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The Twelve
As a Whole
- Adaptational Wimp: If depicted as they were in their original comics, many of them would have Story Breaker Powers, so the strength and breadth of their abilities were toned down to fit better in the modern Marvel universe.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: In the comic's opening (1945) they're trapped in a room with Nazis who knock them out with gas and leave them in suspended animation mit ze intention of studying zem und replicating zeir powers for ze master race! Wa ha ha! Unfortunately, the scientists all ended up killed or in untenable situations, and the twelve of them slept for sixty-three years before awakening in 2008 with a lot to catch up on.
Black Widow
Black Widow
Alter Ego: Claire Voyant
Notable Aliases: Madame Claire, Madam Satan, the Spawn of Satan, Satan's Courier
First Appearance: Mystic Comics #4 (August, 1940)
Golden Age anti-heroine. A mysterious and cursed individual who sold her soul to a demonic entity of some sort for superpowers after her sister was murdered, in exchange for agreeing to act as that entity's representative on Earth by slaying evil men and women and thus condemning their souls directly to Hell before they can think to seek redemption. Her superpowers consist of Super-Strength and flight, as well as an implied but never-actually-seen Touch of Death.
- The Ageless: Part of her pact.
- Ambiguous Situation: In her original comics Claire served Satan (albeit a mildly comical version). In modern-day Marvel comics there's a long list of demons who've claimed that name/title, so it's not clear if she serves some canonical entity or an original one.
- Anti-Hero: She sold her soul to a monstrous entity of some sort in order to avenge her sister and acts in the interests of that being. Fortunately all that being wants of her is to hunt down and kill people who sold their souls to it and tried to trick their way out of paying up. Part of the pact even states that it won't ask her to harm innocents.
- Battle Couple: Eventually with the new and super-powered Phantom Reporter.
- Born in the Wrong Century: She finds herself comfortably fitting in amongst the goth subculture.
- But Now I Must Go: After Dynamic Man is destroyed, she has to depart from Jones a bit to catch up on all the lost work which accrued while comatose. But she returns.
- Creepy Good: She's a terrifying presence destined to serve Satan... but only to punish the wicked and is firmly on the side of the heroes.
- Deadly Gaze: Her glare isn't just scary, it can kill a guy. Provided said guy is a real person and not an android. Check your label!
- Deal with the Devil: Standing on her sister's grave, knowing the murderer's connections would keep him from ever paying for his crime, Claire said she would pay any price for revenge. And, as she says, there are some things you should never say while standing over someone's grave.
- Detect Evil: She's able to find people who have sold their souls to her master and reneged on the contract.
- The Dreaded: Absolutely everyone is terrified of her, friend or foe alike.
- Evil Debt Collector: When people sell their souls to whichever Marvel Universe Devil or demon she represents and then try to cheat them (usually by extending their lifespans beyond their allotted time on Earth), she's the one who collects that evil debt. Quite painfully and gorily, too, from what we see.
- Faux Action Girl: Despite being one of the most powerful members of the group, she ultimately contributes nothing to the climax. The justification given is that Dynamic Man is immune to at least some of her powers.
- Flight: Part of the power set she got from her Deal with the Devil. If someone's in a high-rise apartment, they're hardly going to let you in to kill them and claim their soul, after all.
- Friendship Moment: She's a detached and mysterious character who eventually warms up to Jones by offering him coffee and revealing her backstory.
- Ms. Fanservice: A beautiful (albeit terrifying), goth-friendly blonde who sleeps in the nude. What's not to like?
- Naughty Tentacles: The entity she serves has at least one, of ambiguous nature, which it uses to caress her cheek in one scene.
- No Man of Woman Born: It seems her most deadly powers can only be used on genuine human beings, and not robots.
- Not Saying The Z Word: In The Twelve they never actually outright say the name of just whom or what Clare serves, unlike in the original comic where she explicitly serves Satan. She's just implied to serve him, or something close enough.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Witness notes at one point that he and Black Widow both have obligations to serve a higher power whom they are beholden to, which she acknowledges.
- Older Than They Look: She's actually a good couple of decades older than everyone else, but her Deal with the Devil stopped her aging.
- Punny Name: Even Lampshaded by Phantom Reporter, that Claire Voyant seems to be her actual real name.
- Shrouded in Myth: As a result of her reserved nature. It's said that she can kill a man with a single touch. We never really get to see it.
- Succubi and Incubi: It's implied that access to her sexual favors is one of the terms of the pact she made with... something.
- Super-Strength: She's not one of the heavy physical hitters of the group, but she's got some degree of this.
- Terror Hero: Even Jones finds her unnerving sometimes.
- Weakened by the Light: She implies during one conversation that she's stronger at night than daytime, though how much so is unclear.
- Wolverine Claws: She killed the man who shot her sister by manifesting these and tearing him apart. Presumably also what she does with her other debtors, as well.
Blue Blade
Blue Blade
Alter Ego: Roy Chambers
Notable Aliases: B.B., "Bladey", Musketeer
First Appearance: U.S.A. Comics #5 (June, 1942)
A flamboyant wisecracking costumed adventurer who dresses up as a half-naked swashbuckler in various shades of blue.
- Attention Whore: Heroics are only second to his desire to be famous.
- Badass Normal: Has no superhuman abilities, but still fought criminals and later Nazis with nothing but his wits, acrobatics and fencing skills. And shirtless, too!
- Camp: He's a flamboyant person whose theatrics tended to get on the nerves of those around him.
- Camp Straight: In spite of his mannerisms (and Dynamic Man's insinuations), he seems to only have eyes for the ladies.
- Celebrity Superhero: Subverted. Chambers so desperately wants fame but it's implied he wasn't even that successful at it during his own time.
- Color Character: The Blue Blade is his moniker.
- Defiant to the End: When Dynamic-Man-controlled-Electro approaches to murder him, Blue Blade goes out swinging (despite being laughably outmatched).
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Blue Blade is very much a man of his time (that is, the 1940's) when it comes to women.
- Disco Dan: Blue Blade's attempts to break into show business fail miserably because his entire character and (very misogynistic) sense of humour is tied down to a very 1940's understanding of the world. This is illustrated when he talks with his agent about wanting to be "the next Douglas Fairbanks", which his agent notes is a name very few people would be able to recognize without googling these days.
- Expy: He dresses like a musketeer but he's really just a poor man's version of Errol Flynn's swashbuckling characters.
- Freudian Excuse: Growing up dirt-poor in the sticks during the Great Depression and with movie magazines his only escape, made him desire fame and heroics (in that order) like his favorite stars and the characters they played.
- The Friend No One Likes: Granted, the Twelve are together more through circumstance than friendship but it's made pretty clear that they barely tolerate the flamboyant Blue Blade. When Excello moves out, he extends an invitation to everyone EXCEPT Chambers.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: He gets along worst with Dynamic Man, thanks to being the target of the android's homophobic zingers. A costume update might help.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: In the 1940's he dressed like an exhibitionist musketeer, although in the modern age he eventually gets a new costume just before he dies.
Captain Wonder
Captain Wonder
Alter Ego: Jeff Jordan
Notable Aliases: Cap, Professor Jordan
First Appearance: Kid Komics #1 (February, 1943)
A scientist who accidentally imbued himself with Super-Strength and the ability to fly when he had an accident with a chemical formula of his own creation.
- Broken Ace: Wonder was one of the most confident and dashing heroes of his time, but being unearthed in a present where his entire family died while he was away traumatizes him completely.
- Captain Superhero: Interestingly the "captain" bears no real relevance to his occupation as a professor.
- Deconstruction: His relationship with his sidekick Tim adds a much more tragic, darker read on the classic kid sidekicks of comics history. After Captain Wonder's death, Tim started to lose his powers and became a loser with a dead-end job mentally stuck in his glory days as a superpowerful sidekick. When they meet again, Tim is a bitter old man with terminal cancer and Captain Wonder just reminds him of better, bygone times. Tim ends up committing suicide as a result.
- Flying Brick: The serum he made gave him super strength and endurance, and the ability to fly.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: Suffers irreparable burn scars to the right side of his face while restraining Dynamic Man as Fiery Mask destroys him. He wears a half-mask afterward and (for at least some time afterward) begs people he's rescuing not to be scared of him.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: He invented what is essentially a superhero serum... that he's completely unable to recreate. Other than that, his science know-how never comes into play.
- Super-Toughness: This proves disadvantageous after Dynamic Man is destroyed. The flames it took to wreck the android were intense enough to burn half of even Captain Wonder's body badly, but doctors' ability to repair the damage was hampered by the fact that his skin was too tough for their tools to be effective. He healed, but remains disfigured for life.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Not when your wife and sons died in the sixty years you were in suspended animation.
Dynamic Man
Dynamic Man
Notable Aliases: Curt Cowan, D.M., The Man of the Future, The Man of Tomorrow, The Perfect Man, The Perfect Man of The Perfect Future, The Perfect Man of Today, Scarecrow
First Appearance: Mystic Comics #1 (March, 1940)
A superhuman crimefighter who was transformed into the "Man of Tomorrow!" by his father, Professor Goettler, though his father died from heart strain after the process was completed. Except that's actually a lie he tells to cover up the dark truth: he's an android created as Goettler's vision of "the perfected human".
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Apart from being programmed by a sex-hating wacko, said wacko made certain DM wouldn't be tempted by making him completely unit-free.
- Combo Platter Powers: Is a Flying Brick with the addition of Super-Intelligence, Voluntary Shapeshifting, X-Ray Vision and Selective Magnetism powers.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: One of the many dark takes on Superman. In this case Dynamic Man plays with the idea of Superman's "moral purity" and upright qualities being taken to dangerous levels of moral zealotry. Like Superman he's a Man of Tomorrow... but what tomorrow, is the question asked of him multiple times.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Out of the Twelve, he's the one who has the most trouble adjusting to the accepting values of the present. All the more ironic for the hero labeled "The Man of Tomorrow".
- Flying Brick: What his powers generally amount to, mixed with a bit of Super-Speed for good measure.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: Dynamic Man just rubs everyone the wrong way, and doesn't even try to get along with the others.
- Knight Templar: Dynamic Man saves lives and fights crime both in WWII and in the modern age. However, he covers his disgust at how "depraved" he believes the modern world has become, and keeps himself busy rescuing people he despises so that he doesn't have to think about it.
- Kryptonite Factor: His Nigh-Invulnerability can be defeated by the rare element lantholum.
- Mistaken for Subculture: At one point a drunken Phantom Reporter implies that he's a Nazi and Dynamic Man almost kills him. He's not a Nazi, he just hates criminals and (what he perceives to be) perverts.
- Noble Bigot: Eagerly fought the Nazis. Thankfully, his creator wasn't anti-Semitic.
- Repression Never Ends Well: After arriving in the modern world Dynamic Man begins doing heroic deeds on a constant basis. Phantom Reporter believes, and DM later confirms, that he's trying to force himself to keep insanely busy so as not to think about being in the modern world. But Reporter doesn't know that, rather than mourning his old life, Dynamic Man has been trying not to think of the corrupt and sinful world the future has become. Despising the very lives he saves, his hate boiled through the unknown connection he had to Electro, sending the robot on a killing spree.
- The Reveal: Not only is he the murderer... but he's also an advanced artificial being.
- Superman Substitute: A dashing, heroic Flying Brick of perfect morals... at first.
- Super-Toughness: Although Fiery Mask eventually managed to destroy him, it took flames so strong that Captain wonder, another super-tough hero, was burned badly.
- The Teetotaler: A citizen offers to buy Dynamic Man a beer only to find out he doesn't drink... so they settle on a coca-cola instead.
- Tragic Villain: In a way. Just as a child can only be what nature and nurture make them, an android can only be what they're programmed to be, and Dynamic Man got programmed by an lunatic obsessed with the elimination of sin and vice, particularly those related to sex. The difference is that a person can learn and change, and DM was stuck as he was from the moment he came on-line.
- Unknown Rival: Has a one-sided rivalry with Captain Wonder, with Dynamic Man on multiple occasions humble-bragging to the Captain about his exploits. The Captain figures its Dynamic Mans way of sizing him up, but he couldn't care less.
Electro
Electro
First Appearance: Marvel Mystery Comics #4 (February, 1940)
A clanking battle robot created and telepathically controlled by Professor Philo Zog, with armor thicker than a tank, the ability to run at speeds of up to 100mph, and Super-Strength.
- Brain Uploading/The Kid with the Remote Control: How Electro functions: the "pilot" uploads their brainwaves into the machine, allowing them to control it from afar.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: In a sense: it's mentioned how every time the professor connected to Electro, he found it harder to "come back out" again. By the war's end he almost never wasn't connected to Electro by choice.
- Driven to Madness: A possibility. Zog mentions that the interface was still experimental and the effects of long-term usage are uncertain, and according to his daughter he went violently insane toward the end of his life, although for all we know that may have been due to the trauma of being suddenly separated from Electro's telepathic signal.
- Next Tier Power-Up: In his last scene, Electro's been kitted out with modern day weaponry.
- Nose Art: While lacking it in his original 1940's appearance, modern depictions (even ones set in the 1940s) will always portray his with the iconic "BERLIN OR BUST!" graffiti he sported in the miniseries.
- Super Robot Genre
Fiery Mask
Fiery Mask
Alter Ego: Jack Castle
First Appearance: Daring Mystery Comics #1 (January, 1940)
A renowned professor brought in by the police to investigate a case where brainwashed zombies were kidnapping homeless men and turning them into more of their own kind. Himself abducted, Castle was brought before their creator, a 20ft tall Mad Scientist calling himself "The Zombie Master", who attempted to transform Castle, only to fail due to Castle's resistance to hypnosis. Enraged, the villain tried to compensate by increasing the power, but his mind-controlling ray exploded, inadvertently giving Castle superpowers and killing the Zombie Master in the process. Actually, the flame powers he wields are mystical in origin and are part of a legacy; he saved the mortally wounded last bearer of them, and when he told him that an ambulance would take too long to arrive, the former Fiery Mask passed his power on to Castle.
- The Atoner: His last act is to give his fire power away to Jones, hoping it would redeem him for leaving his predecessor to die. According to the Black Widow, it does.
- Bequeathed Power: His flame powers turn out to have been gifted to him by a dying man who'd received them from another man and so forth. Ultimately, he passes them on to Phantom Reporter.
- Combo Platter Powers: Possesses pyrokinesis and also Super-Strength.
- Dark Secret: Excello observes Fiery Mask lives haunted by something he's hiding. It turns out to be that he let a injured man die to get his powers.
- In a Single Bound: Uses his Super-Strength to get around more quickly by making enormous leaps, allowing him to cross miles in a jump.
- Legacy Character: It's revealed that his power was actually passed down to him by an injured man he rescued and by the end, he passes it to Richard Jones to defeat the murderer.
- Murder by Inaction: One day while out driving, Castle came upon the scene of a fiery confrontation with only one survivor, who'd been shot in the gut. Quickly patching the man up as best as he could, Castle realized that the guy needed to go to a hospital and get proper treatment if he had any chance of surviving. The man asked if he would live, and Castle truthfully answered that there was no way to say. The man then explained that he had been granted the power to create and manipulate fire by a man who had passed it down before he died—if the man lived he would continue to fight evil, but if he died the power would die with him, thus he needed to be certain. Castle rushed to call an ambulance, but as he stood with the phone in his hand, he realized that the ambulance might not make it in time or the doctors might not be able to save the man and if he died on the table, so would the power. Therefore he put the phone down and told the man it would be impossible for them to send an ambulance. Thus the man passed the power on to Castle and expired.
- Playing with Fire: One of comics earlier pyrokinetic supers alongside Marvel's Human Torch. Aside from just blasting people with flames, he can also create forcefields of concentrated heat.
- Retcon: The story about the Zombie Master was originally the real backstory he had back in the 40s. It was the mini-series that rewrote that into a story he made up to cover a more shameful truth.
- Super-Strength: Can at least lift a car over his head.
Laughing Mask
Laughing Mask
Alter Ego: Dennis Burton
Notable Aliases: Purple Mask
First Appearance: Daring Mystery Comics #2 (February, 1940)
This Deputy District Attorney grew frustrated with the American civil justice process and decided to take the law into his own hands, donning his trademark phosphorescent golden Comedy mask and Dual Wielding .45 pistols as he set to killing gangsters, spies, saboteurs and anyone else he decided the law was being too slow to stop.
- Badass Normal: Fights criminals and Nazis with just athleticism, wits, and marksmanship with dual-wielded pistols.
- Blood Knight: Truly loves brutalizing people.
- Boxed Crook: The government offers to consider his time in stasis as time served with probation for the remainder of his sentence in exchange for piloting an upgraded Electro with More Dakka to slaughter America's foes. Works for him!
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Able to accurately shoot a shotgun held in a man's hands without harming anyone while dual-wielding, as well as being casually capable of shooting to wound while same.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: He's shown executing criminals he finds particularly bad. This includes Nazi war criminals and rapists.
- Put the "Laughter" in "Slaughter": His golden smiling mask belies how he'll take a more brutal approach to criminals, sometimes outright killing them. This eventually catches up to him when they connect him to the murder of a gangland crook.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: In one of his flashbacks we see that after finding a bound woman with a torn dress in one of their hideouts, he opted to kill some crooks instead of sparing them for the information they were desperately offering him. Notably, he tied them up first, assumedly so they could feel at least a measure of the same fear and helplessness she had before he shot them.
- Sociopathic Hero: Laughing Mask is a bit of a unhinged maniac more than willing to kill his foes in cold-blood while laughing.
- Vigilante Execution: Not above this, when people have performed particularly heinous crimes. Unfortunately, in the eyes of the law, at least one of them was considered a murder... and there's no statute of limitations on murder.
Mastermind Excello
Mastermind Excello
Alter Ego: Earl Everett
Notable Aliases: Excello
First Appearance: Mystic Comics #2 (April, 1940)
This former hedonistic gambling wastrel son of a nuclear researcher gained Super-Intelligence and Psychic Powers, most notably precognition, when an unthinking effort to prevent his father from being shot by a Nazi spy left a bullet made by his father from an experimental radioactive element lodged between the halves of his brain.
- Byronic Hero: He's more standoffish, reserved and cerebral than the rest.
- Crazy-Prepared: Jones recognizes Excello as a genius and wonders why he hadn't prepared some kind of failsafe for himself in the future... until it turns out he did. Excello is effectively rich forever when he set up a bank account to accrue interest in case of an extended absence in the 40's.
- Crimefighting with Cash: By the end, Excello uses his immense wealth to set up an agency that hires both the Reporter and Black Widow as freelance crimefighters.
- Psychic Powers: He was a little bit psychic before the bullet lodged into his head and now he's able to read thoughts, detect energies and has a limited form of precognition.
- The Smart Guy: He is Mastermind Excello.
- Super-Senses: Seems to be combined with some sort of clairvoyance/precognition. All of his senses are enhanced, all of the time to the point where he can hear things all over the country and even sense where he's going to be. And, brother, the country's gotten a lot louder since the 40s. He goes through a lot of aspirin.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Every time Excello uses his powers, a shard of the bullet in his brain gets closer and closer to an artery. One day it will kill him and he knows it.
Mister E
Mister E
Alter Ego: Victor "Vince" Jay (legally changed from Victor J. Goldstein)
Notable Aliases: Mr. E
First Appearance: Daring Mystery Comics #2 (February, 1940)
Golden age detective and member of the World War II superhero group known as The Twelve. Born to a Jewish family, Victor's skill in sports brought him wealth and fame that he realized his heritage would cheat him of in the openly anti-Semitic world of the early 1900s. So he adopted an identity as the WASP "Victor Jay", which eventually led to his becoming a crime fighter.
- Ambiguously Jewish: Subverted and examined: Victor "Vince" Jay was a persona created by Victor J. Goldstein in order to hide his Jewishness from his WASP peers.
- Becoming the Mask: Zig-zagged: He realizes upon waking up in the modern day that he never really felt comfortable as a crime-fighter. What he did become all-to-comfortable as was his "Vince" persona, having essentially abandoned his family and his faith for a chance at high society.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Is on the receiving end of one from his now-elderly son, who shuts the door on him for what he perceived as his father abandoning him and his mother so that he could "go play hero" and pretend to be someone he wasn't. They reconcile at the Fiery Mask's funeral.
- Captain Ersatz: Of The Shadow, at least in his original comics. The Twelve does a lot to flesh him out.
- Civvie Spandex
- Coat, Hat, Mask: Lamp-shaded in universe when Phantom Reporter mentions how similar they dress.
- My God, What Have I Done?: He spends the present day realizing, much to his horror, that he has alienated his entire family and betrayed his faith. Not by vanishing for sixty-three years, but by choosing to hide his Jewish heritage behind a fake identity.
- Repression Never Ends Well: In an interesting parallel to Dynamic Man and his using superheroism to repress his feelings of disgust toward the modern world, Mister E's heroism might be seen as an attempt to escape the pain of having to hide his Jewishness.
- Scrap Heap Hero: Of all the Twelve members, Mister E is the most forgotten and reviled (even by his own family). No one is surprised when he retires from superheroing to mend fences with his son.
- You Can't Go Home Again: After sixty years missing, he returns home to a wife on life support and a senior-aged son who despises him for covering up their Jewish heritage and abandoning them. Particularly since after his wife chose to revert to their Jewish name, everyone who had come to know them as the Jay family turned on them—either out of Anti-Semitism or the feelings of betrayal and mistrust the deception had created—thus leading to life becoming miserable for his family.
Phantom Reporter
Phantom Reporter
Alter Ego: Richard "Dick" Jones
Notable Aliases: P.R., Scourge of the Underworld, Van Engen
First Appearance: Daring Mystery Comics #3 (April, 1940)
A skilled athlete and journalist who took up the alias of a costumed adventurer to try and fight the wrongs that he couldn't as a reporter.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: The first of the heroes (outside of possibly Excello) to realize that something was fishy with the hospital room he woke up in—the radio was playing songs without commercial interruption, the nurse had holes from multiple piercings in her ears and her stockings didn't have garters. He managed to persuade Captain Wonder to help him investigate and together they learned that they were in 2008 and not 1945.
- Badass Normal: The most prominent member of the Twelve with no powers, using only his wits and fists to get things done. Those fists belong to a ex-All-American fullback who was a champion boxer, wrestler and fencer in college though, so they're pretty impressive. Becomes a Empowered Badass Normal when Fiery Mask gives him his powers.
- Bulletproof Vest: Part of his upgraded outfit, gifted to him by Excello.
- Captain Ersatz: Of the Shadow and the Green Hornet. It's so extensive that you can immediately notice that Mr. E shares the same costume.
- Civvie Spandex: Wears a nice suit with a mask and cape.
- Coat, Hat, Mask: Like so many 40s superheroes.
- Deadpan Snarker: More often in narration than speech.
- The Everyman: Jones isn't the only one lacking powers but he's our point-of-view character and ultimately pretty down-to-Earth when compared to his colleagues like the ostentatious Blue Blade or the vindictive Laughing Mask.
- The Heart: A genuinely friendly and well-meaning everyman, lacking in the mental/emotional foibles of his allies, who works to establish friendly or at least respectful relationships with even the most idiosyncratic members of the team. Except Dynamic Man. Screw that guy.
- Guile Hero: His deductive skills as a reporter are the most important thing he has, and what he uses to figure out who killed Blue Blade.
- Intrepid Reporter: Obviously. While he admits his reporting abilities don't amount to much in the 21st century, he's still able to solve the Blue Blade's murder.
- Legacy Character: No, not as the Phantom Reporter. A dying Fiery Mask gives his powers over to Jones who uses them to fight crime alongside Black Widow.
- The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: Played with. Jones muses that he might be using this idea as an excuse for why he never ended up with a significant other. But he does find love by the story's end.
- The Fettered: And The Unfettered. As a reporter, he was limited in the ways he could seek justice— if people wanted to clam up, all he could do was deal with it. If the evidence he needed was somewhere a normal civilian wasn't allowed to go (like someone else's house), he couldn't go there, and if he wrote a scathing exposé on some criminal/corrupt figure, that figure was usually powerful enough to get rival papers to excoriate it. As an anonymous masked man he realizes that he doesn't have to worry about things like journalistic ethics, credible sources or even the law. He could do anything he wanted to get results, even directly confronting people he couldn't touch as a reporter.
Rockman
Rockman
Alter Ego: Daniel Rose
Notable Aliases: Underground Secret Agent
First Appearance: U.S.A. Comics #1 (August, 1941)
A king from an underground empire called Abyssmia, founded by the descendants of the first white settlers of America, who emerged from the darkness below to assist the surface-dwellers and distant kin of his people in their plight. Possesses Super-Strength and Super-Toughness. Except he might just be David Rose, a miner whose beloved daughter and wife were killed in a massive mini* ng accident that destroyed their small town along with giving him superpowers, and the loss made him unhinged, causing him to invent the Rockman persona to cope with his grief. There are signs that point to either being true.
- The Big Guy: The largest and most imposing member of the crew.
- Cerebus Retcon: The Twelve miniseries presents the possibility Rockman's origin of being a exiled prince from the underground realm of Abyssia is actually a trauma-related delusion after losing his entire family.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Rockman's a very odd person, with his constant speeches about the underground and his "link to the earth" coming across as non-sequiturs in whatever conversation he gets involved with.
- Dumb Muscle: Not exactly dumb, but his grasp of reality is tenuous, which means characters always struggle to keep him on the same page as everyone else.
- Dying as Yourself: As the manor is about to collapse on him, Rockman seems to regain some of his human faculties and admits "his princess" is dead. It's played with as the ending implies he might not be dead and might not be delusional.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's never made clear if Rockman's origins are delusions or... something genuine. The comic presents implications for both.
- No Name Given: Even when everyone else's secret identities are disclosed, Rockman seems to have no paperwork linking him to his true identity. Richard Jones finds it weird to call him "Rockman" but there really is nothing else to call him.
- Tragic Dream: He wants to return to his kingdom of Abyssia and to his family. Problem is, they might not be real at all.
Witness
Witness
Notable Aliases: Judge, juror and avenger of evil
First Appearance: Mystic Comics #7 (December, 1941)
The Witness, he knows what you've done! A mysterious individual, the Witness was once a detective in Chicago before he accidentally shot an innocent bystander during a case. Sentenced to prison for two years, he almost committed suicide, before a mysterious voice told him it was not his time. He has been charged with the task of seeing a tragedy about to occur beforehand. He will then watch the impending victim for several days to judge if the person deserves saving, in which case he would either try to prevent the tragedy, or simply witness the event without becoming involved.
- Adaptational Backstory Change: In a way. The Twelve's version of him seems to be required to make the wicked receive their just reward as opposed to simply sitting back and witnessing their deaths.
- The Atoner: His origin starts off with him as a cop who kills an innocent civilian. Since then, he works to fight evildoers.
- Best Served Cold: The Witness is very intent on punishing wicked men involved in the holocaust. In the story proper he directly kills one elderly man who used to be a concentration camp guard some 70 years after the camp closed down.
- Cold Ham: In traditional pulp fashion he speaks in a very dramatic fashion about the evil in the hearts of men, but is usually very restrained in tone (Phantom Reporter even comments he's always whispering).
- Death Glare: Phantom Reporter comments the Witness has a very haunting eyes through which you can sense the wicked things he has seen men do. No one looks him in his eyes on that account.
- Detect Evil: He's got this ability, which is implied to be really strong, allowing him to sense the details of peoples' evil deeds and track them all over the world. S.H.I.E.L.D. employs him specifically because of this.
- Driven to Suicide: After impulsively killing an innocent man and doing two years for manslaughter, he was unable to find work, thus he decided to kill himself—and then he had his revelation.
- Mission from God: His duty to rescue those who should be saved and oversee the punishment of the wicked is framed as both this and a bargain in The Twelve, with the end goal being the redemption of his tarnished soul.
- Mistaken Identity: When Witness was a cop, he impulsively shot an innocent man believing him to be a wanted criminal.
- "Not So Different" Remark: He notes at one point that he and Black Widow both have obligations to serve a higher power whom they are beholden to, which she acknowledges.
- Perpetual Frowner: His expression never changes from a judgmental scowl.
- Photographic Memory: He says he cannot forget anything he has witnessed. Given that he was the first American in Auschwitz just after the Soviets freed it and also regularly watches people get killed in front of him/kills them himself, that's not fun.
- Scarily Competent Tracker: As mentioned above, S.H.I.E.L.D. eventually makes him one of their agents due to his ability to track people down by their sins. He tells Phantom Reporter that he plans to track down those who think they've gotten away with their crimes and are untouchable and show them how wrong they are.
- Seers: As outlined above.
- Terror Hero: Strikes fear into the hearts of criminals with his brutality.
- Unscrupulous Hero: You better hope you haven't committed any evil deeds. The Witness will know and will do something cold and brutal about it.
- War Is Hell: The lone member of the Twelve that seems actively traumatized by WWII. It's mentioned early on, he's the only one of the Twelve who saw the aftermath of the Auschwitz camp.
- Would Not Shoot a Civilian: Averted. Back in his cop days, he shot an innocent party. It completely wrecked his life.
