Rocky Davis
74 years ago - Lester Davis is born in poverty in Chicago.
68 years ago - 6-year-old Lester Davis's mother leaves his father, moving them into shelters.
62 years ago - 12-year-old Lester Davis uses his father's reputation to begin fighting for money on the streets of Chicago. He is given the nickname Rocky.
60 years ago - 14-year-old Rocky Davis's father attacks his mother, and he beats him unconscious. He is brought into a local boxing / MMA gym and begins training.
57 years ago - 17-year-old Rocky Davis has his first professional fight.
53 years ago - 21-year-old Rocky Davis first fights for the Heavyweight championship, winning the title.
50 years ago - 24-year-old Rocky Davis, June Robbins, Ace Morgan, Red Ryan, and Professor Walter Haley survive a plane crash on a volcanic island when their B-47 Stratojet transpacific flight encounters an unexplained spatial phenomenon. They bond over the belief that they had escaped death and felt driven to make something of their borrowed time. Upon returning to civilization, they begin an Adventure Club, The Challengers of the Unknown.
40 years ago - 34-year-old Rocky Davis &The Challengers of the Unknown agree to help free the imprisoned leader of a native resistance movement. Rocky & Red Ryan are intentionally arrested as part of the breakout.
32 years ago - 42-year-old Rocky Davis and The Challengers of the Unknown are trapped in a rigged-to-explode Challengers Mountain along with a group of hostages when it is sabotaged by Hunzar Manning. Professor Walter Haley sacrifices himself, gunned down by Manning's men, to reconnect Ultivac to its body. Ultivac sacrifices itself to save everyone, proving itself an honorary Challenger. Rocky, Ace Morgan, & June Robbins choose to go their separate ways, honoring their roles as the surviving Challengers in their own ways.
31 years ago - 43-year-old Rocky Davis begins working with educational organizations, using his time as a Challenger to inspire people to do the most they can with the time they have.
22 years ago - 52-year-old Rocky Davis accepts that he is gay and comes out to Ace Morgan & June Robbins.
19 years ago - 55-year-old Rocky Davis begins the Challengers Foundation after the death of Ace Morgan, using his fortune to help build housing and access to drinking water and medicine worldwide.
14 years ago - 60-year-old Rocky Davis runs for Congress, becoming the Representative for Colorado.
6 years ago - 68-year-old Rocky Davis retires from Congress.
The individual members of the Challengers do have their own personalities and specialties, but what they don't really have is their own STORY. They all exist, more or less, just as a function of the whole. So it follows that we're going to need to take the fairly bare-bones idea of each of these characters and see what we can build from them.
Rocky Davis's StoryRocky's role in the Challengers, from the very beginning, has been as their resident strong guy. In the earliest stories they were all more or less equal in their general abilities, they could all more or less perform the same feats of skill or strength or knowledge, their specialties just skewed in one direction or another. As time went on, however, Rocky started to have more and more of a big, gruff, and kind of simple personality. Once the Fantastic Four existed, it was pretty clear the writers were using him as the stand in for the Thing, and his relationship with Red absolutely copied Ben Grimm & Johnny Storm. When Corinna Stark joined the Challengers, Rocky even pined from him from afar, thinking himself too ugly for her attention, a move right out of the Ben / Alicia playbook.
We aren't going to be leaning in the same direction, preferring to imagine him as a more equal member of the original group, although we gave him a backstory deliberately meant to give him a rough upbringing. We introduced an idea that, long after the Challengers disband, he comes to terms with his own sexuality and comes out to Ace & June. We also gave him a long post-Challengers career as an educator, philanthropist, and congressman. Of the four original Challengers, it just seems fitting that Rocky would go on to have such a long and distinguished role to play long after he's done punching wizards and alien tentacle monsters. |
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