Professor Ivo
54 years ago - Anthony Ivo is born.
46 years ago - 8-year-old Anthony Ivo barely survives an intracranial hemorrhage. He develops a lifelong fear of death and an obsession with overcoming it.
36 years ago - 18-year-old Anthony Ivo goes to college to study biology.
32 years ago - 22-year-old Anthony Ivo goes to grad school.
30 years ago - 24-year-old Anthony Ivo begins his doctoral work in adaptive cellular morphology.
28 years ago - 26-year-old Anthony Ivo earns his doctorate. He is more and more obsessed with his work, thinking he has unlocked the key to immortality.
26 years ago - 28-year-old Anthony Ivo becomes a founding member of H.I.V.E.
17 years ago - 37-year-old Anthony Ivo leaves H.I.V.E. after the change in leadership to keep his research to himself.
15 years ago - 39-year-old Anthony Ivo uses his power siphons to attack the Justice League with his Amazo android. he is able to distill their abilities to make his immortality serum before he is defeated by Black Canary.
12 years ago - 42-year-old Anthony Ivo, now deformed and in constant pain thanks to his immortality serum, begins kidnapping Justice League members by stealing their powers, intent on getting his revenge. He upgrades Amazo's programming matrix to copy League powers conceptually, setting it to compile before he is defeated by a depowered League and imprisoned.
8 years ago - 46-year-old Anthony Ivo escapes prison using a synthetic replica of himself. He kidnaps Clara Kendall to mimic her four-lobed brain as the basis for his new android creation before wiping her mind and releasing her.
5 years ago - 49-year-old Anthony Ivo contacts T.O. Morrow for assistance with Tomorrow Woman's artificial intelligence, kicking off their rivalry.
4 years ago - 50-year-old Anthony Ivo is joined full-time by T.O. Morrow. Together they complete the Tomorrow Woman android.
3 years ago - 51-year-old Anthony Ivo and T.O. Morrow send Tomorrow Woman to infiltrate the Watchtower, but she overcomes her programming and sacrifices herself to save the world, her betrayal leading to their capture.
2 years ago - 52-year-old Anthony Ivo watches from prison as his most advanced Amazo's adaptive matrix finishes compiling and attacks the Justice League.
A lot of those old silver-age stories, even the ones featuring some barely-explainable sci-fi shenanigans, needed a labcoat-wearing scientist to provide some degree of narrative logic. A lot of those old scientists faded into obscurity, while some went on to appear a few more times... very few of them have gone on to have stories all their own, even becoming unique villains in their own right. Professor Ivo has gone on to become one of the Justice League's most important villains.
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Professor Ivo's Comic HistoryProfessor Ivo's first appearance was all the way back in The Brave and the Bold #30, before the Justice League even had its own comic, in 1960. The issue was called "Case of the Stolen Super-Powers", and featured the first appearance of the Android Amazo, who Professor Ivo was using to kidnap all the regular Leaguers. Amazo was really the star of the show here, Ivo was really there just to explain what was happening, although this is also where we first see Ivo's obsession with achieving immortality, and actually does include the invention of his immortality serum.
Amazo would make a few more appearances before we saw the Professor again, but once we did, things got WEIRD. |
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When Ivo appears again, it's revealed that the immortality serum has left him horribly deformed, and in constant pain. Later appearances would refine his 'deformed' look to give him a grey, scaley, monstrous look, but the initial reveal of his twisted face was absolutely grotesque. Thank veteran comic artist Chuck Patton for the nightmares.
You start to see an interesting separation in the style of Ivo's appearances from this point; He's technically best known as the inventor of Amazo, who is a very well-known Justice League enemy, so you often see him depicted as more of a robotics expert, with his more monstrous elements downplayed. Then you get stories like "Last Stand", the final story arc of the original Justice League series, when Ivo has built a small army of android servants and is using them to kill off the new members of the Justice League as an act of revenge. We discover that even the main Ivo is ALSO an android, and that the original has been locked in a straightjacket by his own creations as his twisted motivations have driven him completely insane. It's as classic a monster story as you'll ever see. Ivo of course also appears in the JLA story "Woman of Tomorrow", where he and fellow mad scientist best known for his creation of a major Justice League character, T.O. Morrow, build a new android to infiltrate the Justice League. He's made a few appearances since then, but nothing that has caught our attention enough that it needs to be discussed here. |
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Our Professor Ivo StoryThe major story beats for Professor Ivo follow his major comic story arcs; with his penchant for kidnapping superheroes and copying their powers into androids. We're of course going to include his obsession with immortality, the invention of his immortality serum, and the resulting deformity and borderline insanity... although I'd say we can dial it back a little from Chuck Patton's absolute night-terror design.
Ivo is of course another of the classic mad scientists, and so we're going to include him among the founding members of H.I.V.E., although at that time he's going to be pretty obsessed with keeping his research to himself. I'm sure this next part will surprise no one, since we so often frame our storylines around 90's era stories, but we've wound up devoting a lot of Ivo's story to the development of Tomorrow Woman. Moving forward, Ivo remains a reliably weird mad scientist whenever we need a classic bad guy for some old-fashioned silver age shenanigans. |