Toshiro Mishawa
78 years ago - Toshiro Mishawa is born in Hokkaido, Japan.
60 years ago - 18-year-old Toshiro Mishawa attends Columbia University.
57 years ago - 21-year-old Toshiro Mishawa first meets Jack Marlowe at Columbia University. They are academic rivals and fast friends.
56 years ago - 22-year-old Toshiro Mishawa earns a bachelor's in bioengineering, and begins his graduate work in microtechnology.
50 years ago - 28-year-old Toshiro Mishawa invented a new generation of micronanites, allowing him to rapid-prototype any tool in seconds. He earns his doctorate in nanobiology. When displaying his new nanite technology, someone other than himself tries to use it, leading to their death. He is unable to secure funding to continue his research, returning to Japan.
48 years ago - 30-year-old Toshiro Mishawa is contacted by Jack Marlowe to become one of the founding members of Jenny Sparks Stormwatch, a secret organization designed to protect Earth and the barriers between dimensions. He is continually finding new uses for his Micronanite technology, using the name The Engineer.
40 years ago - 38-year-old Toshiro Mishawa is killed by the interdimensional android warlord Tao in the final battle that destroys Stormwatch. His micronanite colony goes inert. They are collected by S.H.A.D.E., but without recovering his work, they can't be reactivated.
For a very long time, I really only knew the Engineer that appeared in the pages of the Authority. I knew that they referenced an earlier Engineer that Angela Spica had gotten her powers from, but I honestly had no idea who they were beyond that. It was only when i finally sat down and read through the original Stormwatch that I found the three-issue story this character was referencing. It's not a lot to build on, but it works in our story for there to be an earlier Engineer, so we're going to go for it!
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The First Engineer's StoryThe original Stormwatch series ended in a 1997 three-issue story called 'Change or Die', in which a team of superheroes whose powers were near godlike (a very clear Justice League allegory) start using their powers to actually completely change humanity, doing away with war and hunger and inequality... It was sort of an exploration of the same questions that would later come up in the subsequent series The Authority. Among the characters on this team was a character called the Engineer, who was explained thusly; "The Engineer has spent his adult life extending the limits of his own biology with technology. Using his own body as a test bed for the changes he wants to make in the world." The Engineer (and the rest of his team) died in that story, and then when The Authority debuted in their own series in 1999, we meet the new Engineer we're all familiar with, who has developed her own nanite technology based on her former colleges work.
Since we're including Angela Spica, the new Engineer, it stands to reason that we'd also want to adapt her predecessor, but there really isn't any information about this character at all. We didn't even have a name to give him, so we instead used the name of one of the original Stormwatch members, Fuji. We gave him his own history, developing his nanite technology but being unsuccessful in finding traditional means of advancing his work because of the perceived danger. We made him a contemporary of Jack Marlowe, who will one day be the hero Spartan, and through him make him a member of the original Stormwatch team assembled by Jenny Sparks. He dies in the same final battle as the rest of the team, and we can then set up the eventual handoff of the technology to his eventual successor. He's sort of a prebuilt legacy that we just had to fill in with his details. |
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