Vandal Savage
43,106 BCE - Vandal Savage is born.
43,083 BCE - 23-year-old Savage, dying in the frozen waste, falls asleep next to a glowing meteor. It’s mysterious energy grants him immortality before it dissolves.
43,000 BCE - Savage becomes the warlord of his tribe, building it to rule the known region.
20,000 BCE - Savage finally abandoned the last of his tribe after several millennia of rule as they are slowly wiped out in an Ice Age.
3100 BCE - Savage unifies upper and lower Egypt, founding it’s first Dynasty.
2900 BCE - Savage is overthrown from the throne of Egypt due to his excessive practice of human sacrifice.
2100 BCE - Savage leads an army in an attempt to take Thebes at the height of its power, but is personally defeated by Khufu Kan-tarr & Chay-Ara Thal.
1600 BCE - Savage leads the Hittites in bloody conquest of the known world using his new iron weapons.
486 BCE - Savage takes the throne of Persia, using the name Xerxes.
480 BCE - Savage leads the Persians to attack Greece.
344 BCE - Savage meets a 12-year-old Alexander III of Macedon as a student of Aristotle.
336 BCE - Savage assassinates Philip II so Alexander can take the throne of Macedon.
334 BCE - Savage leads Alexander’s armies as they invade the Achaemenid Empire, the antecedent of his former Persian Empire.
326 BCE - Savage & Alexander invade India.
323 BCE - Savage kills Alexander in Babylon when he expresses regret.
60 BCE - Savage forms a political alliance with Julius Caesar, Crassus & Pompey to resist the Greek Senate.
53 BCE - Savage bolsters Caesar’s ambition when Crassus dies, so that he doesn’t join Pompey in siding with the Senate.
51 BCE - Savage, bolstered by Caesar’s victories in the Gaelic Wars, refuses to return control of Rome’s armies to the senate.
49 BCE - Savage & Caesar cross the Rubicon with a full legion, inciting civil war & naming Caesar “dictator in perpetuity”
44 BCE - Savage betrays Caesar to Brutus. Savage’s influence through the new Greek Republic now touches the entire known world.
476 - Savage watches the Roman empire fall, and attempts to sew discord within the Catholic church to stem its influence.
1162 - Savage begins uniting nomadic Mongolian Tribes, committing wholesale slaughter on civilian populations.
1227 - Savage's Mongol Empire at its height covers more of the world than even the Greek or Roman empires.
1456 - Savage retires to the country of Wallachia where the perpetual crusades allow him to wage brutal war on the Ottomans.
1462 - Savage earns the nickname Vlad the Impaler after decimating huge portions of Bulgaria.
1716 - Savage begins taking sailing ships in the Caribbean, earning the name Blackbeard.
1718 - Savage is hung for piracy.
1815 - Savage frees Napoleon from Elba Island, persuading him to conquer Europe.
1821 - Savage retreats to America when Napoleon is defeated.
1878 - Savage steals vast stretches of land in the American West, ruling it like a king. He is stopped by the Justice Riders, including Jonah Hex, Tallulah Black, Bat Lash, Lazarus Lane, & Standing Bear, who track him back to his gold mine in Mexico. He is gunned down by Hex.
1888 - Savage commits five brutal murders in the White Chapel district of London, earning the name Jack the Ripper.
1923 - Savage meets Adolf Hitler in prison after his failed coup. He joins the nazi party, refocusing on his vocation of world domination for the first time since Mongolia.
1933 - Savage maneuvers Hitler to become Chancelor of Germany.
1939 - Savage commands Hitler’s armies to invade Poland.
1940 - Savage personally signs the Tripartite Act for Germany along with Italy & Japan
1941 - Savage leads Germany's armies in invading Russia, but Japan spoils his timetables by attacking the west.
1944 - Savage attempts to cripple the US with a nuclear attack on New York, but is stopped by the Blackhawks.
1945 - Savage secret laboratories are destroyed by the Freedom Fighters, and the US bombs Hiroshima. He initiates his fallback plan, staging Hitler’s death and stealing his brain, meeting Delores Winters to move his brain into a cloned superhuman body starting Savage's Secret Wars.
1947 - Savage's Secret War is stopped by the Blackhawks and the Creature Commandos.
64 years ago - Savage's daughter Scandal Savage is born
56 years ago - Savage steals his daughter Scandal Savage away from her mother, and places her under the tutelage of a cabal of the greatest assassins in the world.
50 years ago - Savage's daughter Scandal Savage finally defeats and kills her teachers, taking the Lamentation Blades for herself, becoming his most trusted assassin.
48 years ago - Savage's discovers that his daughter Scandal Savage has inhereted his healing ability, making her half-immortal. He subjects her to experiments attempting to isolate and replicate the effect. One of the scientists working on her, Niles Caulder, objects to her being used this way and tries to free her, the resulting explosion leaving him in a wheelchair. Scandal escapes Caulder and returns to her father.
42 years ago - Savage allows Scandal Savage to remain in a Belarus prison under a fake name as punishment for her failure to assassinate one of the leaders of the Order of St Dumas.
38 years ago - Savage's organization attempts to launch a network of satellites to take over the world's communications, but are stopped by the All-Star Squadron.
37 years ago - Savage tracks down Scandal Savage when she escapes prison, forcing her to return to him.
34 years ago - Savage promises Terry Rothstein he can save his wife in exchange for him fighting the All-Star Squadron as Cyclotron.
33 years ago - Savage assembles the Injustice Society, organizing efforts to defeat the All-Star Squadron.
28 years ago - Savage again subjects Scandal Savage to further experiments. She finally refuses, and fights him to a standstill. She leaves his service, working as a freelance information broker and operative.
18 years ago - Savage learns Scandal Savage's location from Kobra. He sends mercenaries to collect her, but she kills them and hands over Kobra secrets to S.H.A.D.E. becoming an agent.
14 years ago - Savage forces the Doom Patrol to choose between the destruction of the small town of Codsville, Maine, or to die in the destruction of his submarine headquarters. They choose the latter.
6 years ago - Savage attempts to claim the remaining arsenal of Quroc, but is stopped by the Justice Society.
4 years ago - Savage begins his plans for Tartarus.
2 years ago - Savage races the Doom Patrol and the Brotherhood to collect the remains of Rita Farr.
1 year ago - Savage forms his think-tank, the Light. His new assassin retainer Lady Elaine Marsh-Morton tracks Scandal Savage and administers a custom nano-virus that will burn out her consciousness and rewrite her as a loyal follower within 48 hours. He sends an army of mercenaries after her, but she takes refuge with the Doom Patrol, who buy her enough time for the virus to be counteracted.
now - Savage initiates Tartarus, a team designed to distract and test the Watchtower.
Vandal Savage has made a bunch of appearances in wider media, most notably as the main villain in the first season of the live-action series Legends of Tomorrow, but also in the animated movie Justice League: Doom. Over the years he's become a HUGE presence among the baddies of DC, but even though he's a Golden Age invention he really didn't have a ton of appearances until much later on. Even still, his whole concept dictates that he has one of the biggest timelines we've ever made; it has some actual historical references in it, so we're very open to any feedback you might have.
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Vandal Savage's Comic HistoryVandal Savage appeared for the first time in Green Lantern #10 in 1943. The Green Lantern in question was Alan Scott, and Savage was an invention of Alan Scott's co-creator Martin Nodell, along with the series writer Alfred Bester. The Green Lantern comics of this era were a weird mixed bag; they aren't really that much fun for a modern reader as Green Lantern was one of those characters with a bumbling adult sidekick that take up a lot of page time, but conceptually, the series really stands out for introducing some incredibly high-concept villains, notable for waiting until late in the issue to really explain what is going on. Savage was presented as a menacing gangster at first, but by the end of the issue we discover the sweepingly epic story of Savage's journey across time.
Savage actually didn't appear that much in the Golden Age. He was a member of the original Injustice Society, and then also made a few one-off appearances in the silver age Flash series, but it wasn't until the late seventies as the various anthology series started to plum the Golden Age for classic villains to use against Earth-2 heroes that Savage suddenly became an incredibly prolific character, showing up with such frequency through the 90s that it becomes almost impossible to track; he just becomes a constant ubiquitous threat poised over the entire DC world. |
Our Vandal Savage StoryGod, this one was so much fun to make. There have been countless references to all of Savage's appearances across history, to the point where it becomes less of an exercise of trying to include them all. It's more about trying to pick out the ones that seem the most relevant.
There actually is an arc to his journey, as he develops his interest and skill at world domination. Savage has actually DONE it, and more than once. His very first appearance referenced his role in Ancient Egypt, his roles as Julias Caesar & Genghis Khan, and so on; very deliberately evoking times when particular people or peoples ruled the entire known world. We followed that logic, establishing a centuries-long ebb and flow as he builds his influence only to watch it crumble with time over and over. This will eventually lead to a long period of what is basically retirement as he becomes less of a historic conqueror and more of a world-hopping bogeyman, becoming historic monsters like Blackbeard or Jack the Ripper. |
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This is probably one of the more fun elements of Vandal's extensive backstory, getting to put him in so many different places, or the idea that he actually was different historic figures. It's understood that sometimes he instead chooses to be the power behind the powerful historic figure, and we chose to make that the case with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. We also get to use him as a villain for the Wild West characters.
Of course, one of the most important roles Savage plays is as the main architect of World War II. This is the era when most comic book characters first appear, and Savage is essentially going to touch every part of that. Moving forward into modern stories, Savage is a regularly occurring villain for a lot of different superteams, most notably the Justice Society and the Doom Patrol. We're using him as the catalyst for several upcoming super-villain organizations; both the super-genius think-tank "the Light", and "Tartarus", the team engineered to confront the new Watchtower. |