Vril Dox
25 years ago - Vril Dox is decanted at a relative age of 15, a clone of Brainiac creates to escape the control of the Coluans. Captured as an intergalactic criminal, he is placed in the Starlog, a space station prison run by the Citadel. The Durlan stows away on his body, joining him in prison and beginning to educate him.
19 years ago - 21-year-old Vril receives a message from his own clone in the future, Brainiac 5. Partnering with Kalista, the imprisoned crown princess of Euphorix, he surgically reactivates Ti'julk Mr'asz' powers and uses them to escape along with several fellow prisoners. They form the Omega Men, fighting the control of the Gordanians in the Vega system.
17 years ago - 23-year-old Vril & the Omega Men liberate the Gordanian planet of Slagg with the help of the slave dancer Felicity who becomes their newest member. Kalista is targeted by the intergalactic bounty-hunter, Lobo. Vril outsmarts him and he joins them as a probationary member.
15 years ago - 25-year-old Vril & the Omega Men are confronted by Adam Blake, who pursues them as escaped criminals. Cornered on Lythyl, Vril Dox outsmarts Blake, pitting him against Gordanian shock troops, revealing the regime they are fighting. Blake agrees to become a probationary member of the Omega Men.
11 years ago - 29-year-old Vril and the Omega Men defeat Calculators of Colu. He helps establish a new Coluan government, using their manufacturing facilities to construct his own interplanetary drone fleet.
10 years ago - 30-year-old Vril is able to replicate the the powers of Ti'julk Mr'asz using cloned fungal growths sharing his DNA. Ti'julk is able to retire, moving to Hardcore Station.
9 years ago - 31-year-old Vril & Kalista have an ill-advised affair.
8 years ago - 32-year-old Vril, seeing the return of Onimar Synn, contacts Carter Hall on Earth to find the Claw of Horus and battle Synn.
7 years ago - 33-year-old Vril & the Omega Men assist Dick Grayson as he ventures into the Vega system to free a kidnapped Koriand'r from her sister Komand'r. Assisting General Ph'yzzon's Tamaranian rebellion, they free Tamaran from the rule of the Gordanians, and capitalize on that victory to finally overthrow the Gordanian regime. Returning Kalista to her throne, Vril is given a full pardon. The Omega Men are officially disbanded, their enemy defeated. Vril begins to operate his interplanetary drone fleet as an independent peacekeeping force in the Vega system, using the designation L.E.G.I.O.N.
2 years ago - 38-year-old Vril learns that the forces of Lady Styx's Terror Fleet have killed the Durlan & Ferrin Colos, and attempted to kill Ti'julk Mr'asz & Adam Blake. He begins to secretly position his L.E.G.I.O.N. forces tactically through the galaxy to prepare for her coming invasion.
now - 40-year-old Vril & Adam Blake join the new Omega Men being assembled by Adam Strange to fight the Lady Styx's Terror Fleet
2224 - Vril Dox begins the practice of using cloning technology to replicate himself.
2730 - Vril corrupts the programming of Brainiac 4.0, a sleeper weapon meant to target Superman in the past. The corruption allows her alternate personality to assert it's dominance, becoming Indigo. She fights Brainiac 3.0 before escaping into the past, allowing Vril to finally destroy him. Vril takes up residence on Colu, beginning a small research community using clones of himself.
2978 - The Clones of Vril create an offspring using both their cloning tech and the repurposed artifical intelligence of Brainiac, creating Querl Dox.
Brainiac is one of the biggest villains in the DC Universe, and his influence reaches all over, affecting both huge stories as well as small ones. This character, Vril Dox, is really just a sort of vestigial offshoot of Brainiac, but has gone on to have a surprisingly prolific part to play in DC in general, and for whatever reason we just kept finding more and more utility for him. So this relatively obscure character winds up being a pretty big player in our version of cosmic DC.
Vril Dox's Comic HistoryVril Dox was originally created as a continuity patch. Brainiac was already a classic Superman villain, and Brainiac 5 was already established as the descendant of Brainiac when he was introduced as a Legion member in Action Comics #276 in 1961. A few years later, so the story goes, DC discovered that the name "Brainiac" was trademarked in real life by the inventor of an early computer kit, so in Superman #167 in 1964 they decided to update his origin to make him a super-intelligent android built by the Computer Tyrants of Colu specifically to look like a biological Coluan. This obviously created an issue with the idea that Brainiac could have a biological descendant a thousand years in the future, so in that same issue, in a single panel, they introduce an adopted biological son for Brainiac, named Brainiac II, meant only to sell his disguise as a biological being. Brainiac II ran away in the very next panel, and we basically never saw him again. He didn't even get a name until a text section in Adventure Comics #335 in 1965.
Vril didn't appear again until after the Crisis, where he's reimagined as Brainiac's clone rather than his adopted son. He is introduced in the aftermath of the Invasion crossover as the main character of the new space opera series L.E.G.I.O.N. by Keith Giffen in 1989. L.E.G.I.O.N. was a pretty long running series, and a stable element in all of DC's ongoing spacefaring stories, meaning that this version of Vril would go on to have appearances throughout DC's various series practically whenever a character interacted with the galaxy at large. He's essentially remained in that role ever since. |
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Our Vril Dox StoryWe are playing kind of fast and loose with Vril's existing continuity, but he just happens to occupy a particular fulcrum point in a lot of interconnected stories and by being creative with him, we get a LOT of mileage. First and most obvious, we've taken his traditional team, L.E.G.I.O.N., and just mined it for a few ideas, applying it all instead to our version of the original Omega Men. That team has at it's core some conflict between leaderships styles, and Vril is a perfect manifestation of that.
We've also taken a lot of the competing origin concepts for the legacy of Brainiac and reassembled into what you see here; he's a clone of the original biological Coluan Brainiac, who receives a message from his distant descendant, goes on to build his own team of criminals and freedom fighters, eventually getting a pardon and running an independent peacekeeping force... and then in the distant future, starts cloning himself, is responsible for the origin of Indigo, usurps the mantle of Brainiac from his "father", and ultimately creates the legacy that leads to the future hero Brainiac 5. Among the heroes operating in our cosmic space opera side of DC, Vril manages to be right in the middle of almost all of it. We've really condensed a lot of the disparate ideas to center around the story of the Omega Men, and one of the biggest steps in building up that team to really feel like it MATTERS was to make it the creation of this guy. He might be a less well known character, but his reach and importance are unmistakable. |