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The Farm
Abraham Slamowski
Abraham Slamowski / Abraham Slam
After the Crisis
As Abraham Slam
- Badass Normal: The only non powered one among the “family”, but still can fight.
- Call to Agriculture: He became a farmer in the ten years since the heroes defeated Anti-God. The situation admittedly didn't leave him many options, given that he's stuck on a mysterious farm with no way to leave, but still.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: Abe doesn't have any powers beyond his rigorously trained boxing skills, but flashbacks to the final battle with Anti-God show that he's strong enough to rip large chunks out of a building's rooftop with his bare hands and hurl them like boulders.
- Boxing Battler: He's a world-class boxer who uses his training and skills to fight crime.
- Expy: A Composite Character of Captain America and Wildcat.
- Fantastically Indifferent: He reacts to Lucy's revelation that all books on the town's history are blank with mild bemusement, failing to see how such an oddity might have any significance to the heroes' situation.
- No Sympathy: Abe's had a much easier time adjusting to life on the farm than the others and enjoys the new life he's built for himself. Because of this, he's unsympathetic toward their problems and their desire to leave, calling them all a bunch of whiners during the tenth anniversary of Black Hammer's death.
- Old Superhero: Abraham Slam started fighting crime in the 40s and kept at it for several decades. He eventually hung up his costume when he realized that supervillains were becoming more than he could handle, though he came out of retirement in 1986 to help the other surviving heroes fight off Anti-God.
- Secret Public Identity: His superhero name is practically the same as his real name, yet no one outside the superhero community seems to have figured out that Abe Slamkowski and Abraham Slam are one and the same.
- Took a Level in Badass: He’s basically Steve Rogers if he trained and exercised to get his muscle instead of taking Super Soldier Serum.
Gail Gibbons
Gail Gibbons/ Golden Gail
as Golden Gail
- The Alcoholic: One of the ways she copes with her ordeal is by drinking… a lot.
- Boy Meets Ghoul: Once Gail retired, she struck up a relationship with her former nemesis, the undead ex-supervillain Sherlock Frankenstein.
- Brought to You by the Letter "S": Her superhero costume has a big G on it.
- By the Power of Grayskull!: She used to be able to switch between her normal form and her Golden Gail form by saying the magic word "Zafram". It hasn't worked since she came to the farm, leaving her stuck as an immortal child.
- Dating Catwoman: She wound up in a romantic relationship with her arch-nemesis Sherlock Frankenstein, although by that point Gail had retired from being a superhero and Sherlock had gone straight.
- Embarrassing Superpower: When she was younger, Gail hated using her powers because she was afraid people would discover her secret and make fun of her for turning into a little kid to fight crime. She grew out of this mindset as she got old and began to appreciate the chance to turn back into a kid, at least until the change became permanent.
- Expy: Of Shazam!, being a hero who can transform from an ordinary person to a superpowered being by saying the name of the wizard who gave her her powers. She even had her own version of the Marvel Family in the Golden Family.
- Kid Hero All Grown-Up: She first got her powers as a child and spent most of her life fighting crime, retiring only once she reached middle age.
- Older Alter Ego: Inverted. Gail's normal form is a middle-aged woman while her superhero form is a nine-year-old Flying Brick.
- Older Than They Look: She's actually in her 50s but is stuck as a nine year old.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Gail used to be able to change between her true form and a superpowered child by saying the magic word "Zafram". It stopped working when she got to the farm, leaving her stuck as an unaging nine-year-old for the last ten years. She's hated every second of it.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Gail drinks, smokes, and swears like a sailor, much to the shock and consternation of the Farm's neighbors. Justified in that Gail is actually a middle-aged woman trapped in the form of a nine-year-old child.
Mark Markz
Mark Markz / Barbalien
- Dead Person Impersonation: He took his human identity from a policeman who died in front of him.
- Exposed Extraterrestrials: He tends not to wear clothes when in his natural Martian form. Any clothes he wears in his human form are the product of his shapeshifting.
- Expy: Of the Martian Manhunter. Whom he amusingly shows nothing but dismissive contempt for when they meet one another in the canon crossover comic.
- Gayngst: His orientation causes him no end of grief. First, he developed feelings for a fellow detective and made a pass at him to see if he felt the same, only to learn that the detective was rabidly homophobic. Then word of his sexuality got out and other cops started harassing him by writing slurs on his locker, eventually leading him to quit the force. Then he develops feelings for the local pastor, only to be rejected yet again.
- Immune to Bullets: When Mark first got to Earth, a mobster tried to shoot him. The bullets bounced harmlessly off his bare chest.
- In-Universe Nickname: His friends call him "Barbie".
- Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: On Mars he was a diplomat in a society that valued warriors and martial skill. The other Martians treated him with contempt because of this.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In an alternate reality where Mark never left Mars, bigoted Martians burn down his home, destroy the spaceship that he'd secretly been building to leave the planet, and kill his lover. Mark slaughters them all in retaliation.
- Super Cop: He was a seemingly ordinary policeman by day and a shapeshifting Martian superhero by night, at least until the harassment of his coworkers drove him to quite the force.
- Sword and Gun: When he was an active superhero, Mark carried both a sword and a Ray Gun. He's shown wielding both weapons to deadly effect when he goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the homophobic Martians who murdered his lover in the alternate reality.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: His superhero costume was basically just a cape and shorts, gloves optional.
Randall Weird
Randall Weird / Colonel Weird
A NASA astronaut who explored many worlds across the universe. A chance encounter with a gateway into a strange alternate dimension called the Para-Zone would change his life forever.- 24-Hour Armor: He's almost never seen out of his spacesuit.
- Apologetic Attacker: He apologizes to Talky-Walky before he shoots her. Afterward, he remorsefully tells her that he wished he didn't have to do this and admits that she's the best friend he’d ever had... right before administering a Coup de Grâce.
- Expy: Of Adam Strange, being a Raygun Gothic space adventurer with a metaphysical connection to an otherworldly locale.
- The Fatalist: Because of his experiences in the Para-Zone, Colonel Weird believes that the universe follows a design or pattern which nothing can deviate from, least of all himself.
- Intangibility: His connection to the Para-Zone allows him to drift through solid objects like a ghost.
- Non-Linear Character: Colonel Weird constantly drifts in and out of the Para-Zone, where time is wonky relative to the normal universe. He sees and experiences things out of chronological order as a result. This makes it difficult for him to interact with the others, as their linear perspective of time means that what is a recent event to them may be a distant memory or future event from Weird's perspective.
- Retro Rocket: His spacecraft is a cigar-shaped, lands-on-its-fins type of rocket, befitting his nature as a Raygun Gothic character gone wrong.
- Thousand-Yard Stare: He sports a perpetually haunted expression due to his experiences in the Para-Zone.
Talky-Walky
TLK-E WLK-E
An extraterrestrial robot and the longtime companion of Colonel Weird. Talky-Walky has never given up on getting out of Rockwood, constantly sending probes beyond the farm’s perimeter in the hopes of finding a way out.- Aliens Steal Cable: She launched probes into space to learn about other species and civilizations. The probes picked up television signals from Earth.
- Et Tu, Brute?: She clearly feels shocked and betrayed when Colonel Weird shoots her.
- Glowing Mechanical Eyes: Her "face" is a set of four glowing parallel strips.
- Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: Colonel Weird destroys her to stop her from probing too deeply into the mystery of how Lucy arrived on the farm.
- Mechanical Lifeforms: She's a sapient alien robot from a civilization of similar robots.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much: She's the only robot on her planet who wasn't satisfied with the status quo and wanted to learn more about the universe beyond their world. She also doesn't share their hatred of organics.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: For whatever reason, Talky-Walky is one of the only people to keep her memories of the original timeline when the heroes accidentally create a new one by returning to the real world.
- Tin-Can Robot: She looks like the sort of robot that would appear in media from the 1950s: humanoid in shape but clearly inhuman, with a glass jar over her head (which has a series of parallel rectangular lights in place of a face).
- The Unpronouncable: Her name is TLK-E WLK-E. "Talky-Walky" is not the correct pronunciation, but it's apparently as close to it as the human tongue can get.
Madame Dragonfly
Madame Dragonfly
A creepy witch who lives by herself in a cabin full of otherworldly horrors. Madame Dragonfly is the most inscrutable and mysterious of the farm’s residents.- Amazing Technicolor Population: She has bright green skin as part of her Wicked Witch look.
- Animal Motifs: Dragonflies, obviously. She's named after them, she has their wings, and at the climax of the series she turns herself into a dragonfly as part of a Heroic Sacrifice.
- Deal with the Devil: How she got her powers. She sought out a mysterious swamp witch to ask her to resurrect her dead son. The witch agreed, but only on the condition that she take the witch's place as custodian of the cabin.
- Fourth-Wall Observer: She seems to be aware that she's a character in a comic book and speaks directly to the reader on several occasions.
- Horror Host: She acts like one, presenting macabre tales to the comic's reader while simultaneously being a character in the comic's story. At one point the other heroes interrupt her while she's trying to tell the reader a story, making her very annoyed.
- Outliving One's Offspring: The whole reason she became a witch in the first place was to try and resurrect her infant son, who died under unspecified circumstances. Centuries later she became pregnant with her Plant Person lover's child, only to have suffered either a miscarriage or a stillbirth shortly after she arrived on the farm.
- Sickly Green Glow: Her body radiates a green miasma when she works her magic.
- Surveillance as the Plot Demands: She uses a Magic Cauldron to scry on the other heroes.
- Wicked Witch: Subverted. Madame Dragonfly is a green-skinned sorceress who dresses all in black, lives by herself in a haunted cabin, and wields sinister magic. She does plenty of shady stuff throughout the story, but ultimately she's not evil.
- Winged Humanoid: She has four dragonfly wings sprouting from her back.
Joseph Weber
Joseph Weber / Black Hammer
The greatest hero Spiral City has ever known. His death ten years ago weighs heavily on the residents of the farm.- All-Loving Hero: Joseph was a social worker before he became a superhero, and his focus has always been on saving lives and helping people, even his enemies. When his arch-nemesis Metal Minotaur accidentally snapped her own back during a battle, he immediately took her to New World to get her life-saving medical treatment and stayed with her while she convalesced.
- Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: His spirit survived his physical death and now dwells on New World with Starlok.
- Befriending the Enemy: The Metal Minotaur was once his Arch-Enemy, but then she snapped her own back. Joseph saved her life and stayed with her while she convalesced, even going so far as to trust her with his secret identity. This act of friendship and trust convinced her to bury the hatchet with him and give up her villainous ways.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: When he crossed the invisible boundary surrounding the farm, an unseen force stripped the skin off his body and phased his organs right out of him.
- Electric Black Guy: He's an African American who can shoot lightning from his hammer like a black version of Marvel Comics' Thor.
- Expy: Of the Donald Blake version of The Mighty Thor, being an ordinary man who gains godly powers from wielding a divine hammer.
- Legacy Character: He isn't the first person to bear the name and weapon of Black Hammer. And he isn't the last.
- Only the Chosen May Wield: His hammer can only be wielded by someone who is worthy and pure of heart. Joseph more than qualified.
- Posthumous Character: He's been dead for ten years by the time the story takes place.
- Powers via Weapon: His godlike powers came from his eponymous hammer.
- Take Up My Sword: He inherited the hammer from its original wielder, who was dying in an alleyway when Joseph found him.
- Transformation Trinket: Like Donald Blake, Joseph could transform into Black Hammer by striking his hammer on the ground.
Spiral City Civilians
Lucy Weber
Lucy Weber
Joseph Weber's daughter. Lucy was ten years old when her father and the other heroes brought an end to the Cataclysm and vanished. In the ten years since, she has not given up hope that they are still out there somewhere.- Healing Shiv: In the alternate reality created when the team returns to the real world, Lucy discovers that she can restore her friends' memories of the original timeline by clocking them with her giant hammer.
- Intrepid Reporter: Her desire to learn the truth about what happened to her father led her to become a journalist. Once she arrives on the farm, she puts those journalistic skills to use unraveling the strange mysteries of Rockwood.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: When Lucy first arrives on the farm, Madame Dragonfly promptly casts a spell on her to make her forget how she got there. She regains her memories once she inherits the power of Black Hammer, and she is pissed.
- Legacy Character: She becomes the new Black Hammer when she picks up her father’s weapon.
- Power Makes Your Hair Grow: Her modest bun becomes an enormous afro bun when she turns into Black Hammer.
Elliot
Elliot
Lucy's husband by the time of Black Hammer Reborn, a reformed supervillain who used to go by the name Lightning Rod. Though he and Lucy love each other dearly, the strain of their marriage has led them to grow distant from one another.- Atrocious Alias: Everyone who learns his supervillain name thinks it's ridiculous.
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: What little we see of his supervillain career shows that he wasn't particularly competent, or evil. The worst he ever did was knock over a laundromat to get enough money to pay rent, for which he was beaten up and nearly killed by Skulldigger.
- Kavorka Man: He's an overweight middle-aged man with a prominent bald spot, but this hasn't prevented him from carrying on an affair with an attractive secretary behind Lucy's back.
- Shock and Awe: He has the power to shoot electric sparks from his fingertips.
Spiral City Supervillains
Sherlock Frankenstein
An undead Mad Scientist who originally hailed from Victorian London, Sherlock Frankenstein has menaced Spiral City for decades.
- Artificial Zombie: He turned himself into an undead being used an advanced scientific procedure.
- Florence Nightingale Effect: He fell in love with the nurse who took care of him while he was wasting away from a disease. He would eventually marry this woman after turning himself into an undead man, only to lose her when she succumbed to the same disease which almost killed him.
- Heel–Face Revolving Door: The man started out as a Victorian era superhero, then spent a huge chunk of the 20th Century as a ruthless supervillain, then gave up his criminal ways in the late Seventies and became an Honest Corporate Executive.
- Hellish Pupils: Closeups in Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil show that his eyes have slit pupils like a reptile.
- Humongous Mecha: His first appearance in the main series shows him attacking Spiral City at the controls of a giant robot.
- I Just Want to Be Loved: At his core, Sherlock is a lonely man who wants someone to love him. The loss of his beloved wife is what initially drove him to become a supervillain, while the love of Golden Gail is what eventually brought him back to the side of good.
- Love Makes You Evil: He lost his first wife to the same disease that nearly killed him, with the treatments that originally cured him having no effect on her. The loss of the woman he loved and the knowledge that he would live forever with the pain of that loss drove him to lash out at the world, marking his descent into supervillainy.
- Love Redeems: Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil shows that, while he made a pretense of turning over a new leaf when he founded his company, it was Gail's love that truly convinced him to give up on his villainous ways and go straight.
- Undeathly Pallor: He has an unnaturally pale complexion due to his undead state.
Metal Minotaur
A genius who built herself a powered exoskeleton in the shape of a minotaur and used it to commit crimes. She was a longtime foe of Black Hammer.
- Career-Ending Injury: Her supervillain career was cut short when she accidentally snapped her own back while testing out the latest model of her Metal Minotaur armor.
- Cool Old Lady: By the time Lucy seeks her out in Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil, the Metal Minotaur has become a pretty chill old woman more than happy to tell her life's story to the daughter of her one-time archenemy.
- Humongous Mecha: The first few Metal Minotaur models were battlesuits large enough for the head to serve as a cockpit. She scaled down the size in later models, with the final model being small enough to act as Powered Armor—with disastrous results when she took it for a test drive.
- Our Minotaurs Are Different: They're suits of Powered Armor/Mini-Mecha built in the likeness of the mythological Minotaur, in this case.
- Samus Is a Girl: The Metal Minotaur armor gives no indication of the wearer's gender, and Black Hammer's files on the supervillain list their secret identity as "N. Parker". Lucy assumed that Metal Minotaur must be a man and is quite surprised to learn that she's actually a woman.
- Secret-Keeper: She’s one of the few people outside the superhero community who knows that Joseph Weber is Black Hammer, having been told his secret identity by the man himself while she was convalescing from her broken back.
- Smart People Build Robots: She was a brilliant scientist and engineer who built a series of minotaur-themed battlesuits, ranging in size from Humongous Mecha to Powered Armor.Metal Minotaur: There was a time, [...] I could build just about anything I put my mind to. And it just so happened what I chose to build was a massive suit of battle armor.
What can I say? It was the Seventies. Things were different then...
Other Characters
Anti-God
Starlok's evil brother. Anti-God was a "cosmic despot" who'd stop at nothing to tilt the Balance Between Good and Evil squarely in favor of evil.
- The Anti-God: It's right there in his name. He is the most powerful evil being in the setting and the dark, malevolent counterpart of Starlok, the resident God of Good.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Flashbacks show that he towered over the buildings of Spiral City.
- Big Bad: A posthumous example. Anti-God nearly destroyed the universe during the Cataclysm ten years ago, and the heroes are stranded on the farm as a direct consequence of stopping him. In the second half of the series, the heroes' goals shift from getting off the farm to preventing Anti-God's resurrection and return.
- Cain and Abel: The Cain to Starlok's Abel. Anti-God is a tyrannical god of darkness and evil who seeks to disrupt the balance and conquer or destroy the universe, whereas his brother Starlok is a benevolent god of light and good who seeks to protect the universe from Anti-God's tyranny by maintaining the balance.
- Evil Is Hammy: His few lines are as bombastic as you'd expect from an evil cosmic deity."NOTHING stands against ANTI-GOD. Nothing and NO ONE!"
"HA HA! The last of the LIGHTRIDERS! I'll tear you and your friends apart just like I did STARLOK and his fools on New World!" - Expy: Of Darkseid, with shades of Galactus as well.
- God of Darkness: He represents darkness in the cosmic balance just as his brother represents light.
- God of Evil: He's a cosmic deity who personifies evil.
- Hero Killer: He slaughtered most of the other heroes offscreen before coming to Earth, forcing the main characters to come out of retirement and stand as Earth's last line of defense.
- The Legions of Hell: He is served by hordes of demonic Hellamentals.
- Posthumous Character: Black Hammer killed him ten years ago, but his shadow continues to loom large over the heroes. He starts coming back to life late in the story, and the heroes are forced to make a Heroic Sacrifice to prevent his return.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: His speech bubbles have red text on a black background with a red border to emphasize his evil nature.
