T.O. Morrow

51 years ago - Thomas Oscar Morrow is born.

33 years ago - 18-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow goes to college to study cybernetics.

30 years ago - 21-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow begins grad school.

29 years ago - 22-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow publishes a series of papers, and is acknowledged as the world's foremost expert on Artificial Intelligence.

26 years ago - 25-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow earns his Doctorate, and becomes one of the earliest members of H.I.V.E.

23 years ago - 28-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow has Will Magnus as a student. His own work advances by several orders of magnitude

17 years ago - 34-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow withdraws from H.I.V.E. after the change in leadership.

11 years ago - 40-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow recovers the Raanian storm entity Ulthoon. He begins using it as a base for his new android creation.

10 year ago - 41-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow sends his android creation Red Tornado to infiltrate the Justice League, but is defeated when Red Tornado's free will allows him to abandon his creator and join them. Morrow is imprisoned.

7 years ago - 44-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow manages to rewrite the protocols for Will Magnus's Plutonium Man design.

6 years ago - 45-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow is released from prison thanks to Damien Darhk. He aquires the tropical Oolong Island and begins building his own labs there.

5 years ago - 46-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow invites Will Magnus to work in his Oolong Island labratory. He is contacted by Professor Ivo to consult on his Tomorrow Woman project, kicking off their rivalry.

4 years ago - 47-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow and Will Magnus have a falling out when Will refuses to allow his research to be sold on the open market. Morrow loses ownership of Oolong Island to Magnus. He takes up Professor Ivo's Tomorrow Woman project.

3 years ago - 48-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow & Professor Ivo send Tomorrow Woman to infiltrate the Watchtower. She is able to overcome her programming and sacrifice herself to save the world.

2 years ago - 49-year-old Thomas Oscar Morrow, informs the Justice League about the nature of Professor Ivo's latest Amazo android.

T.O. Morrow is a really fun artifact to include, because he's a pretty minor character, but because of his association with a few OTHER characters he's managed to compile a pretty respectable stack of appearances and become a recognizable character all on his own.

T.O. Morrow's Comic History

T.O Morrow first appeared in a crossover with Green Lantern in Flash # 164 from 1964. The story was called "Trial of the False Green Lanterns!", and the story followed Barry & Hal as they deal with a group of duplicate Hal Jordans. Eventually, we learn about Thomas Morrow, whose lifelong obsession with the future was derived from his name, T.O. Morrow... but whose attempt to build a time machine was ultimately unsuccessful. What he WAS able to build, however, was a viewing machine that allowed him to see the future, and occasionally view some future invention that he could then steal, build for himself, and use for his own crimes, including the Hal Jordan duplicates.

His big standout story came a few years later in Justice League of America # 64; where he winds up as the explanation for the creation of the new Red Tornado. This connection to an eventual Justice League member would have him appearing often enough across the run of the Justice League to cement him into continuity, but the bulk of his appearances would actually come in relation to his later appearances in Metal Men, where it was established that he was a mentor to Doctor Will Magus. After the New 52, he seems to have basically turned over a new leaf, appearing mostly as a Star Labs scientist appearing in a series featuring Vic Stone's Cyborg.

Our T.O. Morrow Story

Of course, the most important role for T.O. Morrow to play is as the inventor of a Satellite Era Justice League member in Red Tornado. Red's origins have shifted subtly over the years, and we've loosely adapted them, making him based on a Raanian creature that battled Adam Strange... but given that Morrow's original origin had him plucking design schematics from the future, this doesn't actually seem that far-fetched.

We're actually grabbing the bulk of Morrow's canon appearances and applying them to our timeline; including his connection to Will Magnus, and making him the sole original owner of the Island Labs featured in the series Fifty-Two. We've also included him iin the development of H.I.V.E. since the whole idea here is that it's a sort of Ayn Rand-themed Objectivist movement in the worlds scientific community that helps explain the preponderance of "mad" scientists.

The last story we involve him in is his involvement, along with Professor Ivo, in the creation of Tomorrow Woman. In the comic he actually celebrates her breaking free from their control, indicating that Morrow has actually come to value the independence of his creations more than he does his ability to control them to his own ends, which actually is an interesting development for this old-school DC mad scientist.

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