<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0
transitional//en">The Lethal Luthors:
A Deceptive
Brilliance
PART TWO: THE SECRET FOUR
William Luthor 1903-1967
William
Luthor should be the hardest brother of the Luthor quadruplets to research
because he lived so much of his life in the shadows, leaving little concrete
evidence about his career. However there are extensive dossiers about his
various guises such as The Scorpion and Baron von Strucker in the records of
the intelligence agencies of the
Like his
brothers, Alexander, David and Lawrence he was born on September 18, 1903, to
Paul Luthor and Sally Finn. Like his brothers he was born with a genetic
predisposition for total scalp baldness. Also like them he was brilliant. Yet
he differed from them in many important ways. He was quiet and studious. He was
the only brother to remain at home and help his mother through their father's
many long absences. He was the only brother to take an interest in helping to
raise their sister,
Lorelei Brown was the daughter of a wealthy banker who had accumulated his wealth during what was then called the Great War but what is now known as World War One. Once William was his son-in-law, Brown revealed certain things to him. He had had William investigated and knew that he had the capability to rise through the ranks of the military given his intelligence and talent. Brown believed that William could be very useful to Brown and his associates. Brown belonged to a group of wealthy men who gained their wealth by manipulating politics and arranging conflicts between nations or nationalistic groups. This was not as cold blooded or as mercenary as it seemed. These men believed that man was a predator and conflict was his natural state. Modern civilization arose because of conflict, as did most of the modern technology. They believed that they were helping mankind reach its fullest potential—while becoming wealthy.
William Luthor was still idealistic enough to reject his father-in-law’s offer, but not naïve enough to reject it outright. While the philosophy did appeal to him on a certain level, he considered himself enlightened enough not be a racialist. He told Brown that he would think about it and if he rose to a position where he thought he could contribute to the organization, he would contact him about joining.[2]
He received his
officer’s commission and was sent to the
Luthor
escaped from the Ifuago and drew the warriors away from the village. He circled
back and freed his men. Although outnumbered, in a strategic battle he defeated
the warriors of the village. He and his men then made an example of the village
by torching it and killing all of the inhabitants. Word of this reached Douglas
MacArthur, who was appalled at this behavior. He used his influence to have
William Luthor reduced in rank to a private. Luthor was part of an infantry
unit assigned as support on a naval vessel hunting pirates in the
During
the course of this mission he heard tales of a secret society of pirates.
Although piracy remained their economic and social mainstay these pirates had
made some moves to diversify into various other criminal enterprises, such as
smuggling, drugs, and arms dealing.[3] Most authorities
believed this secret society of pirates to be either members of the Triads or
to be entirely fictitious. William Luthor, however, was convinced that there
was such a society and that it was somehow connected to the cult of the
Scorpion that seemed out of place in these
The naval vessel and their infantry support drove the attackers into their stone fortress and began to bombard it with their artillery. The captain of the gunboat asked for a volunteer to parley with the pirates and accept their surrender. William Luthor volunteered, believing that this would be one way to work his way back to an officer’s rank.
William
Luthor was escorted into the stone fortress and from there into a palatial
mansion inside the fortress. He remembered drinking a tasty exotic tea. The
next thing he knew he was standing over the dead bodies of the officers of the
gunboat with a smoking gun in his hand. Pirates poured over the side of the
gunboat, slaughtering all of the
The pirate
organization was named Scorpia. This an organization had begun in the 1500s as
an organization of pirates[5]. Scorpia was believed to have been
destroyed in 1612 by the mysterious man known as the Phantom. The Phantom
killed Scorpia's leader Brunel de Gottschalk in mortal combat. The Phantom then
destroyed Scorpia's castle by blowing up its gunpowder room and so destroyed
the stronghold from which they had carried out their campaigns of terror.
However Scorpia survived in secret and it established strongholds in
William
Luthor worked his way through the ranks of Scorpia using his military genius
for the benefit of the pirate organization. His outstanding achievements
brought him to the attention of Baron Sojin, who made him one of his advisors.
Sojin found Luthor’s genius also extended to financial and speculative advice
as well. Luthor studied Sojin closely, for Sojin resembled him to some extent.
They had the same build and Sojin shaved his head to display his scars. When
William Luthor was certain that he could impersonate Sojin, he murdered him and
assumed his identity. Once William Luthor assumed the identity of Sojin, he
claimed that the dead body was that of William Luthor who had tried to lead a
coup against him and so had been killed. Luthor then carried out a purge in
which all of Sojin’s closest associates were killed, using the excuse that they
had been working in concert with Luthor. “Sojin” then took further vengeance
against the Luthor family by claiming possession of Luthor’s family to be his
concubine and slave. Luthor used this excuse to have his wife and daughter
transported from the
Assuming total command of the Scorpia organization, William Luthor decided to modernize it and move its primary occupation away from piracy and towards war profiteering. They manufactured and smuggled munitions and began wars to have a market for their products. He reorganized the loose alliance of groups into a monolithic organization under the name of Scorpia. As part of this move towards a diversified means of income, Luthor made contact with the organization to which his father-in-law belonged. Through William Luthor’s efforts, The Controllers made a tentative alliance with Scorpia.
As the supreme leader of Scorpia William Luthor called himself the Scorpion rather than maintaining a constant impersonation of Baron Sojin. So far as the Scorpia organization was concerned, Baron Sojin was now subordinate to the Scorpion and would not be seen that often by the membership of Scorpia since he would the Scorpion’s personal representative. In this way Luthor arranged so that he would only have to impersonate Baron Sojin when absolutely needed.
A disgruntled member of Scorpia who did not like the “demotion” of Baron Sojin tried to assassinate the new leader of Scorpia by releasing an experimental gas in the mansion. Luthor was not in the mansion at the time and so escaped from any of the ill effects. Lorelei was killed outright by the gas and Serina was permanently affected by the gas; it paralyzed her facial muscles, making her face slack and expressionless. She took to wearing a mask to hide her features.
As
William Luthor went through Sojin’s papers, he discovered that Sojin was a code
name, given to him through his association with
William
Luthor studied the political landscape of the late twenties with the eye of a
military strategist. He established many bases worldwide and used the assets of
Scorpia to invest in manufacturing concerns with an eye to manufacturing arms
and also to improving existing arms. These he would sell to the highest bidder.
Yet he needed customers, so he used the volatile atmosphere of the world in the
wake of the Great War to create customers. Strictly apolitical, Scorpia gave
financial support to those political organizations he thought would best
promote conflict. He gave financial aid to the Bolsheviks in
In
In the early thirties William Luthor’s long-range plans seemed to be moving ahead on schedule. There was however one fly in the ointment. One of the officers whom William Luthor had been induced to kill when he had been inducted into Scorpia had been a friend of a Lieutenant Don Winslow.[8] Winslow was a friend of Admiral Colby. Attached to Naval Intelligence, Winslow was given the special assignment of tracking down the band of pirates that had killed the crew of the gunboat. Winslow’s diligent investigation uncovered the existence of Scorpia and its leader the Scorpion. William Luthor made certain that despite Winslow’s continual interference Winslow never learned the true identity of the Scorpion. To dissuade Winslow from his investigation of Scorpia, the Scorpion had Winslow’s friend, mentor, and unofficial superior in Naval Intelligence, Michael Splendor captured and tortured. However even after Splendor was left paralyzed from the waist down, Winslow continued his campaign against the Scorpion, perhaps with even more gusto.
Through
out the Thirties Winslow derailed many of the Scorpion’s operations; time and
time again the Scorpion was forced to destroy prototypes of weapons or research
on weapons rather than let it fall into the hands of the United States
government. The Scorpion did not care if they eventually acquired the
technology, but he was not about to let it go for free. Winslow ferreted out
and arrested associates and underlings of the Scorpion, or else he forced to
them flee imprisonment or cause their deaths. In many cases, however, Winslow
seemed only to suspect a connection between various threats to
In 1933,
Scorpia agents stationed in
Baron von
Strucker’s early support of Hitler paid off when he was given a special status
as part of the new German Intelligence service under Himmler. Luthor used
the von Strucker guise to persuade the Reich to begin a super soldier program,
to push for new technologies in armaments, and to award certain companies
lucrative government contracts. Luthor used Hitler and Himmler’s fascination
with the occult to lay the foundations for connections to various criminal
organizations in the
It
was also in 1933 that Luthor, as Baron von Strucker, was given a simple mission
with dire consequences. Strucker was accompanying Hitler and the head of the
Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, to a luncheon meeting at a hotel in
He shared
responsibilities for the indoctrination and training of Johann Schmidt with the
leading Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Luthor had an idea, which he was able
to sell
Although it may have not made that much difference to either Luthor or Rosenberg, their subject for the psychological conditioning was a psychopathic killer. The man known as “Johann Schmidt” was born in a southern German village, the son of an illiterate, drunken peasant named Hermann and his long-suffering wife Martha. Martha died in childbirth, and Hermann tried to drown the newborn “Johann”, blaming him for the death of his mother. Other villagers and the Priest stopped Hermann from killing the infant. In shame and despair Hermann committed suicide the next morning.[13] The infant was rescued by a local doctor, who delivered the infant to an orphanage. “Schmidt” ran away at age seven, and grew up on the streets. During his childhood and adolescence he was in and out of prison for petty crimes ranging from vagrancy to theft. In prison and on the streets Schmidt was constantly beaten and victimized by other thugs. He was eventually taken in by a Jewish shopkeeper, whose daughter was the only person to show Johann kindness. Smitten with her he mistook her kindness for love and he tried to force himself upon her. When she refused, he became enraged and killed her. Terrified, he fled—but after the initial shock had passed he discovered that he actually was exhilarated by the act of killing.
In
The Red Skull harbored a
deep hatred for all mankind, especially Jews. It was his influence on Hitler,
Himmler, and Rosenberg over the next few years that pushed the idea that the
Final Solution for the Jewish problem could not mean mere containment or exile
but necessitated extermination, however it would be years before Hitler and his
top advisors would actually implement the policy.[15] During
the war, the Red Skull undertook many different special operations for Hitler,
slowly gaining more power within the Third Reich until even Hitler was
terrified of his own creation; the Allied forces' Captain
With effectively unlimited authority in Nazi Germany, Schmidt began to build secret bases around the world, and create untraceable fiscal reserves. He built a "wolf-pack" of Nazi u-boats whose raids were used to fill Schmidt's personal coffers. Making contingency plans in case of the defeat of Nazi Germany, he established a secret headquarters on a small island (called "Exile Island"), and populated it with several top Nazi leaders, soldiers, and their families.[16]
In 1934-1935 “Baron von
Strucker” was not in
Rather than have Scorpia
directly involved in such deals, William Luthor used another alias- one that
gave him amusement, for it was the alias of his brother David. His brother
David Luthor had adopted the name D. D. Warburton. David’s history had been
adapted into a comic strip with his name altered to Daddy Warbucks because of
David’s munitions interests, although they were, so far as William could
ascertain wholly legitimate. Since D.D. Warburton was a known arms dealer and
since, being identical brothers, William was a dead ringer for D.D. Warburton,
William often adopted this guise when carrying out some publicly known but
shady deals. This deal however went sour as Shiwan Khan’s imperial ambitions
were thwarted by the mystery man known as The Shadow. Believing that Warburton
had sold him out, Khan tried to kill William Luthor. Luthor was shielded by a
member of Scorpia, one of the Thuggees who served as his bodyguard. This
Thuggee bore a resemblance to David Warburton’s bodyguard “
In 1937 the secret of
Scorpia’s existence as an organization currently operating in the modern world rather
than a forgotten secret society was publicly exposed by a college student named
Diana Palmer. Palmer had been an Olympic gold diver in the Games of 1936 and
had been romantically linked with millionaire Christopher Walker. During an
interview with a local newspaper in
William assigned one of his best men, Karabi, a man who had the same general build and appearance as William Luthor and so who often posed as Baron Sojin for him, to take care of the threat to Scorpia. Miss Palmer did not respond to intimidation. So the next step was to silence her. However Karabi was entranced by her beauty and so kidnapped her instead of arranging for her to die in an accident. Unfortunately for Scorpia, Diana Palmer was also loved by the man known as The Phantom, The Ghost Who Walks, whose ancestor had also fought against Scorpia.[18] The Phantom defeated Karabi in single combat. The island fortress was invaded by the United States Marines. Karabi and several of the Scorpia agents were sent to prison; fortunately for Scorpia, Karabi had destroyed all documentation prior to the invasion.[19]
While in
the United States William Luthor used his own checkered past of being an Army
deserter to make contact with a criminal organization run by a man who called
himself the Ultra-Humanite. William Luthor had a plan to arm criminals with
weaponry. This, he reasoned, could spur various states to increase their
National Guard membership and also order more and heavier armaments to deal
with the criminal menace. At the insistence of the Ultra-Humanite, William
Luthor had a personal meeting with The Ultra-Humanite and his second in
command. Although he did not at first recognize The Ultra-Humanite, William did
recognize the Ultra-Humanite’s lieutenant as his brother Alexander Luthor. He
learned that the Ultra-Humanite was his brother Lawrence, aged dramatically by
a failed experiment. The family reunion between three of the quadruplet
brothers consisted of cursory hand shakes before they turned to their business
at hand, promoting chaos for their own particular goals and profit. William
Luthor kept knowledge of his connection to Scorpia from his brothers, lest in
their ambition they try to wrest the organization away from him. They knew him
only as an international arms dealer who sometimes dealt in foreign affairs for
profit. This association was fairly lucrative for both parties. The
Ultra-Humanite and Alexi obtained enough money to further their grandiose
megalomaniacal plans for conquering the world, or at least the
After Alexi and Lawrence had a falling out in 1938, William kept close contacts with both of them. Alexi expressed an interest in joining forces with William on a permanent basis. William gave him the assignment to destabilize the Balkans, setting the various ethnic/nationalist groups at one another throats with the express purpose of supplying the region with arms. Despite a promising beginning, Alexi ultimately failed at this task as the man known as Superman took an interest in thwarting Alexi and stopping the civil war Alexi had created in Lutha from turning into a wider conflict. After Alexi was forced to destroy some very expensive prototypes, William fired him. Alexi went on to have a criminal career that was based on using super science for the purposes of extortion for financial gain. Yet to William’s viewpoint, Alexander’s career seemed designed to bring him into constant contact with Superman with the ultimate goal of humiliating, defeating and destroying the so called “man of steel.” [20]
By 1938
William Luthor’s long-range plans to plunge the world into a great conflict
were reaching crescendo.
Unfortunately during this period Scorpia came under attack on several fronts. Because of the exposure of the Scorpia name and organization by Diana Palmer, William Luthor resurrected an organization that had been an offshoot of Scorpia. Ironically it had been shut down by a man also known as the Phantom in the 1850’s.[21] Although the Phantom was supposed to be immortal, Luthor rather doubted this, believing that the Phantoms were several people, probably part of an organization of similarly costumed men that gave credence to an idea of an immortal defender of justice. His realization of this fact gave him inspiration for his new organization, instead of one irreplaceable man, there would be many replaceable men. His daughter Serina had become one the key personnel in his organization. She would travel around the world being a liaison between the various organizations of Scorpia.
Luthor wondered if the remnants of the organization shattered by the Phantom in the 1850s had become part of the organization to which his father-in-law belonged. The organization had been called Hydra. Its origin dated back to the Black Death of 1347 when a few roving bands of criminals traveled Europe looting the decimated cities and townships grew into a ruthless, structured secret society.
He took the original structure of Hydra and altered each section’s function, assigning a totemic animal to represent each section. A Chameleon for information gathering, espionage, and identity subterfuge; a Serpent for assassination, strike force teams, and sabotage, Scorpion for enforcement, armed action, and invasion forces; Octopus for commercial criminal activities such as drugs, prostitution, and illegal arms sales; and Vulture for organized savaging such as looting, piracy, hijacking, and black market dealings. The man chosen to be the head of the Octopus branch was named Chase, he was a banking magnate whose reputation was above reproach. The rest of the section heads remained unknown. Only the upper-echelon leaders of Hydra were also members of Scorpia. It remains an unsubstantiated rumor that Serina Luthor was the head of the Serpent faction of Hydra.[22]
Shortly
after the reformed Hydra began operations, a moment of carelessness by members
of the Vulture section based in
Luthor had set up Hydra to run independently of Scorpia, as one of the major sources of intelligence and financial resources for Scorpia. The separate sections of Hydra thrived autonomously from Scorpia. Scorpia’s main organization, however, was beleaguered.
One of the most persistent and damaging campaigns against Scorpia was Don Winslow’s obsessive efforts to destroy the organization.
In 1939
Winslow dealt Scorpio a major blow by removing two of the Scorpion’s top
lieutenants. First of all Winslow captured the Scorpion’s main advisor Count
Borg. Count Borg was a dead ringer for Winslow. William Luthor, the Scorpion
had always intended, when Borg’s usefulness as an advisor had ended, to use the
Count to discredit Winslow. However a blow to the head during his capture undid
most of Count Borg’s pro-Scorpia conditioning. Borg and Winslow turned the
tables on the Scorpion, and Winslow impersonated Count Borg in order to
infiltrate Scorpia. Cho-San, the head of Scorpia‘s Asian operations, which was
based in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was forced to abandon his headquarters due
to it being raided by San Francicso law enforcement forces and Naval
Intelligence operatives. Winslow was abetted in this operation against the
William
Luthor happened to be at Cho-San’s headquarters when it was raided, he barely
escaped capture. However he took Lotus with him as a captive and possible
hostage.[25] As it was, with Cho-san’s operation
dismantled Luthor had to lay low in
With Don
Winslow hot on his trail, William Luthor fled
Winslow
and the Scorpion had a confrontation in
In Manila
Luthor used the alias Señor Rufo and once again confronted Winslow but avoided
capture. However the trip to the
During
1939-40 William Luthor spent much of his time traveling back and forth between
William
Luthor discovered, to his dismay, that his daughter was infatuated with the Red
Skull. Serina had adopted the name the Mask of Death because of her
disfigurement also used it as a compliment to the Red Skull’s Masque of the Red
Death borrowing. Luthor kept her far away from that psychopath by placing her
in charge of the Scorpia operation based in the
However her efforts to have Scorpia steal a formula for an extremely potent poisonous gas went awry and she was captured by Don Winslow. Although she begged him not do so, Don Winslow removed her mask, earning her eternal enmity for exposing her paralyzed face.[31]
Luthor
was doing a balancing act in the Pacific, acting as Baron von Strucker,
Hitler’s liaison with the Aryans of the East, the Japanese, and also donning
his role as the Scorpion to encourage Japanese militarism and imperial
ambition. In the latter role he organized a joint venture between Scorpia and
the Japanese based on a
Once again Don Winslow was dispatched to interfere in Scorpia’s plans. However this island base had served its purpose by then but the Japanese were unwilling to let go of their “conquered” territory so in fact by removing the Japanese influence Winslow was doing the Scorpion a favor.[33]
In 1941
William Luthor kept shuttling back between
William
Luthor convinced some of his Black Dragon allies that a direct attack on the
West Coast of the
William
Luthor discovered that when he returned to
Although William Luthor realized that hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people were killed during the wars he engineered, he considered this an unavoidable price to pay for man’s natural state of conflict. He believed that conflict was a form of natural selection that made mankind stronger by weeding out the weaker people. Conflict also spurred mankind’s technological advance. However the Final Solution as promulgated by Schmidt was something that even William Luthor regarded with horror. Collateral damage as the consequence of war was one thing, but the methodical execution of millions of people was something else entirely, so far as Luthor was concerned. Von Strucker’s tacit disapproval of the policy of the Final Solution was used by the Red Skull to erode Baron von Strucker’s influence with Hitler. The Red Skull had ambitions to succeed Hitler and to rule the world under a National Socialist government. Although he harbored some gratitude for Baron von Strucker for having rescued him from his non-existence as a bellboy, he also regarded Strucker as a rival and a potential threat to his eventual domination of the Third Reich.
Shortly
after the Japanese attack on
Although The Howling Commandos were actually insignificant threats so far as the war efforts of the Reich was concerned for some reason Hitler became obsessed with them. He felt that the true damage that they did was to make the Reich look ridiculous. The Red Skull agreed that they should be removed; however having them exterminated by expending a great deal of manpower to hunt them down would not serve the greater good of the Reich. The Red Skull convinced Hitler that it would be best to humiliate the Howling Commandos and their leader before the world before they were killed. He suggested that Baron von Strucker be given the assignment to destroy Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos. In this way the Red Skull was able to give the Baron an assignment that could end in failure and so bring about his disgrace, it would also put him in harm‘s way, so there was a chance that that the Baron could become a casualty of the war and so be removed in this fashion.
Unable to
decline this assignment, William Luthor issue a challenge to Nicholas Fury to
meet with him on the
William
Luthor hoped that the humiliation of Fury coupled with Fury’s disobedience of
direct orders would cause the
The
rematch was held in
Infuriated with Baron von Strucker, Hitler gave him the task of capturing Fury and his Commandos alive so that they could be made examples of before the world.
Fury and
his crew were given an audacious assignment: to capture Adolph Hitler. Through
Scorpia agents in
Luthor formed his own specially trained operatives to capture Fury and the Howling Commandos. They were selected from the SS and also from the ranks of German Scorpia agents. They were known as Baron von Strucker’s Blitzkrieg Squadron.
As the
Blitzkrieg Squadron was training, Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos succeeded
in proving that they were more than just nuisances, they were a true threat to
the war effort. In a joint operation with the American costumed hero Captain
Once the
Blitzkrieg Squadron had been trained, Luthor plotted Fury’s capture. He
constructed a false V-2 Rocket installation on the French coast, giving out
that it was equipped with a new bombsight that would allow the German Army to
land rockets in
Since
this failure further eroded Strucker’s standing with Hitler, he offered to have
his Blitzkrieg Squadron prove their worth to the Reich. They went into
Von
Strucker and the Blitzkrieg Squadron next encountered Fury and the Howling
Commandos when the Commandos were sent to
Because
of his constant failure to capture Nick Fury, Hitler doubted von Strucker’s
commitment to the National Socialist cause and began to doubt that von Strucker
had the will to do what was necessary to achieve victory over the enemies of
the Reich. He ordered von Strucker to go to Cherbeaux in occupied
William
Luthor had to flee
Schmidt, the Red Skull, agreed to help Strucker since he had a residual feeling of gratitude for him and because Schmidt believed that Strucker could eventually prove useful to the Red Skull’s postwar plans.
Freed of
his confinement in
Luthor
had come to realize that in order for conflict to be used most effectively, it
needed to be managed by sane, rational people. It is to this end he decided to
guide Scorpia to become the organization that would control conflict in the
world. To ensure that ultimate control would rest in the hands of Scorpia, he
knew he needed the ultimate weapon. He was determined to create an atomic bomb
before the
Luthor
created a special think tank for scientists with innovative ideas called
Advanced Idea Mechanics. He believed that this could be a way to create super
weapons, giving Scorpia the upper hand in the coming arms race and so being able
to dictate to nation states such as the
The
complex was shielded from aerial sightings by camouflage but to maintain the
secrecy of
The
On the island, each group were set upon by and slowed by traps set up to discourage visitors. Eventually the main bodies of both groups fell into pitfalls that ended up in a series of tunnels which would eventually lead to a Scorpia imprisonment center. The leaders of the two groups Captain Simon Savage and Sgt. Joe Morita were separated from their men as they remained free of the pitfalls and avoided other traps. Each made their solitary way towards the Scorpia complex. Within the underground passages, the two groups of soldiers eventually met up and fought each other, with the Raiders gaining the advantage, but eventually they were both captured and imprisoned by the forces of Scorpia.[43]
On the surface, Savage and Morita squared off. Though an even match, Savage managed to knock Morita down long enough to convince him that without their squadrons, they would need to team up against the common enemy.
After another brief scuffle between the two squad leaders, Strucker forced them both to run a gauntlet to decide whether they could be worthy additions to Scorpia (after some brainwashing, of course). Despite several disagreements, Morita and Savage were forced to work together to survive the series of attacks. Meanwhile, the members of the Samurai Squadron and the Leatherneck Raiders joined forces to break free from their prisons, though tensions remained high. The two groups managed to confront Strucker himself, but not before he could send a squadron of Scorpia agents to attack their exhausted leaders.
Savage and Morita managed to regain their wits and fight off their attackers, but Strucker managed to trap the two groups, summon reinforcements, and line them up in front of a firing squad. Before Strucker could give the order, however, Savage and Morita broke in and freed their soldiers. Rather than let his research be captured by the Allies or the Japanese William Luthor set up the self-destruct sequence on the island and escaped in his own private submarine. The Raiders and Samurai Squadron managed to make it to another submarine and escape as well, though not without some fighting over who was in command of the vessel.
Ultimately, the two groups parted in peace, as the Americans brought the Samurai Squadron back to their rendezvous ship. Savage and Morita shook hands, hoping that they'd one day meet again as friends and allies.
Following the destruction
of
William Luthor realized
that this war had reached the zenith of its usefulness, there was little more
profit to be made from it and little more technological achievement that would
be wrought since
However, Hitler was still
obsessed with Nick Fury and insisted that Baron von Strucker take care of this
unfinished business. Luthor located Nick Fury and put in place a plan to
destroy Nick Fury by subjecting him to a special hallucinogenic drug. Strucker
captured Fury in
Hitler sent von Strucker
to investigate weird lights in the
As they were moping up the operation, Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos showed up. Hitler was correct about one thing, Gruenstadt had indeed been signaling the Allies. Fury believed that von Strucker had exterminated the town because of their treachery to the Third Reich. The Howling Commandos attacked. Baron von Strucker and Arnim Zola barely escaped with their lives. Professor Wilhelm Schmidt, one of the scientists who had accompanied the Germans was left behind. He became infected with the last remaining parasitic creature.[46]
Luthor arranged for Fury
and his men to be lured into attacking a hard water plant in
Once Luthor had convinced
Hitler that Fury had been killed, he was also able to convince the Fuehrer that
the war was all but lost. He began urging him to carry out a limited scorched
earth policy of destroying arms and fortifications so that the enemy could not
turn them against the Reich. He convinced Hitler that the war was nearly over
by revealing the plans of the Red Skull, Arnim Zola, Baron Zemo, and others to
flee
William Luthor may not
have known of Hitler’s various plans to avoid death, such as transferring his
consciousness to a mechanical brain, having embryos created from his cells to
be implanted in women, and planting his own successor in the
William Luthor escaped
from
Luthor used the resources
of the Fraternite Internationale de la Resistance Contre l’Oppression as one means
to track down Scorpio agents who had gone underground with the fall of the
Fascist states in
She became romantically involved with Ernst Stravo Blofeld and bore him a daughter named Nena in 1950.[50] Blofeld and Irma Bunt hired a former prostitute named Angelique Calvert to be the girl’s nanny.
In the first few years directly after the Second World War, military production geared down and Scorpia needed an infusion of capital. Luthor had heard of several caches of gold hidden away by the Nazi high command and spent a few years looking for some of them. He heard that the location one such cache was locked away in the memory of a concentration camp victim, one Gabrielle Haller. Although she had not been a conventionally pretty girl she had been used as a prostitute by the officers of the camp. Her sexual exploitation shattered her mind, and a protégé of Dr. Mengele took advantage of her ruined but receptive state to hypnotically implant her mind with the location of the Nazi gold. She retreated from the trauma of the hypnosis into a defensive catatonia. The officers and the doctor who had been entrusted with the location of the gold had been killed when the camp was liberated.[51]
The catatonic Gabrielle
Haller had been transported to
Although it was not known to the general public, Charles Javier was the nephew of a man reported to be deceased. His uncle’s name was John Wainwright, a biographical novel about his short life by Olaf Stapledon was called Odd John.[52]
Odd John was a sport, a
random mutation of humanity. His mutation was a recessive mutation derived from
an ancient people in
These mutants, known as Oddian mutants,[53] share many physical characteristics, despite diverse ethnic origins. The shared physical traits include long, lithe limbs; large heads, overly large eyes with odd pupils; protruding brows; sharp, broad noses; large mouths; and long sinewy hands. These traits render them physically repugnant to most of humanity. Additionally they are long lived; many live to be two hundred to four hundred years old, and they have high intelligence and a powerful sexual pheromone that makes them extremely sexually attractive despite their physical appearance. They suffer from various physical deformities and disabilities and are prone to mental disorders yet they also possessed great mental powers.
The repulsive physical traits tend to moderate as an Oddian mutant ages because the traits result from the mutant’s long-gestation period and even longer childhood and adolescence. The physical traits give them a juvenile appearance and so they are taken for children long into the normal period of adulthood.
Gabrielle was also an
Oddian mutant, and it was because of her often unconscious sexual charms that
she had been forced to become a prostitute for the officers and soldiers of the
concentration camp in which she had been imprisoned. Charles Javier had heard
of her and from her physical appearance had deduced she was akin to his Uncle.
Using his finely honed telepathic skills, he consoled her ego and guided it
through the layers of psychic trauma until she rose from her catatonic state.
Javier’s delicate telepathic healing was guided by his Uncle John Wainwright.
John had learned from Charles about Haller. Odd John had traveled to
Odd John was also pleased to make the acquaintance of Erik Lehnsherr because although Lehnsherr was an entirely different form of mutant from himself, his existence and the existence of other like him proved to Odd John that his kind, homo superior, would eventually hold sway over the planet and become the dominant race of mankind. However their numbers were tiny compared to the majority of mankind and so they needed a long term strategy to gain political and military power in such a manner so as not to arouse fear, hatred, or mistrust. Lehnsherr’s latent hatred towards regular humanity could be useful; Wainwright saw that Lehnsherr could become pawn, patsy, and public face of persecuted mutant kind.
Gabrielle was kidnapped
from the hospital. Javier, Lehnsherr and Odd John tracked her kidnappers.
Gabrielle had been kidnapped by Baron von Strucker, or at least this was the
identity Luthor was then using. Agents of Scorpia in
Odd John knew that Baron Strucker was really William Luthor. He experienced an odd frission when he saw a face from his memories in the memories of William Luthor. Odd John had been raised by the Wainwrights as their son and until he began reading minds he had believed that he was their flesh and blood. However a stray thought by his mother had led him to investigate further. Odd John was the son of a Thomas Wainwright but not the Thomas Wainwright who raised him. His mother had retained a memory of what the Thomas Wainwright who had fathered John had looked like.
Odd John had searched for records of his birth parents only to discover that they had been killed shortly after his birth. Yet William Luthor had memories of Thomas Wainwright under the name of Paul Luthor.[54] Odd John and the erstwhile Baron von Stucker were half-brothers.
With their combined powers, Odd John and Lehnsherr defeated William Luthor and his Scorpia agents. William Luthor had not allowed his men to violate the helpless Haller so Odd John made them forget about the location of the gold but otherwise let the men go. Lehnsherr had a form of psychokinesis that allowed him to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. For some reason Lehnsherr thought that his powers were limited to magnetism, although he would occasionally, apparently without knowing it, manipulate another part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Odd John was content to leave Lehnsherr ignorant of his own potential.
Odd John took a portion of the gold but left the rest of it with Lehnsherr. Odd John planted the suggestion in Lehnsherr’s mind that he should use his portion of the gold to keep mutant kind safe from humanity in any way necessary. Lehnsherr would become an infamous terrorist under the name of Magneto, the Master of Magnetism. Most people, however, doubted the stories of Lehnsherr being a special kind of human being and thought that his feats of magnetism were either due to some technological device or some type of trickery.
During the 1950’s William
Luthor concentrated on expanding the power and influence of Scorpia while
heightening tensions between East and West in the Cold War.
You will recall that one of William Luthor’s main lieutenants Karabi had been had been disgraced by being captured by the Phantom while posing as Baron Sonjin. However Karabi showed his loyalty by not exposing any of the secrets of Scorpia despite his arrest and imprisonment. His reward when he was released from prison was to be allowed to rejoin Scorpia as part of the Serpent section of its underling organization, Hydra. Ambitious, Karabi soon came to Luthor with a plan to create another semi-autonomous organization that would be indirectly tied to the Scorpia organization. This organization would be created out of the Serpent section of Hydra by taking over an existing organization. This was a small but highly influential Asian organization in the late 1930’s that had formed when the followers of the late Sen Gat[55] had joined up with a small cult of Naga worshipers.
The Nagas were beings associated with Hindu and Buddhist mythology, usually represented as gigantic cobras with several hoods or with a human head and serpent body. In addition to representing fertility, they also symbolized eternity and destruction. The King of the Nagas, Adisesha, was believed to have a thousand heads. Generally Adisesha was worshipped as a Manifestation of Vishhu who spews a venomous fire that destroys all creation at the end of each kalpa. This particular Naga cult, however, associated Adisesha with Siva the Destroyer rather than Vishnu the Infinite. The cult also practiced a form of Thuggism, strangling victims for Kali-Durga who they depicted as being in the form of a King Cobra. They possessed strangling cords made of braided snakeskin and also poisoned victims from afar by means of a blow dart treated with cobra venom. Prior to Karabi’s plan to annex them this cult had been occasionally contracted by were Scorpia to carry out assassinations and terrorist acts.
The cult was already
grooming a child that they believed was the incarnation of Siva. The child,
Jeffrey Burr had been part of pair of conjoined twins that had been
successfully separated. The conjoined twins were the sons of a member of the
As Karabi was
reorganizing the Kali Yuga cult, William Luthor expanded the activities of
Scorpia into
Arnold Brown ran the American branch of Scorpia under the Hydra labe