Owlman
31 years ago (dream realm memory) - Thomas Wayne Jr stages the death of his parents and little brother Bruce.
15 years ago (dream realm memory) - Thomas Wayne Jr returns to Gotham, having trained with and stripped all the resources from the League of Shadows, Court of Owls, & Order of St Dumas. He takes on the identity Owlman.
13 years ago (dream realm memory) - Owlman and Ultraman both attempt to take over the Crime Syndicate. They arrive at a truce with Ultraman as public leader but Owlman secretly controlling their resources.
12 years ago (dream realm memory) - Owlman and Superwoman begin their affair, with her cheating on Ultraman.
12 years ago - The Justice League are attacked in their dreams by Doctor Destiny. They follow him back into the Dream Dome defeating him and disabling his technology. The Dream Dome builds a dream reflection of the world and populates it with nightmare mirrors of the Justice League. They remember their own history, coming together as the Crime Syndicate and dominating their world.
9 years ago - Morpheus returns to the Dreaming. While reclaiming his realm, he disabled the Dream Dome, the technology built by Garrett Sanford while lost in the Dreaming. The dream reflection of the world that is home to the Crime Syndicate, no longer protected by the Dome, is set adrift in its own corner of the Dreaming.
7 years ago - The Crime Syndicate confirms that their world is in fact merely a dream reflection of the real world. They escape, and attack the Justice League to take their place. The League is defeated, and has to regroup. They are assisted in finally defeating the Crime Syndicate by Owlman.
The Crime Syndicate is really one collective storytelling entity. While Grant Morrison's take on these characters did give them a little more backstory, the point has never really been for any of them to have a lot of story of their own, so making character specific timelines becomes kind of beside the point.
Because of the way we did this, with the Syndicate being dream reflections of the League, the timelines of these characters are deliberately pretty esoteric. These characters remember a past, and that past is a sort of mirror universe mélange of the histories of the characters they are reflections of, but none of those histories actually happened, so we they're not going to link out to the timeline at large. They only exist on these pages.
Because of the way we did this, with the Syndicate being dream reflections of the League, the timelines of these characters are deliberately pretty esoteric. These characters remember a past, and that past is a sort of mirror universe mélange of the histories of the characters they are reflections of, but none of those histories actually happened, so we they're not going to link out to the timeline at large. They only exist on these pages.
Owlman's Comic HistoryAll of the members of the Crime Syndicate are designed with more than a little bit of whimsey, but there is something really charming about the vintage Silver Age Owlman. The idea that the Crime Syndicate were meant to be literal mirror reflections of the Earth One heroes really didn't come about until later, they were just meant to be one more variant Earth in the multiverse, and Owlman was really his own character. He was a super genius, he actually had mentalist superpowers, and always had a slightly sardonic smirk on his face. He was a core part of that original story, coming up with the clever tricks that allowed the Crime Syndicate to defeat their foes even if they lost their individual battles. This version of the character really never shows up again, and that's kind of a shame.
The redesigned Frank Quietly Owlman, in the meantime, is pretty much an entirely different character. He was Thomas Wayne Jr, a character Morrison would do a lot with later on when he was writing Batman. He has one of the coolest costumes you've ever seen, and was exactly as cool as a character meant to mirror the JLA era Batman would have to be. It was so cool, in fact, that a version of this Owlman actually wound up joining a version of the regular Outsiders. He's the main villain in the animated Crisis of Two Earths movie, which has really cemented him as perhaps the most important character of Earth 3. |
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Our Owlman StoryAll of our Crime Syndicate timelines are much simpler than our regular ones, because these aren't recalling actual events, it's just keeping track of the dream memories these characters all have of their own lives. This is usually only a few events, but Thomas Wayne Jr by default has a few more story beats. We mirrored Bruce's timeline, zeroing in on the major events of his life. In the same year that Bruce's parents are gunned down, Thomas arranges the death of both his parents AND his little brother. When Bruce was coming back to Gotham after training all over the world, Thomas comes back having exploited several major criminal organizations and taking all their resources.
We mirrored the Justice League's membership history with the Crime Syndicate, which means that several members join later. Owlman and Ultraman join at the same time, so we used that beat to introduce the constant cold-war animosity between them that is a major part of a lot of these stories. Finally... Owlman actually winds up helping the League defeat the Syndicate. Why? Maybe it's a reference to the nihilism of the animated Owlman... or maybe it's because he has a loophole that will allow him to escape the fate of the rest of his universe... |
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