The Brain
67 years ago - Ernst Morden is born in France, the son of British parents.
50 years ago - 17-year-old Ernst attends the Sorbonne.
48 years ago - 19-year-old Ernst earns his bachelors degree and begins his graduate work, secretly fascinated with the work of Gerald Shugel.
45 years ago - 22-year-old Ernst acquires Mallah, using him as a test subject, slowly increasing his intelligence.
44 years ago - 23-year-old Ernst has all his research suspended when his work on the brains of animals is exposed. He is taken in as a researcher in the labs of Niles Caulder, who recognizing that his work could save lives.
43 years ago - 24-year-old Ernst, seeing Niles Caulder's work saving Cliff Steele's brain in a robot body, begins planning to do the same with his own brain.
39 years ago - 28-year-old Ernst takes on Mallah, his gorilla lab animal, as his devoted assistant.
37 years ago - 30-year-old Ernst Morden uses sanitarium patient Rose Canton in his experiments. Unaware that only her hidden alternate personality was empowered, she is written off as a failure.
36 years ago - 31-year-old Ernst's body is decimated in a lab accident. His lab assistant Mallah follows his instructions, saving his brain in a jar. His techniques to transfer his brain are not ready, leaving him permanently disembodied. Left completely insane, he abandons his name and chooses to go by The Brain. He and Mallah destroy Niles Caulder's lab, stealing his equipment, blaming him for the accident.
32 years ago - 35-year-old Brain has Mallah stage an toxic waste accident, mutating Laura De Mille. He stabilizes her powers, twisting her mind. They begin setting up their new laboratories in the catacombs under her school.
30 years ago - 37-year-old Brain begins selling his experiments to the highest bidder, his criminal organization earning the name the Brotherhood of Evil
26 years ago - 41-year-old Brain gives a massive donation to H.I.V.E.
24 years ago - 43-year-old Brain’s Brotherhood of Evil first comes into conflict with Niles Caulder's Doom Patrol.
22 years ago - 45-year-old Brain agrees to subject Wade LeFarge to the unfinished adrenocorticotropic hormone, enhancing his body but leaving him dangerously unhinged.
15 years ago - 52-year-old Brain fakes his own death when the Brotherhood of Evil are cornered in their catacombs of Paris after their attack on the Doom Patrol's Doom Manor. His escape module sends his brain bottle to his secret lab at the bed of the Mediterranean Sea.
4 years ago - 63-year-old Brain is found in his secret lab by Emil La Salle, who contacts Mallah in prison. Mallah escapes with the help of Christopher Smith, traveling to the hidden lab and gaining access, where Mallah kills Chris, and they rebuild the Brotherhood of Evil. The Brain drugs Madame Rouge & Angela Haswkins to control their reunion.
The idea of villain being a disembodied brain honestly isn't THAT unique an idea... you see it in screwball horror all the time. What you don't see, however, is that disembodied brain actually getting character development and driving huge parts of the plot of a traditional superhero narrative, and then regularly being played for laughs because he's essentially an inanimate object. The whole Doom Patrol is such a weird part of the DC universe, so of course they need one of the weirdest nemesis in comics.
The Brain's Comic HistoryThe Brain's first appearance is in the first issue of Doom Patrol, which was confusingly issue #86, as the book was previously "My Greatest Adventure:, but was renamed because the Doom Patrol are awesome. He was created by Doom Patrol co-creator Arnold Drake, who confessed later to having done a similar character played for laughs in comics he wrote starring real life comedians Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope, and deliberately just reusing the idea but playing it straight. The Brain was a super-criminal, part of an organization deliberately designed to serve as the opposite of the Doom Patrol. I can't say for certain if the intention upon creation was to make a literal nemesis for Doom Patrol leader Niles Caulder, but whether they meant to or not, boy did they nail it out of the park
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The Brain made fairly regular appearances across the original run of the Doom Patrol, establishing himself as a very reliable antagonist. He and the Brotherhood of Evil, with their oddball French flair, really carved their own little niche in the world of DC baddies.
Like all of the Doom Patrol mythos, the Brain saw some real lunatic character development while the series was written by Grant Morrison, even though he made relatively few appearances. In fact, it really all happened in issue #34, when Mallah (notably a gorilla) and the Brain finally confess their love for each other. Wildly, this relationship between an intelligent ape and a supergenius that is basically a piece of furniture became their defining characteristic as they continued to appear regularly in books like Young Justice, Batgirl, and the Outsiders. Both characters were killed in the mid 2000's rush to make comics as joyless as possible when Gorilla Grodd actually used the Brain to beat Mallah to death. |
Our Brain StoryWe needed to create the original name for the Brain, and took it from another character in the issue where he first appears (although as it happens it also winds up being the name of another Doom Patrol enemy that we're not using, Mr. Nobody.) Getting our version of the Brain right basically requires three elements, and if we tackled them from least to most important, we wind up going in reverse chronological order. The first is that we do want to include the relationship between Brain and Mallah... its such a weird element of their story, but it really defined most of their modern appearances, and it just leans into the particular strangeness of the Brotherhood.
Second, we've built most of the Doom Patrol timeline so that it all happens much earlier, both because it's necessary to set up Beast Boy properly, but also in an attempt to roughly mirror actual comic continuity, since the Doom Patrol and related characters really do vanish from continuity for a while, so we actually need to build that into our story for the Brotherhood... and a lot of that stems from having The Brain fake his own death. We made it deliberately odd, having him launch his brain in an escape pod into a secret lab beneath the Mediterranean Sea, but that's the sort of antics this character gets up to. |
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FInally, we want to make sure that we firmly establish the Brain as one of the uber-geniuses of the DC Universe. He's tied to Niles Caulder like only the most bonded of comic book nemesis like Reed Richards & Dr. Doom, or Charles Xavier & Magneto, but by building up that relationship we're setting him up to fulfill a major role in the world, even becoming one of those story elements we can exploit in other places to help explain some of the stranger elements of out world.
The most recent story element we're using the Brain in is in Vandal Savage's villainous think tank the Light. He's such a perfect inclusion into that group that it almost doesn't work without him, because while every member of that group is specifically meant to be one the biggest criminal geniuses in the world, they're all insane in their own way, and the Brain is one of the most delightfully crazy characters in the DC catalog. |