still, they are suprisingly prolifict concepts in DC, appearing in modern times (somehow) almost with the same regularity they appear in the 30th century.
The real fun here is that each of these five characters represents a pretty solid villain in their own right, so we're going to expand on them all just a little bit, and in doing so will get a nice spectrum of treats to throw up against our team of future teen heroes.
The real fun here is that each of these five characters represents a pretty solid villain in their own right, so we're going to expand on them all just a little bit, and in doing so will get a nice spectrum of treats to throw up against our team of future teen heroes.
Mano's StoryMano appeared for the first time along with the rest of the Fatal Five in issue #352 0f Adventure Comics in 1967, an invention of (notably 16-year-old) Jim Shooter. Of the five members, you get the distinct sense that Mano was designed around his look first. He's a black, mysterious face hiding inside his fishbowl space helmet, but his powers are the sort of thing that you can really only do with the Legion; he can disintigrate with a touch. In his backstory, he literally touched his hand to the ground of his home planet and deliberately destroyed it, making him the genocidal murderer of an entire race of people. It is kind of bonkers how casually this is treated in the comic, but that was kind of the fun of this huge superhero space opera being written by a teenager.
Of the members of the Fatal Five, Mano has made the fewest appearances. He might be a little bit more obscure, but it could also be because the level of power he's meant to have is just absolutely nuts. He's a character that actually makes it necessary to bring a literal army of Legion members to fight them. For our timeline, We're going to dial him back a LITTLE bit. We certainly have him as this incredibly powerful, lethal, heartless killer, we just need to temper it a little. Make him motivated by personal gain and revenge rather than just making him a genocidal mass murderer. He's still just as scary. |