Spellbinder
37 years ago - Ira Billings is born, the son of a wealthy hedge fund manager.
28 years ago - 9-year-old Ira is sent into full time psychiatric care. He begins learning how to manipulate his doctors.
22 years ago - 15-year-old Ira designs the earliest version of his virtual reality tech, at first primarily used for gaming. His father sells the designs, but he keeps the prototypes.
19 years ago - 18-year-old Ira attends Gateway University studying Psychology while maintaining his interest in virtual reality.
15 years ago - 22-year-old Ira earns his bachelors degree and begins working on his post grad degree in psychology, applying what he learns about hypnosis to his virtual reality technology.
13 years ago - 24-year-old Ira earns his masters, and begins working as a counselor for students of Gateway University, privately manipulating them using virtual reality hypnosis technology, subtly manipulating their lives.
10 years ago - 27-year-old Ira has Donna Troy as a patient. He manipulates her with his hypnosis technology, but she is able to break through his illusions and expose him. He uses his technology to directly control people into stealing for him, going by Spellbinder, forcing Donna & Diana Prince to navigate his illusions to defeat him.
6 years ago - 31-year-old Ira begins incorporating actual magic into his technology, making his hypnotic illusion casting even more potent. He goes after Donna Troy again, making her believe her past was a lie, and that she was merely a delusional young woman. She is saved from his illusion by Lilith Clay, but Ira escapes.
4 years ago - 33-year-old Ira Billings uses his completely rebuilt technology to trap Donna Troy in a even more complex illusion in which she is trapped in an endless cycle of torment, wanting to see if he can break her. Donna is able to overcome the illusion with the help of Kyle Rayner and Roy Harper, and together they are able to capture him.
Spellbinder is essentially a fairly run-of-the-mill Silver Age character that has seen most of his success in various adaptations across other media. He's also experienced a few updates over the years that have been pretty interesting, but there's never been a singular comic book take on this character that's really established him as canonically relevant.
We happen to have a very specific role this character fits perfectly, however, so now we get to to find a way to adapt this obscure character to our timeline.
We happen to have a very specific role this character fits perfectly, however, so now we get to to find a way to adapt this obscure character to our timeline.
Spellbinder's Comic HistoryThe original Spellbinder first appeared in Detective Comics # 358 in 1956, a pretty classic creation of Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino. Just like a lot of their characters, he was a guy who used technology to derive some sort of effect, and then used that effect to commit crimes until his gimmick wears out and he's caught by the hero. In this case, Delbert Billings is an art forger, and his gimmick is that he can produce hypnotic illusions. He's a perfectly functional villain for one story, at least, but there just wasn't that much that stood out about him. He had an absolutely lunatic costume, which we'll get into later, but other than that he was just one more baddy in a catalog of characters.
Spellbinder did appear a few more times over the next few decades, but those appearances were incredibly limited. You started to see him a little more often in the early 90s, if only because he was just a little bit more functional than the absolute joke characters like Kite Man and Condiment King. |
|
|
Chuck Dixon's Detective Comics # 691 was part of the 1995 crossover event Underworld Unleashed, which featured Neron, the DC equivilent of the devil, reaching out to a series of villains and offering them greater power in exchange for their soul. Neron finds Spellbinder on the run from the law in a hotel room along with his girlfriend, Fay Moffet. Billings turns him down Neron's offer of power, but Fay responds by shooting him dead and asking Neron if the offer was open to anyone. It's specifically that he shot him FIRST and asked second that I find so wild in that moment. From this point, we were introduced to Lady Spellbinder, a character that has way more appearances than the classic Spellbinder, if for no reason other than she was almost comically underdressed. She was a regular fixture in villain crossovers, and also regularly clashed with the Birds of Prey and with Barbara Gordon in particular.
Fay was killed during Infinite Crisis in 2007, and from that point we didn't see much of Spellbinder until the new 52 in 2011. A new version of the character named Viktor Mironov that was entirely based in magic made an appearance in Constantine's series. and much later in the 2022 series Batgirls we meet Charles Dante, a thoroughly re-imagined take on the character with a costume so strange it almost out-does the original. But of course, most of the comic appearances during this time are actually adaptations of the character we're actually using here; the version of Spellbinder from the animated series Batman Beyond. |
Animated SpellbinderI hope we're not blowing your mind too hard when we tell you that most of what makes Batman Beyond such a great story is that it uses a lot of the story beats from Spider-Man, and that the rogues gallery from the show is pretty much a one-to-one replica of Spider-Man's rogues gallery. Spellbinder is absolutely the Batman Beyond equivilent of Mysterio, just using some of the trappings of a classic Batman villain in his backstory. This time it's Ira Billings, rather than Dilbert, and he's the high school counselor at Terry's school, and who uses advanced technology to create his illusions to fight Batman and stage crimes. He shows up in a number of episodes, all themed around different types of virtual reality technology.
We're primarily building our version of Spellbinder from this take on the character. We'll certainly be using this costume (although the latest costume with horns for eyes is absolutely wild, and I'm very in favor of this costume being deployed once the character joins Tartarus... but we're getting ahead of ourselves.) |
|
|
Our Spellbinder StoryThe main reason we are including Spellbinder is because he's actually an ideal foil for Donna Troy. Donna has cannonically been constantly confronted by forces that make her question her own story and her own origins, primarily because her actual origins have been in flux so consistently. We wanted to give Donna an enemy that was specifically designed to challenge her, and when this idea was proposed it just fit her so perfectly.
So for our story, we're introducing Spellbinder as a psychiatrist who uses his interest in virtual reality and image projection technology to manipulate and control his patients, until he's confronted by one patient that resists his control, who he goes on to obsess over and continually challenges he, forcing her to fight her way out of his control. This makes him an ideal candidate for Vandal Savage's Tartarus, the team built to mirror the lineup of the new Watchtower. He's actually a very outside-the box addition to that team, and his strangeness is why I'm actually tempted to suggest that we use the new 52 costume redesign at this point, to highlight just how bizarre he is. |