Terra-Man
1850 - Tobias Manning is born in Greens Fork, Indiana.
1864 - 14-year-old Tobias Manning's family moves from Indiana to California. His father dies along the way.
1869 - 19-year-old Tobias Manning leaves his mother and brothers in California and moves to Mason County Texas, working as a cowhand.
1871 - 21-year-old Tobias Manning starts rustling cattle
1875 - 25-year-old Tobias Manning and his fellow rustlers begin open war with the local law when two of them are jailed and lynched. He personally guns down over two dozen men over the next three years, becoming an infamous gunfighter.
1879 - 29-year-old Tobias Manning narrowly avoids a gunfight with Jonah Hex by turning on his own posse, handing them over and escaping.
1886 - 36-year-old Tobias Manning discovers a crashed Lexorian craft, and scavenges the technology inside to use as weapons. He robs several banks before he is tracked by El Diablo. In the midst of their gunfight, he is caught in an abduction beam, bringing him into space to recover the Lexorian technology. He's placed in suspended animation as a lab subject.
1891 - Tobias Manning is released from suspended animation in an experimental lab in a distant quadrant, where he begins adapting to using different technology, his capacity for violence continually startling his captors.
1901 - Tobias Manning escapes from his captivity In a small one-man craft, continually stealing and adapting new technology to use as a bounty hunter, using the name Terra-Man after his home planet.
1934 - Tobias Manning is tasked by the rulers of Throneworld to track down and capture the vanished Prince Gavyn. He follows their trail to Earth where he has become Starman. He stages several attempts to capture him but is continually defeated, imprisoned on Earth.
1944 - Tobias Manning is freed from prison by Wotan to join the Injustice Society. He again attempts to capture Prince Gavyn, and engages in an extended air battle with Carter & Shiera Hall before he falls out of the sky.
I was getting near constant comments asking me how I was going to include Terra-Man for a really long time before I realized they were basically all coming from one person. This character has one incredibly voracious fan on our discord, and as a result I've been turning over how to include this character for a long time, even though he has always, clearly by design, defied any explanation as to why someone invented him in the first place.
We do finally think we have the perfect place to use him. I hope this one lives up to the weirdly intense expectations!
We do finally think we have the perfect place to use him. I hope this one lives up to the weirdly intense expectations!
Terra-Man's Comic HistoryTerra-Man appeared for the first time in Superman #249 in 1972. The issue was divided into two parts, beginning with Superman being confronted by this strange new enemy (all while he's stricken with a mysterious Kryptonian illness) and a second half that explained his origins. It seems he was a kid in the old west, whose father wanted him to be the most notorious desperado of all time, but was accidentally killed by an alien they encountered. The alien chose to adopt the boy and fulfill his father's wish, giving him access to all sorts of alien technology in the process, but also wiping his memory so he doesn't remember the killing of his father. Young Tobias manning grew up the apprentice of the alien, getting an implanted oxygenator-thermostat so he can breath and survive in the vacuum of space, and learning how to use all sorts of alien technology, including an energy lasso he used to break his own Arguvian Space-Steed, and a magical herb chewing tobacco that briefly gives him reality-altering powers. Seriously. After killing his mentor (he worked out that he'd killed his father), he returned to Earth as Terra-Man, the time dilation of his years of faster-than-light travel bringing him back today... to confront and be quickly defeated by Superman.
Terra-Man was a regularly reoccurring villain through the seventies and early eighties. There was a very different version of the character in the John Byrne era of Superman comics, but the original version returned just long enough to be murdered by Black Adam in the pages of 52, but he's shown up again in a recent issue of Superman, now somehow in possession of a time machine. |
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Our Terra-Man StoryI do not have an explanation for Terra-Man. His introductory issue is by Cary Bates with art by Swan Anderson, and I am fairly sure one of them must have had some sort of fever dream that they then worked backward to explain as a comic character. The particular combination of cowboy with a winged horse using magical space alien technology so completely defies explanation. I have to admit that the resulting character does work though. He achieves a sort of homogeneity of all his competing concepts and walks away sort of effortlessly cool.
We made a small change to the character's origin, in that it didn't really work for us to have him grow up in space. Instead, we gave him a long history as outlaw, loosely basing him on real-life outlaw Johnny Ringo. He has his obligatory interaction with Jonah Hex (everyone gets one), before we introduce him to his alien technology, Send him into space and give him a career as a human working as a bounty hunter in distant space. This gives us the perfect reason to return him to his native Earth when he's hired by Throneworld to capture their rogue deposed Prince Gavyn, or Starman from the Justice Society. The gives us a great reason to pit him against them as a member of the original Injustice Society, where he somehow, impossibly, actually seems to fit right in with all those weird Golden Age villains. |