Mark Moonrider
56 years ago - Mark Moonrider is born on New Genesis.
39 years ago - Mark Moonrider attends the Academy of Higher Consciousness on New Genesis, where he first meets Beautiful Dreamer, Serifan and Big Bear, and becomes rivals with Vykin the Brave
38 years ago - Mark Moonrider tries to stop Vykin the Brave, Serifan & Beautiful Dreamer from finding the next generation mother box hidden on the grounds of the Academy of Higher Consciousness, and to find it for himself, but ultimately they all work together so that Bykin can bond with the mother box, Maya, to stop Doctor Bedlam.
32 years ago - Mark Moonrider, Beautiful Dreamer, Big Bear, & Mark Moonrider all undergo the ritual for Serifan to relinquish his godhead and receive it anew, so his physical form aligns with who he is, bonding them together as the Forever People.
25 years ago - Mark Moonrider and the Forever People defy the commands of Highfather, banding together to go to Earth to save Beautiful Dreamer from Glorious Godfrey. Seeing the effects of Anti-Life on the planet, they choose to stay on the planet, helping free it's people.
23 years ago - Mark Moonrider and the Forever People stage a giant concert, helping enough of Glorious Godfrey's followers to turn away from Anti-Life to force him to abandon the planet. Knowing that he had many other Anti-Life experiments across the galaxy, they venture into space to begin freeing those people.
11 years ago - Mark Moonrider and the Forever People help refugees from Despero's campaign of interplanetary conquest band together and find a new home, becoming the gods of a new religion.
4 years ago - Mark Moonrider and the Forever People return to New Genesis at the request of Highfather to help navigate the Boom Tube inversion field around Earth. They lead the way for the New Gods to confront the Parademon wave invasion
1 year ago - Mark Moonrider and the Forever People travel into the territory conquered by Lady Styx to bring help to the people there.
The Forever People, as they appear in their own comic stories, were really about the group as a whole more than about any one individual. This isn't to say they weren't complete characters, of course... in fact, I would say that there's something almost magic in how minimally these five were focused on while still each being so loaded with personality. Maybe that's part of what Kirby was deliberately aiming for, to emulate something vibrant about the people of the 60s he was celebrating.
Mark Moonrider is an interesting character, because he is clearly meant to be the leader of the Forever People, but almost every depiction of him we've ever gotten outside of the original stories depict him as anything but. He certainly looks the part, but something about his demeanor or design seems to prompt people to cast him in a very different role, and we're going to try our best to lean into that.
Mark Moonrider is an interesting character, because he is clearly meant to be the leader of the Forever People, but almost every depiction of him we've ever gotten outside of the original stories depict him as anything but. He certainly looks the part, but something about his demeanor or design seems to prompt people to cast him in a very different role, and we're going to try our best to lean into that.
Mark Moonrider's Comic HistoryMark Moonrider and the Forever People all appeared for the first time in issue #1 of the Forever People in 1971. He has the very obvious design of a character meant to be the central leader of a team. You absolutely know it when you see it; He's the handsome, heroic, (white) central figure of the team. He also would sometimes talk to the others as if he was a little irritated with them, in something that I think passed for leading man coolness in that era. Once they recovered Beautiful Dreamer, it was pretty clear that she and Mark were meant to be a couple, although it was never really expressed in anything other than their holding hands.
It's really after that original series that a pattern starts to emerge where Mark is continuously depicted as the most hot-headed of the Forever People, and often the one most prone to conflict. In the DeMatteis series he is by far the most distraught when they are stripped of the lives they'd built on an alien planet, and is actually fully corrupted by the villainous "Dark", helping to capture the others before being restored at the end of the book. In the New 52 series we see that almost every character's relationship with him, even Beautiful Dreamers, is strained and adversarial, so much so that it's actually the core tension of the book. Clearly there's just something about this character that makes him feel like he needs to be something other than the trusted leader of the team, so that's what we're going to strive to do as we give him his own unique role. |
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Our Mark Moonrider StoryTruth be told, our timelines for all of the Forever People are pretty identical. Once they all bond together over their shared support of Serifan's transitional ritual, they pretty much operate as a single entity together. It's really in their earlier life where we get to create a sense of them as individuals. We've followed a certain narrative framework cribbed from another popular fiction, in which the central heroes have a fellow student that operates as a rival and pseudo-antagonist, and that's actually a perfect role for our version of Mark. We've shifted the focus of the story so that it's actually Vykin who is the main hero of the group, so Mark can actually be his rival when they are back in school, only to eventually become their ally, and to join them all in Serifan's ritual.
This means that Mark gets to be kind of the rebellious bad boy of the Forever People, and for some reason that just clicks. It's a better role for him. With that in mind, we've also gravitated hard toward his updated design in the animated Young Justice series (pictured here). All of the members of the Forever People had their costumes updated, but the look they created for Mark is just absolutely fantastic, and a perfect choice for our version of the character. |
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