Mikron O'Jeneus
47 years ago - Mikron O'Jeneus is born.
30 years ago - 17-year-old MIkron begins building & selling his own weapons tech.
20 years ago - 27-year-old Mikron is recruited into H.I.V.E.
17 years ago - 30-year-old Mikron transitions into the new H.I.V.E. weapons division, developing his own systems.
13 years ago - 34-year-old Mikron joins the H.I.V.E. Academy, and starts seeing on of the techs.
10 years ago - 37-year-old Mikron battles the Teen Titans with H.I.V.E. His son Mikron O'Jeneus Jr is born. He joins Doctor Light's Fearsome Five and battles the Titans again before they are imprisoned.
9 years ago - 38-year-old Mikron is freed from prison by Psimon when he reforms the Fearsome Five. They battle Superman & the Teen Titans.
8 years ago - 39-year-old Mikron and the Fearsome Five are imprisoned when Psimon is banished by Trigon.
6 years ago - 41-year-old Mikron is freed from prison by Damien Darhk, rejoining H.I.V.E. He brings his son Mikron O'Jeneus Jr to see their new facilities.
3 years ago - 44-year-old Mikron is freed from prison when Doctor SIvana reforms the Fearsome Five, but the doctor kills him.
Mikron O'Jeneus is Gizmo, a villain that most fans probably know as the recurring enemy of the Teen TItans on their animated series, but before he showed up there, he was a long running low-level threat to the New Teen Titans without a lot of backstory, but who still had a pretty neat look and personality. We'll be using both this classic comic look AND his animated series look as two different characters, which winds up working really well.
|
Mikron's Comic HistoryGizmo appeared for the first time in the New Teen TItans #3 in 1981, a creation of George Perez and Marv Wolfman and a member of the Fearsome Five, a group of supervillains deliberately introduced to challenge the titular teenage heroes. The characters don't exactly get a complex backstory, they're just bad guys... but they do have a pretty solid overall look if only because they have some good diversity in their design. GIzmo was simply a bearded dwarf who was constantly building weapons out of random found implements. There wasn't a lot more that needed to be done with him; he never showed up in any capacity unless he was showing up with the rest of the Fearsome Five.
The 2003 animated Teen Titans series brought with it a pretty major design style, which featured new looks for a lot of their villains. They didn't use the entire Fearsome Five; just Mammoth, Jinx, and Gizmo. The new design of Gizmo was a younger, bald-headed imp that quickly became a fan favorite. From that point on, whenever the original Gizmo showed up in the comic, his look was very deliberately rethough to mimic the cartoon design. He was eventually shot by Doctor Sivana during Judd WInick's Outsiders. |
Our Mikron O'Jeneus Story While sometimes villains can be the driving force of the larger plot and go on to define the heroes by providing them with the trials that allow them to strive for new levels of heroism, often a bad guy's whole job is just to give the heroes something to fight. Wrestling fans describe characters like this as 'jobbers', although i couldn't tell you why. Characters like this just need a fun, interesting design to make the pages fun to read, and Gizmo is a great example of how to do this.
Now, the distinct difference between the classic appearance of Gizmo vs his animated design actually gives us a fun opportunity. We can make them two different characters; a father and son. This does essentially mean that any interesting character development we MIGHT have applied to Gizmo is actually applied to his son, and therefore Mikron Sr is just a sort of career criminal and weapon inventor who never really makes much of himself, just constantly working with either H.I.V.E. or the Fearsome Five, living his life in an out of prison. This works pretty well, because it lets Mikron Sr fill all the roles we need from the classic continuity, but also sets him up as this weird absent father figure that the young Mikron Jr can idolize. |
|