The Key
39 years ago - Richard Rigel is born.
21 years ago - 18-year-old Richard Rigel goes to college to study chemistry. He makes money on the side by making designer drugs.
18 years ago - 21-year-old Richard Rigel leaves school entirely, focusing on his drug manufacturing.
15 years ago - 24-year-old Richard Rigel invents a rudimentary version of his psycho-chemicals. He begins working for Intergang, stealing from them to fund his own secret research.
12 years ago - 27-year-old Richard Rigel goes into hiding when Intergang is given control of Metropolis's drug trade, knowing they will soon discover his theft.
10 years ago - 29-year-old Richard Rigel's chemically unlocks his consciousness, developing new senses and wielding more of his brain. He abandons his identity, becoming the Key, administering his psycho chemicals to control people, including the Justice League. He is defeated and put in Arkham Asylum.
7 years ago - The 32-year-old Key reaches deeper into his own unconsciousness, becoming able to move through the Paths Beyond to bypass any locks, using his psycho-chemicals to stage an entire hive-mind crimewave. The Justice League turns his control back on itself, the feedback wave putting him in a coma.
3 years ago - The 36-year-old Key awakens, his consciousness fully unlocked, and uses his psycho chemicals to imprison the Watchtower in their own dream fictions, using their efforts to break free to unlock the Dream Realm. He is stopped by Green Arrow, returned to a coma and trapped in a fractal maze.
2 years ago - The 37-year-old Key overcomes his fractal maze prison, and attempts to access the Dream Realm, capturing Rebis & using them as a fuel source to break through Danny the Street into the Paths Beyond. Chief Niles Caulder sacrifices himself to try to save them. Gar Logan & Raven pursue him into the Paths Beyond with the remaining Doom Patrol. Rebis ultimately defeats him by transcending to a higher plane of existence, diffusing the Key across the surface of reality.
As we do Justice League Villains in our timeline, we run again and again into the fact that Grant Morrison based most of their groundbreaking JLA series around reimagining old League villains for modern audiences, meaning that quite a few of their stories wind up hinging on their appearances in that series. Even in that environment, however, The Key might be the MOST Grant Morrison villain the Justice League ever faced, even before they ever got their hands on the character.
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The Key's Comic Historythe Key appeared for the first time in Justice League of America #41 from 1965. The issue begins with the League all agreeing wholeheartedly that they should disband, all of them acting like it's about time, because it was always such a hassle. Then we meet the Key, who talks about how he uses his psycho-chemicals to unlock and control people, twisting them to his will. He also wields a key weapon, and is accompanied by his henchmen, the key-men.
That's really all there was to the Key. He didn't have an origin or a more in-depth definition of what he was even doing. He later posed as a different baddie, the Star-Tsar (we had to steal the civilian name from a different Star-Tsar to give to the Key because he never actually had one of his own). Through all of this, the Key continued to be a weird villain powered by what amounted to psychotropic drugs and mind control. It was like Gardner Fox looked into the future, read Morrison's Invisibles, and was just setting up a rough draft of a villain for Morrison to run with. |
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Morrison's take on the Key was practically unrecognizable, although they did quickly breeze through a backstory that was actually more complete than anything the character had ever had before, adding a history with Intergang, but the real genius here was in the way the story trapped the League members in their own personal Elseworlds stories all happening INSIDE the story we were reading, and as they unlocked the puzzle of their confinement, they were inadvertently unlocking access to a negative space that would make him a virtual god... essentially relying on the League's ability to always win. It's a great premise, and the Key, with his wild new design, was a great villain for that story.
We also got the fantastic moment where Connor Hawke has to use his dad's boxing glove arrow to save the day. it's just comic gold in every sense of the word. Of course, the Key would appear again after this story, but he really was tailor-built for this one storyline, and in his later appearances he never really provides anything specific that we couldn't get from a million other characters. |
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Our Key StoryThere's actually a lot of work that has to be done in order to get the Key set up to actually work in the timeline. For one thing, he doesn't actually have a backstory or any identity to speak of, or even a name. As we said earlier, we grabbed the name from another character to have used the Star-Tsar identity, but made sure to include the idea that he completely abandons that identity in favor of just going by 'the Key'. We also used the brief reference to working for Intergang.
Once he actually becomes the Key (I presume in a slightly less deranged costume at first) we wanted to give him a few very specific encounters with the Justice League. his actual in-cannon appearances are so abstract it's actually difficult to say what is happening in them, so we based each encounter on elements of his developing powers that he would unlock as he develops his psycho-chemicals. First, it's his ability to control people, which was the core ability in his first appearance. In this case, he actually takes over the Justice League, which would have made him VERY dangerous. In his second appearance, he also gains the ability to move himself into the Paths Beyond, effectively doing with drugs what most characters need magic to do. His third appearance is based entirely on his story in JLA, which we're basically doing verbatim. the one change we're making is in the place he's trying to access... which in our story is actually the Dream Realm. We're then going to use him as the final enemy of Niles Caulder's Doom Patrol before he's stopped by the Gar and his new version of the Patrol. The Key is basically a blend of Drugs, Magic, Metafiction, and Dreams... so again... the most Grant Morrison character ever. |