The Ultra-Humanite
1906 - Gerald Shugel is born in Poland with a degenerative neurological disease.
1921 - 15-year-old Gerald Shugel first pioneers his brain transplant technique with cats. He is sent to an insane asylum.
1924 - 18-year-old Gerald Shugel earns a degree in biochemistry, and is released from the asylum.
1931 - 25-year-old Gerald Shugel reveals his technique to allow a single chimp brain to drive multiple bodies. He is denied a doctorate and banned from the entire scientific community. He joins the scientists in Germany’s Nazi party.
1938 - 32-year-old Gerald Shugel & his Nazi overlords begin their attempts to steal the secrets of Iron Munro’s island headquarters.
1939 - 33-year-old Gerald Shugel begins experimenting on captured Polish soldiers. He earns the moniker Ultra-Humanite.
1942 - 36-year-old Gerald Shugel's labs are infiltrated by Hippolyta & Stever Trevor to save the soldiers held prisoner. Will Everett sacrifices himself to save them, absorbing the radiation of an experimental reactor.
1943 - 37-year-old Gerald Shugel captures 26-year-old American film actress Delores Winters. She is saved by Spy-Smasher, who is unaware that the Ultra-Humanite has placed his brain in her body.
1944 - 27-year-old Delores Winters uses biological samples from Al Pratt, Roy Lincoln & Iron Munro to create 100 superhuman embryos. They are recoved and placed into storage by S.H.A.D.E.
1945 - 28-year-old Delores Winters disappears from Hollywood when Vandal Savage steals Hitler’s brain. She meets him and plants Hitler’s brain into Savage's cloned body, starting the Secret Wars.
1947 - 30-year-old Delores Winters is infected by her own Bio-Plague while fighting the Blackhawks & the Creature Commandos. She abandons her human body and puts her own brain into one of her lab apes, retreating to her hidden secret facility in Argentina.
9 years ago - Ultra-Humanite, aware of the downfall of the Justice league, begins a secret campaign of extortion across the planet, using the funds to build a network of mind control nodes. His actions inspire the creation of the new Justice Society.
8 years ago - Ultra-Humanite is freed from prison by Gorilla Grodd, only so Grodd can kill him.
The original version of Ultra-Humanite, if he was introduced today, might actually be able to raise some really interesting questions about gender identity that the original audiences (which, lest we forget, were primarily children in the 40's) would probably never have considered. As he is, he's one of the more outrageous modern Super-Villains, but even with his borderline absurd appearance, what really makes the Ultra-Humanite interesting isn't so much his modern appearance, but instead it's the story he comes from.
The Ultra-Humanite's Comic HistoryThe Ultra-Humanite has incredibly deep roots in the history of DC. Way WAY back in issue #13 of Action Comics in 1939, only a month after the debut of Batman over in Detective Comics, Superman met his very first recurring villain. The Ultra-Humanite was a brilliant, wheelchair-bound evil scientist, as advanced mentally as Superman was physically. He showed up in four issues before dying... and then continued to appear, because his brain had been moved into the body of American actress, Dolores Winters. Dolores died in issue #21, and Lex Luthor debuted in issue #23, forever claiming the role of Superman's archnemesis, but for two issues in 1940, he was preceded by an equally dangerous super-genius in the form of a beautiful woman who used he/him pronouns.
Ultra-Humanite remained an artifact of the Golden Age for a long time. Although he wasn't actually appearing, once DC introduced it's multiverse, he would be considered an Earth-2 character along with the rest of the characters from his era. He showed up again in 1981 as part of the annual crossover between the Earth-1 Justice League and the Earth-2 Justice Society in the pages of Justice League of America, only now he had transplanted his brain again, this time into a giant mutated albino ape? |
This was a particularly weird era for the character designs of the DC characters, as the animated Superfriends and the Super Powers action figure line were all thriving and producing a unified design sensibility, so this mutant-ape-wearing-an-orange-toga look actually did basically fit into a DC that included android Brainiac and Lex Luthor in power armor, but it was a pretty far cry from the human scientist from early Action Comics.
Ultra-Humanite would continue to appear fairly regularly through the early 80's, but as the comics of that era really dove head-first into the ever-expanding multiverse you saw lots of stories set in flashbacks on different Earths, which meant that you were just as likely to see the Dolores Winters Ultra-Humanite as you were the albino ape. Which version of the character you like better is probably a matter of preference, but while the ape certainly was weider looking, I'd argue that the evil male scientist in a woman's body was a little more engaging. The ape version of the Ultra-Humanite would appear in the Justice League animated series as a founding member of the Injustice Gang, and was played pretty comically, so for a lot of readers this would be the main version of the character they recognize. |
Our Ultra-Humanite StoryHere's the thing; the albino ape version of the character looks wild and is fun to include, but he doesn't actually DO much, so our plan is to use him as the major plot development that creates the modern Justice Society, to give him a big sweeping story to play in. After that, we don't really have much else to do with him, so we used him as a way to build up the REAL apex gorilla of DC.
We're already using James Robinson's elseworlds graphic novel Golden Age to inform a lot of our characters from that era, and that story does some very cool stuff with Ultra-Humanite's brain-swapping technology. We're building a large post-war story involving Vandal Savage's plans for HItler's Brain, and that means we get to use the Delores Winters Ultra-Humanite as a key part of one of the big stories of that era, interacting with lots of the stranger heroes in DC's history. |