Spartan

73 years ago - Jack Marlowe is born in Canada.

57 years ago - 16-year-old Jack Marlowe is accepted into Columbia University in New York City where he studies Biotechnology and Chemical Physics. He becomes academic rivals and fast friends with Toshiro Mishawa.

55 years ago - 18-year-old Jack Marlowe earns his bachelor's degrees and becomes a grad student at Columbia. He first meets Jenny Sparks.

52 years ago - 21-year-old Jack Marlowe earns his first doctorate in Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics.

49 years ago - 24-year-old Jack Marlowe begins assisting Jenny Sparks with her research into the Bleed, the space between dimensions.

48 years ago - 25-year-old Jack Marlowe is one of the founding members of Jenny Sparks Stormwatch, a secret organization designed to protect Earth and the barriers between dimensions.

40 years ago - 33-year-old Jack Marlowe is killed in Stormwatch's final battle with Tao, but manages to use his own brain's neural map to overload Tao's network, and store himself in the alien supercomputer. He uses Tao's biosynthetic android bodies to build his labs under New York.

11 years ago - Jack Marlowe and Jenny Sparks are lost in a dying dimension. They meet Zealot, and join her ongoing battle with the Daemonites.

5 years ago - Jack Marlowe attempts to traverse the bleed closing off Zealot's dimension. His android body is almost destroyed.

3 years ago - Jack Marlowe assists Jenny Sparks, newly returned from the bleed, to wrest control of a Voidship from her former operative Manchester Black and the Elite. With control of Bunny the Voidship, Jenny recreates Stormwatch.

1 year ago - Jack Marlowe and Stormwatch make themselves public when they join the battle against Mageddon.

WildC.A.T.s creator Jim Lee is the man responsible for perhaps the most iconic look of X-Men field leader and everybody's current favorite, Cyclops. It's not really surprising that he would apply the same design philosophies when building the field leader of his creator-owned team... which is kind of infamous for being only different enough from Lee's X-Men to be legally distinct. As Image went on, however, there were a ton of other characters building around the same archetype, and nobody has produced anyone who feels quite as iconic as Spartan. He just delivers on the core concept so well that I would argue he should be counted among the most iconic early Wildstorm characters. Adapting his frankly insane amount of backstory into our timeline has given us something really fun and useful, and I hope you like it!

Spartan's Comic History

Spartan was one of the founding members of Jim Lee & Brandon Choi's WildC.A.T.s, their launch title for Image comics in 1993. Just like the rest of the now-iconic team, they were all built specifically for their looks first, with their story filled in afterward in their long ongoing series. What we know up front is that Spartan is the field leader of the team, and that he has an android body that can be repaired when it takes damage. Over time, we learn that the WildC.A.T.s are a team of alien hybrids, part of the Kherubim species and their ongoing war with the evil Daemonites. Spartan is Yohn Kohl, a full blooded Kherubim who crashed on Earth thousands of years ago, perpetuating the war here as the two species blended into the population. He'd taken the name John Colt and had a whole superheroic career starting in the 30's, which ended in a battle where his body was destroyed, but his personality and possibly memories were copied to later be uploaded into a new android body. Bear in mind, this all just BACKSTORY.

Spartan's body was destroyed a few times over his history. During a time when the WildC.A.T.s were presumed lost he actually was recovered and rebuilt by Stormwatch, and served with them for a time (alongside his son from a former relationship with fellow felly full-blooded Kherubim, Zealot). In a later WildC.A.T.s series, he took over as the head of the organization funding them, the Halo Corporation, this time using the name Jack Marlowe.

Our Spartan Story

Image would go on to have multiple series that started to get into deep action figure collection mode, just cranking out characters that were almost interchangeable stylistically. Spartan might be a pretty clear attempt to stylistically copy Cyclops of the X-Men, but he manages to do so really successfully. He has his own iconic look, his own powerset, and just mountains of character backstory to build with. When we imagined including him in our take on Stormwatch, we knew up front that we wouldn't be using ALL of his history, but that there was so much here we could assemble a fully faithful version of the character that fit right into our timeline.

First, we knew up front that our version of this character wasn't going to be involved with the on going Kherubim / Daemonite conflict. We're making that a feature of the alternate universe Zealot came from, and we didn't want to share that origin unnecessarily. He doesn't really have to be a Kherubim, his cool android body and the powers they wield can come from pretty much anywhere. We don't want them to be built by human technology, of course, that shouldn't be within the reach of our science. That problem kind of answers itself, then... the android bodies he's uploaded his consciousness into are something he stole from the enemy that killed him. We used Tao, a character from one of the later WildC.A.T.s series; reimagining him as an interdimensional android warlord. This is the battle that actually destroys the original Stormwatch, and Spartan taking over his android bodies is the thing that actually defeats him, setting up the idea that he now has these interchangeable android bodies that are extremely lifelike and well beyond current human technology.

Of course, if he doesn't have the android body until the END of the original Stormwatch, who was he before? We decided to use the name Jack Marlowe rather than John Colt; no particular reason, other than Jack Marlowe just feels like a less generic name. We imagined him as an early science hero; an adventuring scientist helping Jenny Sparks in her attempt to understand the Bleed in the years after regular access to it was cut off in the war with Sliding Albion.

This idea suddenly gives this fantastic structure to the original Stormwatch. As a talented scientist, he can be contemporaries with Dr. Mishawa, the original Engineer. Later on, with his new android body, he can be stranded in the dying universe with Jenny where they meet Zealot and assist in the war with the Daemonites... we had him return to Earth earlier as a way to illustrate how lethal traversing the Bleed can be, showing that he was only able to survive because of his repairable android body.

Modern Spartan is a cool addition to our Stormwatch, replacing a lot of their earlier members with the character they were clearly emulating, but it's his contributions to the long history of the team that make him such a great character to add.

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