The General
57 years ago - Wade Eiling is born.
39 years ago - 18-year-old Wade Eiling attends West Point.
34 years ago - 23-year-old Wade Eiling becomes a commissioned army officer.
16 years ago - 41-year-old Wade Eiling becomes a field general.
14 years ago - 43-year-old Wade Eiling leads the military response to the Shaggy Man, a creature spawned by Dr. Andrew Zagarian's work in tissue regeneration and his polyalloy human tissue. The Justice League intervenes, and Eiling holds them accountable. Shaggy Man is trapped in a polyalloy prison in the ocean.
13 years ago - 44-year-old Wade Eiling comes into direct conflict with the Justice League over the jurisdiction of their satellite. He is ordered to stand down, and is later placed in charge of developing a Metahuman deterrent for Argus by Amanda Waller. He creates the First Strike Program, using the technology developed by Pat Dugan. He approaches Christopher Smith to serve as his head security officer.
7 years ago - 50-year-old Wade Eiling withholds Nathanial Adam's pardon when he returns to the timestream, instead using him as part of the First Strike Program as one of their meta-soldiers, also including Celia Forrestal as the pilot of the Argo Harness and Scott Sawyer as the primary subject of their Warmaker Project. He recovers John Corben & updates his hardware but he escapes and rampages, and is stopped by Superman.
6 years ago - 50-year-old Wade Eiling, worried that the First Strike Program will be mothballed with Amanda Waller being removed as tactical director of Argus, secretly ships Chemo out of cold storage and releases it in Washington DC, using the massive property damage when the Justice League stops it as an excuse to order Christopher Smith & the Americommandos to arrest the League.
5 years ago - 52-year-old General Wade Eiling's blackmail of Nathanial Adam & his involvement in the Chemo disaster are exposed. The First Strike Program is decomissioned. Adam joins the Justice League, while Celia Forrestal joins the Global Guardians. Eiling retains the Scott Sawyer Warmaker Project under a blackbox Ultramarine comission.
4 years ago - 53-year-old Wade Eiling engineers Scott Sawyer replacing Celia Forrestal on the Global Guardians, He loses his commission when Sawyer goes crazy.
3 years ago - 54-year-old Wade Eiling is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. He has the Shaggy Man recovered, and his mind transferred into it's brain, becoming the General. He attacks the Watchtower, until he is incapacitated and teleported onto an Asteroid.
1 year ago - 56-year-old Wade Eiling is freed from his asteroid prison by Lex Luthor's Injustice Gang. He attacks the Watchtower as part of Luthor's plan, ultimately stopped by Orion who sends him into Null-Space.
There are plenty of characters in the DC cannon that have multiple stages in their story across their history, but the General stands out because those stages are actually evolved from two completely separate pieces of DC lore. So separate, in fact, that we're actually going to do two different comic histories. We wound up using this character quite a bit, let us know what you think!
Wade Eiling's Comic HistoryWade Eiling appeared for the first time in 1987, in Cary Bates' new series Captain Atom. This is one of the new series that launched after the Crisis of Infinite Earths, incorporating the recently acquired Charlton character in a whole new story set in the Post Crisis DC. It's a really fun series, and a huge part of what made the series tick is antagonist General Wade Eiling.
Eiling is cut from a very particular cloth; if you watch a lot of eighties-era action movies, you see this sort of character a lot; hard as nails, corrupt, scheming corporate/military bigwigs that operate above and/or outside the law, openly manipulating the hero who is nonetheless powerless to do anything about it. Eiling hit the nail on the head SO hard that he appears in comics all across this era fulfilling a fantastic archetype, from the Suicide Squad to Firestorm. Eiling eventually featured in Morrison's JLA, where he builds the Ultramarines, a new group of cloned heroes under government control (a story that was later copied in the Justice League animated series episode Ultimatum featuring the Ultimen) That same story also saw Eiling, who was apparently dying of a brain tumor, upgrade himself into a true villain by putting his mind into the synthetic body of the Shaggy Man. |
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The Shaggy Man's Comic HistoryThe Shaggy Man is a much older artifact of DC lore, dating all the way back to Justice League of America # 45 in 1966. Shaggy Man was a synthetic body built by scientist Andrew Zagarian from his experimental plastic alloy, which was meant to be an advancement in artificial body tissue for limb replacement. The body reacted to his power source, spontaneously growing tons of hair and attacking anything that moved, proving so powerful and indestructible that the Justice League actually can't beat it, they can only imprison it.
What I really like about this era of Gardner Fox's Justice League is the way he sprinkled little science facts all through his storytelling. Dr Zagarian gives little lectures about the different types of materials used in prosthetics, Green Arrow remarks about animals that can regrow limbs, and we even learn a little about Roche's Limit; a term in Celestial Mechanics. Also, It's noteworthy that Dr. Zagarian isn't an evil mad scientist at all, he's actually completely altruistic. One wonders that if he was closer to the T.O, Morrows and Professor Ivos of the world, perhaps Shaggy Man would have had a more recurring place as a Justice League baddie? As he was, the Shaggy Man made a very limited number of appearances over the next few decades in the pages of the Justice League of America, and that was pretty much it. He was an incredibly destructive threat, but he also really wasn't malicious at all, with basically no intellect to speak of. Until Wade Eiling got ahold of him. |
Our General StoryWith the Shaggy Man's body, the General was now an incredibly lethal threat to the Justice League. He was only defeated by being teleported away... and was brought back as part of the far more dangerous second incarnation of Lex Luthor's Injustice Gang, basically providing a hammer with which to beat the Justice League into submission.
General Eiling is an incredibly useful character in our timeline. We put him in place as we built Captain Atom's timeline, but he just kept providing narrative framework for more and more characters. His work building his government-backed "meta-deterrent' is a great place for us to structure the stories of several other characters, and he just wound up a great tool for us to use. The Shaggy Man, by comparison, is a fun one-off story to include in the timeline of the Justice League, but we also used him as a way to build out Eiling's history of antagonism with the League, and with superheroes in general. Then, of course, comes Eiling's fantastic final act, turning himself into the General, fighting the Watchtower, and appearing again as part of the Injustice Gang during the attack of Maggeddon. The General has made a few appearances in canon after this story, but we're absolutely making this the end of his story, because at this point, this character is pretty much perfect. |
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