Prometheus

38 years ago - Curt Calhoun is born on a commune to social malcontent parents.

33 years ago - 5-year-old Curt's parents refuse to give him up to social services, living on the road, beginning a spree of bank robberies.

29 years ago - 9-year-old Curt is left orphaned when police gun down his parents to stop their thrill kill spree. He swears himself to wage a war against justice.

26 years ago - 12-year-old Curt escapes his foster home, and collects several stashes of money hidden by his parents. He travels to Malaysia, where he studies Silat.

23 years ago - 15-year-old Curt continues his fighting training in Brazil, where he becomes an expert pitfighter.

20 years ago - 18-year-old Curt enrolls in Oxford University in England under an assumed name, entrenching himself in the aristocracy.

18 years ago - 20-year-old Curt graduates from Oxford. He begins working as an operative for terrorist organizations.

16 years ago - 22-year-old Curt becomes a programmer for Kobra, helping write code for several of their criminal headquarters. He steals exabytes of data from their records, building his own tech database.

14 years ago - 24-year-old Curt Calhoun goes into business himself, becoming an international mercenary & assassin.

9 years ago - 29-years-ago Curt Calhoun kills a prominent federal prosecutor, and is caught by the Freedom Fighters. He becomes a subject of the First Strike Program's phasic experiments for the Warmaker Project, where he discovers what he calls the
"ghost zone". He uses it to escape, and begins to explore the world looking for his own access.

7 years ago - 31-year-old Curt Calhoun discovers a hidden temple under the Kongur Tagh mountains of eastern China built from a thousand-year-old crashed alien ship, the monks descended from the original alien refugees. The temple descends through the ship's power system into the Ghost Zone. He murders the monks, stealing the key accessing it, rebuilds their monastary into his 'crooked house', and begins refining his equipment.

3 years ago - 35-year-old Curt Calhoun assaults the Watchtower as Prometheus, successfully defeating almost everyone individually before he is stopped by Selina Kyle, escaping into his Ghost Zone

1 year ago - 38-year-old Curt Calhoun is convinced by Lex Luthor to join his new Injustice Gang. He infiltrates the Watchtower again, where he shatters the ice statue of William MacIntyre, killing him. He has his nervous system reprogrammed with his own tech by Batman, trapping him in a neural loop.

I actually don't know if modern readers, who mostly know Prometheus from his appearances in later non-Morrison stories, are aware of just how slick a character he was when first introduced. I fully acknowledge that I do fanboy about Grant Morrison quite a bit, and that not everyone likes their stuff as much as I do, and I'm sure that for those people, this is a less interesting character. Personally, I think his original persona was incredibly cool, and I really want to find a way to make our version of this character reflect that.

Prometheus's Comic History

Prometheus's first story is in the middle of Morrison's JLA, beginning in issue #16 from 1998 (although his actual first appearance is in a self-titled one-shot published a month earlier, where he explains his backstory before killing a contest winner to take his place as a guest on the Watchtower) This was the first issue of Morrison's to feature their new expanded lineup designed specifically to mimic the pantheon of the Greek gods, so I'm sure it's no mistake that the first enemy was named after the figure in greek mythology who stole fire from the gods.

There are tons of characters in DC that are designed as dark reflections of Batman; Owlman, Wraith... even Killer Moth was originally designed with this in mind. What makes Prometheus stand out is very specifically that he's a Grant Morrison creation; he uses strange thinking-outside-the-box tools and technology to work around the powers of the League; whether that means cranking up the oxygen and shooting Martian Manhunter with a phosphorous dart, programming his own brain with Batman's martial arts skill, or shutting down Green Lantern's ability to imagine with "neural chaff' before straight-up shooting him in the chest. He moved so quickly in such unpredictable ways he almost took out the whole League all on his own, entirely because he wanted to be the guy who did it.

Prometheus came back later in the series when Lex Luthor brought together a new, upgraded Injustice Gang. Lex's initial team was all classic villains from each current League member's rogues gallery, so the new one was entirely new characters that posed a much more pressing threat. This story lead into the massive World War III arc, and in many ways really cemented these characters as some of the most prominent League villains.

Unfortunately, this really set up Prometheus for failure down the line. The whole point of the character was that he was wildly, dangerously innovative, but that means that to use the character in the future the writer has to be equally innovative, and that's not always possible. He showed up elsewhere but was notably diminished to a fairly generic villain, although this was later retconned to have been an impostor using the same equipment.

He was the main villain of the miniseries Cry For Justice, which is pretty widely despised for the amount of character assassination at play. Prometheus dies in this series, and unfortunately this is often the story he's remembered for because it's so infamous. Which is a shame, because his original characterization was so cool.

Our Prometheus Story

Thankfully, our timeline is set up in such a way that the best stories featuring Prometheus are all fairly recent. We can build his story so that it all builds to those stories, so we can focus on them properly and just leave out any later canon comic appearances.

This means we want him to be one of the earliest villains to really threaten the Watchtower once it's assembled, stalking them with his wildly out-of-the-box technology and nearly beating them all, only stopped by Catwoman of all people showed up on the Watchtower, because she's technically not a superhero and so he has no contingency plan for her. Later another Injustice Gang will threaten the Watchtower while Lex is under the influence of Maggeddon. This lets us include the awesome twist where Batman reveals that he's figured out the technology Prometheus uses to load skills and knowledge into his own brain, and reprograms him with, I'm quoting here, "the physical characteristics of one man... Doctor Stephen Hawking."

Batman literally beat someone by tricking their nervous system into believing they had motor neurone disease. Lunacy.

Outside of those stories, we're sticking pretty close to the origin as laid out all the way back in his first appearance. We never actually learn Prometheus's actual name; the name Curt Calhoun is taken from an entirely different character also called Prometheus, but otherwise that origin gets very specific; his parents being killed to stop their thrillkilling, learning Silat in Malaysia, pitfighting in Brazil, moving among European Aristocracy, working as an assassin, and eventually discovering his Ghost Zone by killing tibetan alien monks.

Some of our story is new; we added a career as a terrorist agent and programmer for Kobra, and invented the idea that he was deliberately searching for access to the Ghost Zone after being introduced to it as a subject for the same experiments Wade Elling's meta-deterrent program was running that would eventually lead to the creation of Warmaker-One. it just seems like such an obvious connection to make, and gives Prometheus and the General a little more friction when they both join the Injustice Gang.

Prometheus's Future

There really aren't comic canon stories featuring Prometheus that we'd want to adapt after the Injustice Gang. For a while, we were using Prometheus in a few other stories that featured particularly lethal situations where cities were bombed and characters were killed, because that was how Prometheus has generally been used, but none of it felt particularly good, because that's just not the version of this character any of us like.

So we've come up with something very different for this character's future. When he's able to escape the prison of his own making and restore his nervous system back to normal, and begins a new attack on Justice, we actually want him to wind up fighting the current Teen Titans. During the story the entirety of Mount Justice, the headquarters they used when they were Young Justice, will wind up absorbed inside the Ghost Zone. When they defeat him, they will have a whole new headquarters; a mountain base inside a portable nether-space they can access from anywhere. This is the catalyst for this group returning to use the name Young Justice, allowing a new generation of Titans to emerge down the line, all because of this one villain that we get to use in a way that is as fun and exciting as he's meant to be.

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