RJ Brande
2935 - RJ Brande is born on Earth.
2951 - 16-year-old RJ Brande drops out of school. he starts his own tech company, Brande Mechanics.
2957 - 22-year-old RJ Brande releases his new Jump Gate technology, revolutionizing Jump Gates and redefining interstellar travel. Brande Mechanics is renamed Brande Industries.
2968 - 33-year-old RJ Brande marries his wife Zhay Durgo.
2971 - 36-year-old RJ Brande expands his company, starting Brande Genetics to work in the biotech field.
2975 - 40-year-old RJ Brande officially becomes the richest person in the Galaxy. He dedicates himself to using his fortune to help the people of the galaxy, but struggles with how to do so.
2976 - 41-year-old RJ Brande's wife Zhay Durgo dies unexpectedly.
2978 - 43-year-old RJ Brande adopts his wife's orphaned niece, Luornu Durgo.
2985 - 51-year-old RJ Brande's adoptive daughter Luornu Durgo dies of a rare genetic disorder.
2987 - 53-year-old RJ Brande's labs create a synthetic being. The technique is unrepeatable. She is given the memories & personality of Brande's 11-year-old adoptive daughter Luornu Durgo.
2990 - 56-year-old RJ Brande is almost killed in an assassination attempt. He is saved by Rokk Krinn, Irma Ardeen & Garth Ranzz. When they choose to become the Legion of Super-Heroes, he agrees to fund them.
The Legion of Super-Heroes has of course undergone more complete reboots (and threeboots, and retroboots) of their continuity than almost any other facet of the DC mythology, so for any one supporting character to have consistently remained a part of their story is no small feat. RJ Brande is, very simply, the man who makes the Legion possible. He finances them from the beginning, encouraging them to be superheroes. That role has taken many forms, and so we wanted to work out just what OUR RJ Brande is. For us, we wanted to build him as a man who wants to help and who believes in what the Legion is doing, but also privately is just a lonely man who wants to give these young people a sense of camaraderie.
RJ Brande's Comic HistoryBrande's first appearance is in Adventure Comics #350-351 in 1966, where he's just a guy who appears on a screen asking for help. In the Legion's classic rapid-fire worldbuilding, as the richest man in the galaxy, and the man who finances the team. He shows up again in #359-360 in '67, really only in just a few panels. It was a story where the whole population of Earth had turned against the Legion, and Brande was no different, turning them over to the police... although this story does also quickly inform us that the reason he financed the Legion was because they had saved his life at some point in the past. This story actually happens over in Superboy # #147 from 1968, which literally showed the founding members saving Brande in a story called "The Origin of the Legion".
Brande's role as the Legion's fun uncle continued as they appeared more and more in the pages of Superboy and the book was renamed Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. In 1981, a three-issue miniseries called Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes introduced the idea that Brande was dying, and needed a blood transfusion, which meant the Legion had to find his lost son. Saturn Girl read his mind and discovered that he once had superpowers, but had lost them, and that he was forced to hide as a human ever since. From this, the Legion deduced that he was actually a Durlan, the mysterious shape-changing species and that his long-lost son was actually Chameleon Boy. |
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Our RJ Brande StoryThis is actually a pretty straightforward timeline for us. We did a little work to sort of build up his life, having him start his company as a teenager (he does spend his life identifying with teenagers) before revolutionizing Jump Gates, making him the richest man in the galaxy. We added a few ideas to sort of emphasize that he is sort of lonely in his wealth, and that he is looking for something to do with it that will help the galaxy.
We did make a few pretty specific changes; the biggest being that our Brande is not secretly a Durlan. It's a cute story idea, but it is a bit of a sudden left turn for no reason. Instead, we created a relationship with Duplicate Girl; specifically saying that she is an artificial being with the memories of his deceased adopted daughter. It's not a huge departure from the character as we know him, but we believe it works better to connect Brande to the Legion and make his relationship with them clear. |