The Elite
5 years ago - Manchester Black discovers an rift in spacetime during a mission, and traces it back to an abandoned orbital Voidship, locked in an Earth orbit in otherdimensional space, a remnant of a long-extinct extradimensional empire. Cutting ties with his handlers, he tracks supporters who can help him activate the Voidship, naming it Bunny. They use it as a headquarters to become a new superhuman collective, the Elite. Black pushes them to be more proactive, ending threats before they happen.
Membership: 31-year-old Manchester Black, 24-year-old Angela Spica, 36-year-old Paul Booker, 23-year-old Haruto Satou (Rampotratek)
Membership: 31-year-old Manchester Black, 24-year-old Angela Spica, 36-year-old Paul Booker, 23-year-old Haruto Satou (Rampotratek)
4 years ago - Manchester Black's more violent, proactive approach brings the Elite into conflict with Superman. Black pushes back hard, insisting that Superman is obsolete. Black challenges Superman to a fight to the death against the Elite on the moon, and it appears that Superman sinks to his level to kill his followers and lobotomize Black, but he reveals that it was all staged, that Superman's dedication to hope is harder but ultimately never obsolete. While his powers are temporarily deactivated, Black is taken into custody by Checkmate and imprisoned.
Membership: 32-year-old Manchester Black, 25-year-old Angela Spica, 37-year-old Paul Booker, 24-year-old Haruto Satou (Rampotratek)
Membership: 32-year-old Manchester Black, 25-year-old Angela Spica, 37-year-old Paul Booker, 24-year-old Haruto Satou (Rampotratek)
3 years ago - 33-year-old Manchester Black's powers return. He escapes the Checkmate facility imprisoning him, and attempts to reassemble the Elite so they can kill Superman, but only 25-year-old Haruto Satou (Rampotratek) joins him. Bunny's reactivation allows Jenny Sparks and Zealot to return to this dimension, where Jenny wrests control of the Voidship, using it to assemble a new Stormwatch. Satou is killed by 38-year-old Paul Booker. The Elite are fractured, and Black takes his own life.
Noteworthy Teams
Original Members
This is a really interesting nugget of Superman lore, not just because it's a really good story in and of itself, but also because there's some really fun behind-the-scenes stuff going on here. It's a direct response to the relationship between DC and former Image imprint Wildstorm which, lest we forget, DC had actually owned for several years at this point.
Finding a way to integrate the Wildstorm catalog into DC is tricky, because it's never really been done successfully by DC itself. Weirdly, this pastiche of a Wildstorm team in the pages of a DC book gives us our first small foothold in doing exactly that.
Finding a way to integrate the Wildstorm catalog into DC is tricky, because it's never really been done successfully by DC itself. Weirdly, this pastiche of a Wildstorm team in the pages of a DC book gives us our first small foothold in doing exactly that.
The Elite's Comic HistoryIn 2001 the Wildstorm superhero team the Authority was at the height of it's prominence as one of the most important superhero teams in comics; a modern reimagining of a Justice League-like team (although not a direct pastiche, which I appreciate) that was more proactive and more violent that traditional superheroes. At the time there was a popular prevailing notion that the Authority was more relevant to the modern world, and that traditional superheroes were obsolete in comparison.
Over in the pages of Action Comics, writer Joe Kelly (who was also part of the writing collective Man of Action Studios that would, among other things, go on to create Ben 10) wrote an award winning story in issue #775, called "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?" He introduces the Elite, a team that is very much a riff on the Authority the same way the Authority is a riff on the Justice League. They present themselves as being the modern, proactive take on superheroes that is rendering heroes like Superman obsolete. We see Superman go through a real crisis, but the story comes out the other end making a real powerful statement about the importance of heroes like Superman. It's one of the best single issues of a comic you're likely to read. Manchester Black and the Elite appeared again later in Joe Kelly's Action Comics run, and then a version of the team was assembled as Justice League Elite in a spinoff book created by Kelly a few years later, but it's really this story that makes this team and these characters so incredibly important. |
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Our Elite StoryWe're in kind of an interesting position here, because while we do absolutely want to include Manchester Black and the Elite in our timeline because there are such incredibly important enemies of Superman, we're actually also including our take on the characters they're BASED on. This can be a bit of a trap, because they begin from very narratively similar places and could very easily feel a little redundant It really becomes important to steer headlong into those similarities, to tie their origins together and use them as a way to highlight their differences. In this way, we can really emphasize the specific heroic take we want to use for Stormwatch by deliberately showing how they're NOT like the Elite.
As for our team, while we're maintaining it's structure, we're actually swapping out a few characters. Manchester Black is really the only must-have, a character who at this point you could actually include among the best Superman villains. Going through the other three original characters; In place of Coldcast, the team's looming big powerhouse character, we're using Major Disaster, another character with a lot of influence by Joe Kelly in his development. While we do really like Menagerie, we have the character she's based on, the Engineer, in our timeline and there's really no reason to include them both. In the end the only other original member of the Elite that we're maintaining is the Hat. |