Negative Man
52 years ago - Larry Trainor is born.
34 years ago - 18-year-old Larry joins the navy as a combat pilot.
29 years ago - 23-year-old Larry passes through a mysterious spatial anomaly while flying an experimental quad-fusion fighter. His essence is lost in a mysterious soul form. Niles Caulder manages to contain his disembodied spirit within his own body, which is seriously irradiated.
14 years ago - 38-year-old Larry dies with the Doom Patrol, his body destroyed in the destruction of Vandal Savage's submarine headquarters, sacrificing themselves to save the town of Codsville, Maine. His soul-self bonds with Valentina Vostok, their identities blurring.
9 years ago - The Negative Soul-Self is extracted from Valentina Vostok by Niles Caulder to save her life, and is placed in stasis.
8 years ago - The Negative Soul-Self begins taking possession of cadavers, animating them with its own personality derived from a synthesis of Larry Trainor's, Valentina Vostok's and his host bodies. It takes the name Rebis, becoming the Doom Patrol's new Negative Man.
6 years ago - Rebis & the Doom Patrol go into the blast zone of the Qurac bombing for Gar Logan to rescue the surviving members of the Teen Titans West.
2 years ago - Rebis is captured by The Key in an attempt to access the Dream Realm, using them as a fuel source to break through Danny the Street into the Paths Beyond. Chief Niles Caulder sacrifices himself to try to save them. Gar Logan & Raven pursue him into the Paths Beyond with the remaining Doom Patrol with the help of Will Magnus. Rebis ultimately defeats him by transcending to a higher plane of existence, diffusing the Key across the surface of reality.
It's not news that the original Doom Patrol was built as a pastiche of the Fantastic Four. Negative Man was a pretty obvious reimagining of the Human Torch, but what makes the Doom Patrol work is just how much it innovates on the concept. Sure, Negative Man could have just been a similar flying, flaming spector, but he's quite a bit more than that. He leans hard into the whole team's monsterous aesthetic, and all of that is entirely due to the creativity of the Doom Patrol's creators, Bob Haney and Arnold Drake. Of course, the character was expanded even further by the great Grant Morrison. We have a lot to play with here, so we hope you like what we've done here.
Negative Man's Comic HistoryNegative Man was one of the founding members of the Doom Patrol in 1963's My Greatest Adventure #80. A former test pilot who lost control of his plane when it was bombarded with strange radiation (the Doom Patrol was an almost direct pastiche of the Fantastic Four), leaving him with an irradiated body that has to be wrapped in special treated bandages. He is able to project a mysterious negative energy body from himself, leaving his physical body inert and vulnerable, but crucially can only do so for 60 seconds, or he will die on the spot. Larry was an adventurer with a tragic past, having essentially become a monster. His soul self powers allowed him to take a wide variety of utility roles on a superhero team, but they aren't the sort of powers that provide any sort of wish fulfillment. He and the rest of the Doom Patrol were apparently killed in an explosion in the final issue of Doom Patrol.
When the new Doom Patrol series started in 1987, at first it was understood that Larry was dead, and the negative entiry that had been his powers was now bonded with a new character, Valentina Vostok, a former russian cosmonaut and the new Negative Woman. Very quickly, it was revealed that Larry had survived, and was still forced to keep his body wrapped in it's bandages, and soon was a sort of pseudo antagonist for Valentia. Eventually he was fully cured, just in time for Grant Morrison to take over the book. |
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The Negative energy body left Valentina, revealing itself to be a sentient entity named Mercurius with it's own sense of morality. It appears to Larry and attacks him, merging itself with him, and with his doctor Eleanor Poole, to become a new composite entity that is notably intersex, taking the name Rebis.
Knowing what we now know about Grant Morrison, that they have since come out as non-binary, I have to say I really love that Rebis was such a huge part of this classic, incredibly high profile comic. They were just an absolutely fascinating character, depicted as observing humanity as an outsider with their powers now seeming far more advanced. They were now precognative, psychic, capable of dimentional travel and essentially immortal. Their whole purpose was to continue their own lifecycle, which involved them leaving to mate with themself and to grow a new body. Morrison's story grew to an amazing climax, with the team finding it's way to the fantasy paradise of Danny the World. which Rebis chose to make their new home. Later versions of the Doom Patrol would bring back versions of Larry Trainer in one form or another, but this really is the ideal resolution of their story, and we're going to us this as a major story in the timeline of or Doom Patrol. |
Our Negative Man StoryThere is a lot of fun stuff we can do with Negative Man. That's amost always the case with the best Grant Morrison characters, they are just such a great hodgepodge of wild ideas that we can gently disassemble and choose the best parts of them to incorperate into our version. To begin, of course we can just use Larry Trainor's original story. It's since become cannon that the reason his ship crashed is specifically because it passed through the energy of the negative energy entity which claimed him as a host, and that absolutely works. We don't have to do anything weird with the deaths of the Doom Patrol. this can 100% be the actual death of Larry Trainor.
We do have Valentina Vostok become the new host of the negative energy body and actually kept her on the Doom Patrol for some time, but eventually we want to seperate it from her so that it can evolve into Rebis. This is where our version is a little different, because rather than having the Entity forcefully merge with human hosts, We think the same compositive persona can be achieved by having the entity build it's identity by combining it's previous hosts and taking control of cadavers... which just feeds right into the strange alien nature of Rebis. His final tale is a huge part of the transition to the next generation of the Doom Patrol, and we think this take on Negative Man's story really makes him feel like a core part of the world. |
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