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〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Maxwell Lord IV
CHARACTER AGE: Approximately 40.
SERIES: DCU ( New Earth )
CHRONOLOGY: Brightest Day, after his global mind-wipe.
CLASS: (Anti-) Villain
HOUSING: Random.
BACKGROUND:
Max Lord was born to Arthur and Rebecca Lord in Boston, Massachusetts. When Max was sixteen, he walked in on his chemical businessman father having just been murdered, before he could bring some causative cancer findings about other companies to the Attorney General. Max's mother told Max never to underestimate powerful people, and it was a message that stuck with him. She taught him how to get ahead in life by playing by his own rules.
He grew up, went to Tuck School of Management, got married, divorced, and went on to be a bright, arrogant business executive who stumbled into the superhero biz almost accidentally. During a rock climbing expedition in which Max had planned to murder his boss, his boss had a genuine accident and while attempting to helping him, Max found a computer hidden in the rubble, built originally by the alien Metron and taken over by the computer program Kilg%re. Max forgot about helping his boss, feeling hypnotized by it. Following that encounter Max was given the presidency at this company and quickly transformed it into Maxwell Lord Enterprises and became one of the most successful and wealthy businessmen in the world, thanks to the aid of the computer (although he did do a great deal of the work on his own). He helped it become more self-sufficient in exchange for its help, and the computer suggested to Max the idea of getting in on the reforming team of super-powered heroes known as the Justice League.
Max broke into the house of the superhero Booster Gold to personally recruit him to the newest incarnation of the Justice League, and recruited Kimiyo Hoshi (otherwise known as Dr. Light). The team's formation after so long of nothing sparked much media intrigue. Just before Kimiyo went on to address the General Assembly at the UN, she was met by terrorists who intended to disrupt and kill. She alerted the rest of the League with the signal-device Max gave her, and their first mission, despite some coordination difficulties, ended up a success after the lead terrorist shot himself after his bomb fails to detonate. Max watched this unfold from TVs in his office, musing to himself smugly that perhaps he should have provided the terrorist with the bomb's firing pin.
Next the League went to the Soviet Union to deal with a nuclear missile crisis, which Max helped put an end to by calling the General Secretary and convincing him the Justice League would help them keep their missile stores safe. There was a tussle amongst the League, Russia's Rocket Reds, and three aliens who manage to disarm one of the nukes, and then Russia sent the League home. The incident was covered up for the time being, and then, having masterminded the successful reform of the Justice League and let himself into their headquarters, Max Lord introduced himself and Booster Gold to the League. The League was unsettled Max managed to breach their security, and Dr. Light left, feeling manipulated because Max had no real connection to the League when he recruited her. Booster tried to leave as well, but was met by the Royal Flush Gang on his way out (whom Max and Kilg%re had also organized to attack) and was aided by the League soon after. Max went to press afterward, calling himself the official press liaison of the team and introducing Booster as their newest member. Max promised the team UN and Presidential connections for their cooperation with him, assuring his intentions were good. Max soon also began to realize that his computer was also creating incidents for the League to deal with independent of his control and grew increasingly paranoid that he was being controlled by something, but by the computer doing so, the League gained international acclaim and status by the world and the UN by dealing with said incidents, and thus they become the Justice League International.
Soon after, the League found themselves targeted by a group called Manhunters, one of which (disguised as his secretary) shot Max Lord in his office; the computer killed her and fixed Max up. Max told the League about his suspicions and sent them off to find his suspected "villain," where they found the lair of Metron. After a short encounter they realized Max's computer led them there, and while the League was away Max realized the computer killed his secretary and that he had been manipulated all this time, and that it brought out terrible things in him, so he destroyed it. With the computer destroyed, its repairs to Max's body disappeared and he collapsed, bleeding. He went to the hospital, and J'onn decided that he does trust Max enough to work with them. While Max was hospitalized, he was also offered a position in a group called the Arcana -- which organizes itself like a deck of cards -- as the Two of Diamonds (Diamonds control the finances).
A race of aliens known as Dominators later attempted experimenting on humans to test their capacity to develop superpowers. They expected all of their subjects to die, but were proven wrong -- they concluded that some humans possessed an innate gene that predisposed them to super-powers, even if such powers had not manifested. This is known as a "meta-gene." Earth was written off as a potentially dangerous enemy because of this, and the Dominators determined to send their allies to Earth to slaughter humanity. One of the Dominators, low in caste, had been working on isolating the metagene and hoping to simply neutralize it in humanity so they could avoid a war. Earth of course was in chaos deciding how to react, and Max made the decision for his team to wait before taking action, to find out what the invaders wanted. The Alliance announced itself and gave Earth it's one demand: surrender their superheroes or face annihilation. Earth told the Alliance no. After a long battle Earth won and also gained the alliance of the Daxamite aliens. In a last ditch effort the Alliance launched a gene bomb upon the Earth, that was meant to de-power every hero. This caused powers to go berserk, and also triggered the meta-gene in many otherwise "normal" people, Max included. He began to suffer dizzy spells and fatigue, and passed out in some of the Invasion aftermath while telling the military and JLI his plans for finding the gene virus antidote.
Max spent a good amount of time feeling troubled over the presence of the meta-gene in him, and returned to the cave where he first encountered the computer. He found it, totaled after an avalanche, but curiosity lead him to test it to see if it really was dead: it wasn't. He asked it about the meta-gene and it blew itself out to attack him in response, also trapping Max within the cave. It was then that Max's power first manifested; his signal-device shorted out as well, but by shouting for help he was able to get Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) to come find him. After his rescue and his week of recuperating, the League throws a recruitment party and several new members join up, leading the JLI to open another embassy in Paris. Max slowly began to use his power more comfortably, though still keeping it a secret, and used it to convince the vigilante Huntress to join the JLI. Booster Gold quit the JLI after he made a mess of things stealing funds to build a casino and then getting punished for it (made to do chores!!), and Mister Miracle died (seemingly; it was actually a robot). Max confided in J'onn about his power, which he was still facing loads of moral dilemmas about. He met a woman named Wanda whom he used his power on to get a conversation going, and then had a nightmare about being a superhero who compelled villains to kill themselves. Max and Wanda continued to date for some time. The real Mister Miracle returned, having brought back the robot assistant to the alien Manga Khan, L-Ron, as part of an intergalactic barter. L-Ron soon became Max's personal assistant of sorts.
Meanwhile, a new team popped up, made up of members found by Booster Gold and Claire Montgomery -- Max's ex-wife. Claire was putting together a corporate-business sponsored team to rival the JLI, called the Conglomerate. Eventually they lost their sponsorship and Claire asked Max if they can become a division of the JLI.
Later, he got shot on the steps of the JLI embassy returning from a date. He survived but fell into a coma, with a strong chance of dying. The UN disbanded the JLI and reformed it under their watch, putting many of the current members out of a job. When Max awoke, the super-villain known as Dreamslayer from the group the Extremists, possessed Max to gain revenge against the JLI (particularly the hero Silver Sorceress, who destroyed her body previously) and rebuilt the rest of the Extremist robots. Dreamslayer amped up his power to extreme levels far beyond what they had been before, able to control thousands at once. Silver Sorceress defeats Dreamslayer again, dying in the process. Max felt incredible guilt for her death -- and Dreamslayer's actions -- once he regained his own consciousness again, and quit the JLI briefly. His powers had also disappeared, burnt out, following Dreamslayer's possession. J'onn talked him into rebuilding the League into what it was before he got shot, and re-inspired, he made the attempt. This didn't prove easy: most of the League had already quit, moved on to new things, or left Earth completely -- the entire League disbanded, leaving Max and Oberon alone.
In order to push the League back together Max hired the Royal Flush gang again, and it worked temporarily: however, the Royal Flush gang was tougher than Max anticipated, having also been hired by someone else and given better weapons. Still, some of the ex-members came back to the fight, and upon winning the UN reconsidered the League's disbanding. This time, Superman joined up as well and shook up the League's foundations a bit, mostly where it came to Max's position of leadership, and eventually Wonder Woman joined up as the new leader after Superman's death at the villain Doomsday's hands. Even later, Max organized a group called the League Busters, a contingency plan concocted in the event the Justice League decided to defy US orders or went rogue, after a previous incident of government defiance. The time came to deploy them when the League scattered in response the super-villain Overmaster, who said meta-human activity would put the world at peril more quickly. Wonder Woman didn't respond well to Max's idea, and the clock steadily ticked down to Earth's promised destruction: Overmaster killed Ice, and the rest of the JLI -- mostly Blue Beetle -- foiled Overmaster at last. After Ice's death the League was shaken up again, and Max started suffering from migraine headaches caused by a brain tumor. He's hospitalized immediately and told that although they can treat him and keep him alive, he'll be pretty much mindless. In the hospital, Max was offered a way to keep his consciousness and will alive -- he accepted the deal, and was soon after pronounced dead. It turned out that after all this time, the Kilg%re virus that Max thought he had destroyed had put a kill switch in Max, which manifested now as a brain tumor. The Kilg%re put Max's consciousness in the robot body of Lord Havok of the Extremists, and while a cyborg Max spent most of his time (IE: like an issue) attacking the League -- seemingly being mind controlled by Kilg%re again but using his own consciousness, and taking over the Arcana organization.
Anyway, discarding the Kilg%re's plans, Max altered his robot body so that it looked like his old body, and eventually settled back into his old life and habits and no one seemed to remember or care that he'd been dead. Maybe he never really died at all. He tried, again, to reform a new Justice League -- an accessible and marketable group of "people's heroes" unencumbered by government interests he dubbed the Super Buddies, membership which included Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Elongated Man, Fire, Mary Marvel, and Captain Atom.
Following Sue Dibny's murder, things took a dark turn for the superhero community. Max had faded from the public eye, having become a member of the covert government organization called Checkmate, the power system of which he shook up and took over, as the Black King. Also, they restored his human body via "dozens of operations" or some comic book science bullshit. Blue Beetle worked his way into the Checkmate files -- a database of every superhero, their secret identities, and their weakness -- to figure out what "OMAC project" was, and he tracked down Checkmate headquarters in Switzerland. He was confronted by Max Lord, who explained to him how meta-humanity -- the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman -- needed monitoring, and tried to offer him (since he was a non-meta-human) a position in Checkmate. Max continued to explain how he took control of Batman's Brother Eye project (which allowed him to spy on everything) and gave Blue Beetle the ultimatum to join him or die, an ultimatum that ended with Max shooting him in the head.
Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Booster Gold, with the aid of Max's Black Knight Sasha Bordeaux, began to put the pieces together about Blue Beetle's murder and the theft of Brother Eye. Finding out that Sasha was his mole, Max sent his OMACs -- cyborgs that appear human (were once human) until they transform into murderous monster robot things, who were meant to track down meta-humans -- to track Sasha and Batman down. He also mind controlled Superman into beating Batman nearly to death. J'onn J'onnz, reading Superman's mind, traces his brainwashing back to Maxwell Lord. Superman and Wonder Woman both track Max down at Checkmate's headquarters, and Max stated that he wouldn't release Superman's mind as long as he lived -- so she killed him.
Following Max's death, Brother Eye launched all OMAC units -- in the millions -- to kill meta-humans all over the world. Most of them got shut down by Sasha, who was secretly an OMAC herself, leaving about two hundred thousand or so unaccounted for. The last thing Brother Eye does before it hides itself completely is broadcast the footage of Wonder Woman killing Max worldwide.
The events of Blackest Night caused a number of formerly dead superheroes, villains, and civilians to be resurrected as zombies with the power of the Black Lantern rings, which is a division of the Green Lantern Corps (an intergalactic police force that uses power rings fueled by will) that belongs to the dead. Max was resurrected and driven by the ring to go after Wonder Woman, although Black Lanterns lack their own consciousness and are instead powered by programming in their rings. A contrasting power, the White Lantern rings, overrides the Black Lantern rings, effectively ending the zombie invasion. Some of those with Black rings were given White rings instead, and given missions to perform that would allow them to return to life permanently.
Max's first act was to hide from the world-wide search that was conducted for him by the JLA. Booster Gold found him waiting at the JLI New York embassy, where Max beat Booster to a pulp before going on to perform his biggest mental push ever: Max pushed the entire world (and possibly planets beyond Earth) into forgetting that he ever existed. Everyone except a small core group of ex-JLI members: Booster Gold, Captain Atom, Fire, and Ice. In everyone else's recollection, Blue Beetle committed suicide, all the footage of Wonder Woman snapping Max's neck looked like Wonder Woman holding a sword, and everything he did was historically attributed to someone else. The new Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes, had his family targeted by OMACs and was rescued by the ex-JLI; they follow the OMACs to Russia and fill Jaime in on who Max Lord is, because Jaime's beetle suit remembers him even though Jaime doesn't. While in Russia they run into a squad of Rocket Reds and get one to join their posse, as he had been a fan of the previous Rocket Red. Max also discovered that using his power directly on people turned them into Black Lantern zombies, and Booster realized they were being played into reforming their group once again. Max contacted them via Rocket Red's armor and told them that he did believe the world needed their team again, and he wanted them to save the world.
His White Lantern mission, specifically, was to prevent a devastating meta-human war by killing the meta-human known as Magog. Max recruited him to kill Captain Atom on behalf of Checkmate, provoking the two into a battle that escalated into city streets. Max appeared and made Magog kill himself, then framed Captain Atom for the murder. With Max's mission completed, his life was returned permanently by the White Ring. Magog's staff provoked a nuclear reaction in Captain Atom that, though he tried to contain it, killed over one thousand people in Chicago. Max then went on to kidnap Jaime Reyes to analyze his Blue Beetle suit, and when Jaime fought back Max shot him in the head. However, Jaime didn't die! He was able to give the JLI Max's plan: to build a power-replicating OMAC using all the data he collected powerful enough to kill Wonder Woman. Jaime tricks the OMAC into replicating his scarab technology and takes it over, destroying it. Captain Atom then grabbed Max and forced him to make the world remember who he was again; Max teleported away and left a video behind of himself explaining that all the allegations cycling around about him were false, spread by the meta-human community: but that the JLI were heroes the people could trust, and that he and Checkmate (a "rogue" operation at this point) will be keeping an eye on things.
PERSONALITY:
Max Lord is confident, charming, and arrogant. Not all too uncommon in businessmen, of course, but one of the first things we learn about Max is that his not only cunning and confident, but he'll stop at nothing to get what he wants done. He rose to prominence in business this way via ambition and ruthlessness, always putting a heavy importance on winning. His ends-justify-the-means attitude means that he is willing to do almost anything to get the results he wants, and has, but he still is capable of acknowledging right from wrong. Capable, however, does not mean he will always do the "right" thing. He's a determined man and skilled in leadership, usually calm, although there are some occasions on which he loses his temper -- and when he does, he loses it in a hurry.
In his younger days, Max had entertained the idea of staging an accident so that the president of the company he worked for would die in a rock-climbing accident and Max would be promoted in his place. The man ended up having an accident on his own, but Max, thinking back, suspected he still would have gone through with it. Years later in the same cavern he found the man's body, decayed and uncovered, and had to stop by it and bury it. Although he manipulated his way up to the top, Max does -- or did -- have a heart in there. He was even something of an idealist, wanting to change -- to save the world. He feels as if the JLI made him a better man, which is why when things started going wrong it felt like such a betrayal. He was raised by his mother from the age of sixteen and was extremely close with her (perhaps a little too close) and was educated about how good people always got hurt in battles with the powerful. He learned to play his cards close to his chest and always manipulate the rules of the game to work in his favor.
In his earlier years with the Justice League, Max's manipulative streak got him far, but he did have good intentions in mind. He desired even more to overcompensate after he destroyed the computer that persuaded him to manipulate the JLA in the first place, often struggling to do the right thing by the team. He became friendlier and on more personable terms with them that he had been before, though his cocky and eccentric (and, on occasion, surprisingly dorky) sense of humor remained unchanged. He was close with some of them, but not on much more than a professional basis; he kept his personal life close to his chest and rarely divulged anything about himself. That he was married and divorced three times (twice with the same woman) is something not even the media seemed aware of. Due to his need for leadership, there had been some degree of friction between himself and Batman and Superman, but Martian Manhunter nevertheless trusted him to make decisions with the right intentions in mind. His personality around that point was almost heroic (once even stating "With great power comes great responsibility"), even if he was far more prone to immorality and sleazy tactics than most of the League. He was, after all, a businessman, though spending time with the JLA did give him more reason to question his ruthlessness, though not enough to stop employing it now and again. He had no qualms, for example, telepathically compelling Huntress to join with the JLA even though she herself wasn't interested, but he had strict qualms against using it for dating to the point of it causing him nightmares.
In fact, although he often felt he'd changed from being 'the slimy rat he once was', his newfound power often led him to exploiting it in small, occasionally harmless ways, but also in invasive ways that he didn't see a problem with. His change may have been genuine -- or at least his desire to change, but his power pushed him back a step, bringing him back to power tactics and pushing people into doing what he wanted them to. He also made decisions against his own better judgement -- such as the League Busters, which was a contingency plan he set in place in case members of the JLA became dangerous -- which always came back to bite him in the ass. He carried the guilt of his actions, even while possessed, and the failings of the JLI upon himself.
It wasn't until later that he developed a hatred for meta-humans. What he was wary of was not meta-humanity in general, per se, but the five percent of them that make up the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman, etc. -- Gods among men. Further, he did hide his abilities for a long time after getting them even in his early days, in part out of shame for no longer being "normal," but also because having an ability no one else (except J'onn, after a certain point) knew about was very convenient. The division between "meta" and "normal" was always very strict for Max (although he himself sort of straddled it), and he never considered himself a meta-human. Though he spent many years protecting humanity with the aid of meta-humans, he made it clear that he's in favor of a world where humans are in charge, because he considered meta-humans an overall potential threat -- their actions/existence lead to superhuman disasters and cities being destroyed. It was, however, suggested that many of his years with the Justice League were genuine, and his perspective only began to change around the time when he got his powers, and more so when Sue Dibny was killed; she was killed by someone in the meta-human community, after all, and the fact that his mother died in the Coast City massacre only pushed his perspective further. That his part in the JLI frequently got taken for granted or disregarded certainly added to his resentment -- on more than one occasion he'd been essentially tossed out the door by the superheroes he'd dedicated his life to. Essentially, the seeds were always there, growing over time into something poisonous.
That said, although his morality and motivations changed seemingly drastically, his core personality -- ruthless, determined, and ambitious, remained the same, though enhanced in certain areas. Despite what some would say, he was never simply a slimy politician -- he has always lied and killed for his goals, the main difference being until recently it was only people whom he thought of as pawns he was sacrificing, not friends. He killed a terrorist when he originally formed the League, and he hired the Royal Flush gang twice to push the League together. He still delusional considers Booster Gold his friend, and says that killing Ted Kord haunts him. Generation Lost #1 sums it up somewhat succinctly by saying: "His methods were questionable, but his goals seemed benevolent. He sought to help. To better this world. But power corrupts." While a younger Max Lord didn't have the heart or courage to kill (or so he hoped) or anything else that would bring him down the darker path of morality, Max now has absolutely no qualms in whose life he has to take or what he has to do to accomplish his goals for what is "right."
POWER:
X-TREME Mind Control - Max Lord has the metagene power of Persuasion, meaning he can "push" people into doing what he wants via vocal or mental (it's more effective if it's vocal) suggestion; doing so triggers nosebleeds, or if he is doing something strenuous his eyes, ears, and mouth may bleed as well. Continuing in that vein, if he loses too much blood he can lose consciousness, though that doesn't release people from his mind control -- they'll fall unconscious too. He has to consciously release them or die. His power cannot affect animals or cyborgs/AIs, but it can affect aliens.
After coming back from the dead Max is capable of controlling minds to a more textbook capacity -- even up to thousands at once, although it's a huge strain on his body and mind to do so. He's shown to be capable of erasing memories as well, as well as implanting/changing memories and causing hallucinations/illusions within someone's mind (e.g., making Superman attack Batman because he thought Batman was someone else). Obviously, I will be limiting his power range so that he cannot mind control 100+ people without severely erupting blood from his face and/or winding up in a coma-like state for a few days after, the severity depending on how many people are involved and what he has them do, and the vast majority of his pushing will have to be by vocal suggestion. He also needs to be physically near big groups to be able to control them. Big mind wipes (or what have you) cannot be performed more than once, and are sustained only by the psychic energy of people around believing the same thing.
CHARACTER NAME: Maxwell Lord IV
CHARACTER AGE: Approximately 40.
SERIES: DCU ( New Earth )
CHRONOLOGY: Brightest Day, after his global mind-wipe.
CLASS: (Anti-) Villain
HOUSING: Random.
BACKGROUND:
Max Lord was born to Arthur and Rebecca Lord in Boston, Massachusetts. When Max was sixteen, he walked in on his chemical businessman father having just been murdered, before he could bring some causative cancer findings about other companies to the Attorney General. Max's mother told Max never to underestimate powerful people, and it was a message that stuck with him. She taught him how to get ahead in life by playing by his own rules.
He grew up, went to Tuck School of Management, got married, divorced, and went on to be a bright, arrogant business executive who stumbled into the superhero biz almost accidentally. During a rock climbing expedition in which Max had planned to murder his boss, his boss had a genuine accident and while attempting to helping him, Max found a computer hidden in the rubble, built originally by the alien Metron and taken over by the computer program Kilg%re. Max forgot about helping his boss, feeling hypnotized by it. Following that encounter Max was given the presidency at this company and quickly transformed it into Maxwell Lord Enterprises and became one of the most successful and wealthy businessmen in the world, thanks to the aid of the computer (although he did do a great deal of the work on his own). He helped it become more self-sufficient in exchange for its help, and the computer suggested to Max the idea of getting in on the reforming team of super-powered heroes known as the Justice League.
Max broke into the house of the superhero Booster Gold to personally recruit him to the newest incarnation of the Justice League, and recruited Kimiyo Hoshi (otherwise known as Dr. Light). The team's formation after so long of nothing sparked much media intrigue. Just before Kimiyo went on to address the General Assembly at the UN, she was met by terrorists who intended to disrupt and kill. She alerted the rest of the League with the signal-device Max gave her, and their first mission, despite some coordination difficulties, ended up a success after the lead terrorist shot himself after his bomb fails to detonate. Max watched this unfold from TVs in his office, musing to himself smugly that perhaps he should have provided the terrorist with the bomb's firing pin.
Next the League went to the Soviet Union to deal with a nuclear missile crisis, which Max helped put an end to by calling the General Secretary and convincing him the Justice League would help them keep their missile stores safe. There was a tussle amongst the League, Russia's Rocket Reds, and three aliens who manage to disarm one of the nukes, and then Russia sent the League home. The incident was covered up for the time being, and then, having masterminded the successful reform of the Justice League and let himself into their headquarters, Max Lord introduced himself and Booster Gold to the League. The League was unsettled Max managed to breach their security, and Dr. Light left, feeling manipulated because Max had no real connection to the League when he recruited her. Booster tried to leave as well, but was met by the Royal Flush Gang on his way out (whom Max and Kilg%re had also organized to attack) and was aided by the League soon after. Max went to press afterward, calling himself the official press liaison of the team and introducing Booster as their newest member. Max promised the team UN and Presidential connections for their cooperation with him, assuring his intentions were good. Max soon also began to realize that his computer was also creating incidents for the League to deal with independent of his control and grew increasingly paranoid that he was being controlled by something, but by the computer doing so, the League gained international acclaim and status by the world and the UN by dealing with said incidents, and thus they become the Justice League International.
Soon after, the League found themselves targeted by a group called Manhunters, one of which (disguised as his secretary) shot Max Lord in his office; the computer killed her and fixed Max up. Max told the League about his suspicions and sent them off to find his suspected "villain," where they found the lair of Metron. After a short encounter they realized Max's computer led them there, and while the League was away Max realized the computer killed his secretary and that he had been manipulated all this time, and that it brought out terrible things in him, so he destroyed it. With the computer destroyed, its repairs to Max's body disappeared and he collapsed, bleeding. He went to the hospital, and J'onn decided that he does trust Max enough to work with them. While Max was hospitalized, he was also offered a position in a group called the Arcana -- which organizes itself like a deck of cards -- as the Two of Diamonds (Diamonds control the finances).
A race of aliens known as Dominators later attempted experimenting on humans to test their capacity to develop superpowers. They expected all of their subjects to die, but were proven wrong -- they concluded that some humans possessed an innate gene that predisposed them to super-powers, even if such powers had not manifested. This is known as a "meta-gene." Earth was written off as a potentially dangerous enemy because of this, and the Dominators determined to send their allies to Earth to slaughter humanity. One of the Dominators, low in caste, had been working on isolating the metagene and hoping to simply neutralize it in humanity so they could avoid a war. Earth of course was in chaos deciding how to react, and Max made the decision for his team to wait before taking action, to find out what the invaders wanted. The Alliance announced itself and gave Earth it's one demand: surrender their superheroes or face annihilation. Earth told the Alliance no. After a long battle Earth won and also gained the alliance of the Daxamite aliens. In a last ditch effort the Alliance launched a gene bomb upon the Earth, that was meant to de-power every hero. This caused powers to go berserk, and also triggered the meta-gene in many otherwise "normal" people, Max included. He began to suffer dizzy spells and fatigue, and passed out in some of the Invasion aftermath while telling the military and JLI his plans for finding the gene virus antidote.
Max spent a good amount of time feeling troubled over the presence of the meta-gene in him, and returned to the cave where he first encountered the computer. He found it, totaled after an avalanche, but curiosity lead him to test it to see if it really was dead: it wasn't. He asked it about the meta-gene and it blew itself out to attack him in response, also trapping Max within the cave. It was then that Max's power first manifested; his signal-device shorted out as well, but by shouting for help he was able to get Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) to come find him. After his rescue and his week of recuperating, the League throws a recruitment party and several new members join up, leading the JLI to open another embassy in Paris. Max slowly began to use his power more comfortably, though still keeping it a secret, and used it to convince the vigilante Huntress to join the JLI. Booster Gold quit the JLI after he made a mess of things stealing funds to build a casino and then getting punished for it (made to do chores!!), and Mister Miracle died (seemingly; it was actually a robot). Max confided in J'onn about his power, which he was still facing loads of moral dilemmas about. He met a woman named Wanda whom he used his power on to get a conversation going, and then had a nightmare about being a superhero who compelled villains to kill themselves. Max and Wanda continued to date for some time. The real Mister Miracle returned, having brought back the robot assistant to the alien Manga Khan, L-Ron, as part of an intergalactic barter. L-Ron soon became Max's personal assistant of sorts.
Meanwhile, a new team popped up, made up of members found by Booster Gold and Claire Montgomery -- Max's ex-wife. Claire was putting together a corporate-business sponsored team to rival the JLI, called the Conglomerate. Eventually they lost their sponsorship and Claire asked Max if they can become a division of the JLI.
Later, he got shot on the steps of the JLI embassy returning from a date. He survived but fell into a coma, with a strong chance of dying. The UN disbanded the JLI and reformed it under their watch, putting many of the current members out of a job. When Max awoke, the super-villain known as Dreamslayer from the group the Extremists, possessed Max to gain revenge against the JLI (particularly the hero Silver Sorceress, who destroyed her body previously) and rebuilt the rest of the Extremist robots. Dreamslayer amped up his power to extreme levels far beyond what they had been before, able to control thousands at once. Silver Sorceress defeats Dreamslayer again, dying in the process. Max felt incredible guilt for her death -- and Dreamslayer's actions -- once he regained his own consciousness again, and quit the JLI briefly. His powers had also disappeared, burnt out, following Dreamslayer's possession. J'onn talked him into rebuilding the League into what it was before he got shot, and re-inspired, he made the attempt. This didn't prove easy: most of the League had already quit, moved on to new things, or left Earth completely -- the entire League disbanded, leaving Max and Oberon alone.
In order to push the League back together Max hired the Royal Flush gang again, and it worked temporarily: however, the Royal Flush gang was tougher than Max anticipated, having also been hired by someone else and given better weapons. Still, some of the ex-members came back to the fight, and upon winning the UN reconsidered the League's disbanding. This time, Superman joined up as well and shook up the League's foundations a bit, mostly where it came to Max's position of leadership, and eventually Wonder Woman joined up as the new leader after Superman's death at the villain Doomsday's hands. Even later, Max organized a group called the League Busters, a contingency plan concocted in the event the Justice League decided to defy US orders or went rogue, after a previous incident of government defiance. The time came to deploy them when the League scattered in response the super-villain Overmaster, who said meta-human activity would put the world at peril more quickly. Wonder Woman didn't respond well to Max's idea, and the clock steadily ticked down to Earth's promised destruction: Overmaster killed Ice, and the rest of the JLI -- mostly Blue Beetle -- foiled Overmaster at last. After Ice's death the League was shaken up again, and Max started suffering from migraine headaches caused by a brain tumor. He's hospitalized immediately and told that although they can treat him and keep him alive, he'll be pretty much mindless. In the hospital, Max was offered a way to keep his consciousness and will alive -- he accepted the deal, and was soon after pronounced dead. It turned out that after all this time, the Kilg%re virus that Max thought he had destroyed had put a kill switch in Max, which manifested now as a brain tumor. The Kilg%re put Max's consciousness in the robot body of Lord Havok of the Extremists, and while a cyborg Max spent most of his time (IE: like an issue) attacking the League -- seemingly being mind controlled by Kilg%re again but using his own consciousness, and taking over the Arcana organization.
Anyway, discarding the Kilg%re's plans, Max altered his robot body so that it looked like his old body, and eventually settled back into his old life and habits and no one seemed to remember or care that he'd been dead. Maybe he never really died at all. He tried, again, to reform a new Justice League -- an accessible and marketable group of "people's heroes" unencumbered by government interests he dubbed the Super Buddies, membership which included Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Elongated Man, Fire, Mary Marvel, and Captain Atom.
Following Sue Dibny's murder, things took a dark turn for the superhero community. Max had faded from the public eye, having become a member of the covert government organization called Checkmate, the power system of which he shook up and took over, as the Black King. Also, they restored his human body via "dozens of operations" or some comic book science bullshit. Blue Beetle worked his way into the Checkmate files -- a database of every superhero, their secret identities, and their weakness -- to figure out what "OMAC project" was, and he tracked down Checkmate headquarters in Switzerland. He was confronted by Max Lord, who explained to him how meta-humanity -- the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman -- needed monitoring, and tried to offer him (since he was a non-meta-human) a position in Checkmate. Max continued to explain how he took control of Batman's Brother Eye project (which allowed him to spy on everything) and gave Blue Beetle the ultimatum to join him or die, an ultimatum that ended with Max shooting him in the head.
Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Booster Gold, with the aid of Max's Black Knight Sasha Bordeaux, began to put the pieces together about Blue Beetle's murder and the theft of Brother Eye. Finding out that Sasha was his mole, Max sent his OMACs -- cyborgs that appear human (were once human) until they transform into murderous monster robot things, who were meant to track down meta-humans -- to track Sasha and Batman down. He also mind controlled Superman into beating Batman nearly to death. J'onn J'onnz, reading Superman's mind, traces his brainwashing back to Maxwell Lord. Superman and Wonder Woman both track Max down at Checkmate's headquarters, and Max stated that he wouldn't release Superman's mind as long as he lived -- so she killed him.
Following Max's death, Brother Eye launched all OMAC units -- in the millions -- to kill meta-humans all over the world. Most of them got shut down by Sasha, who was secretly an OMAC herself, leaving about two hundred thousand or so unaccounted for. The last thing Brother Eye does before it hides itself completely is broadcast the footage of Wonder Woman killing Max worldwide.
The events of Blackest Night caused a number of formerly dead superheroes, villains, and civilians to be resurrected as zombies with the power of the Black Lantern rings, which is a division of the Green Lantern Corps (an intergalactic police force that uses power rings fueled by will) that belongs to the dead. Max was resurrected and driven by the ring to go after Wonder Woman, although Black Lanterns lack their own consciousness and are instead powered by programming in their rings. A contrasting power, the White Lantern rings, overrides the Black Lantern rings, effectively ending the zombie invasion. Some of those with Black rings were given White rings instead, and given missions to perform that would allow them to return to life permanently.
Max's first act was to hide from the world-wide search that was conducted for him by the JLA. Booster Gold found him waiting at the JLI New York embassy, where Max beat Booster to a pulp before going on to perform his biggest mental push ever: Max pushed the entire world (and possibly planets beyond Earth) into forgetting that he ever existed. Everyone except a small core group of ex-JLI members: Booster Gold, Captain Atom, Fire, and Ice. In everyone else's recollection, Blue Beetle committed suicide, all the footage of Wonder Woman snapping Max's neck looked like Wonder Woman holding a sword, and everything he did was historically attributed to someone else. The new Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes, had his family targeted by OMACs and was rescued by the ex-JLI; they follow the OMACs to Russia and fill Jaime in on who Max Lord is, because Jaime's beetle suit remembers him even though Jaime doesn't. While in Russia they run into a squad of Rocket Reds and get one to join their posse, as he had been a fan of the previous Rocket Red. Max also discovered that using his power directly on people turned them into Black Lantern zombies, and Booster realized they were being played into reforming their group once again. Max contacted them via Rocket Red's armor and told them that he did believe the world needed their team again, and he wanted them to save the world.
His White Lantern mission, specifically, was to prevent a devastating meta-human war by killing the meta-human known as Magog. Max recruited him to kill Captain Atom on behalf of Checkmate, provoking the two into a battle that escalated into city streets. Max appeared and made Magog kill himself, then framed Captain Atom for the murder. With Max's mission completed, his life was returned permanently by the White Ring. Magog's staff provoked a nuclear reaction in Captain Atom that, though he tried to contain it, killed over one thousand people in Chicago. Max then went on to kidnap Jaime Reyes to analyze his Blue Beetle suit, and when Jaime fought back Max shot him in the head. However, Jaime didn't die! He was able to give the JLI Max's plan: to build a power-replicating OMAC using all the data he collected powerful enough to kill Wonder Woman. Jaime tricks the OMAC into replicating his scarab technology and takes it over, destroying it. Captain Atom then grabbed Max and forced him to make the world remember who he was again; Max teleported away and left a video behind of himself explaining that all the allegations cycling around about him were false, spread by the meta-human community: but that the JLI were heroes the people could trust, and that he and Checkmate (a "rogue" operation at this point) will be keeping an eye on things.
PERSONALITY:
Max Lord is confident, charming, and arrogant. Not all too uncommon in businessmen, of course, but one of the first things we learn about Max is that his not only cunning and confident, but he'll stop at nothing to get what he wants done. He rose to prominence in business this way via ambition and ruthlessness, always putting a heavy importance on winning. His ends-justify-the-means attitude means that he is willing to do almost anything to get the results he wants, and has, but he still is capable of acknowledging right from wrong. Capable, however, does not mean he will always do the "right" thing. He's a determined man and skilled in leadership, usually calm, although there are some occasions on which he loses his temper -- and when he does, he loses it in a hurry.
In his younger days, Max had entertained the idea of staging an accident so that the president of the company he worked for would die in a rock-climbing accident and Max would be promoted in his place. The man ended up having an accident on his own, but Max, thinking back, suspected he still would have gone through with it. Years later in the same cavern he found the man's body, decayed and uncovered, and had to stop by it and bury it. Although he manipulated his way up to the top, Max does -- or did -- have a heart in there. He was even something of an idealist, wanting to change -- to save the world. He feels as if the JLI made him a better man, which is why when things started going wrong it felt like such a betrayal. He was raised by his mother from the age of sixteen and was extremely close with her (perhaps a little too close) and was educated about how good people always got hurt in battles with the powerful. He learned to play his cards close to his chest and always manipulate the rules of the game to work in his favor.
In his earlier years with the Justice League, Max's manipulative streak got him far, but he did have good intentions in mind. He desired even more to overcompensate after he destroyed the computer that persuaded him to manipulate the JLA in the first place, often struggling to do the right thing by the team. He became friendlier and on more personable terms with them that he had been before, though his cocky and eccentric (and, on occasion, surprisingly dorky) sense of humor remained unchanged. He was close with some of them, but not on much more than a professional basis; he kept his personal life close to his chest and rarely divulged anything about himself. That he was married and divorced three times (twice with the same woman) is something not even the media seemed aware of. Due to his need for leadership, there had been some degree of friction between himself and Batman and Superman, but Martian Manhunter nevertheless trusted him to make decisions with the right intentions in mind. His personality around that point was almost heroic (once even stating "With great power comes great responsibility"), even if he was far more prone to immorality and sleazy tactics than most of the League. He was, after all, a businessman, though spending time with the JLA did give him more reason to question his ruthlessness, though not enough to stop employing it now and again. He had no qualms, for example, telepathically compelling Huntress to join with the JLA even though she herself wasn't interested, but he had strict qualms against using it for dating to the point of it causing him nightmares.
In fact, although he often felt he'd changed from being 'the slimy rat he once was', his newfound power often led him to exploiting it in small, occasionally harmless ways, but also in invasive ways that he didn't see a problem with. His change may have been genuine -- or at least his desire to change, but his power pushed him back a step, bringing him back to power tactics and pushing people into doing what he wanted them to. He also made decisions against his own better judgement -- such as the League Busters, which was a contingency plan he set in place in case members of the JLA became dangerous -- which always came back to bite him in the ass. He carried the guilt of his actions, even while possessed, and the failings of the JLI upon himself.
It wasn't until later that he developed a hatred for meta-humans. What he was wary of was not meta-humanity in general, per se, but the five percent of them that make up the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman, etc. -- Gods among men. Further, he did hide his abilities for a long time after getting them even in his early days, in part out of shame for no longer being "normal," but also because having an ability no one else (except J'onn, after a certain point) knew about was very convenient. The division between "meta" and "normal" was always very strict for Max (although he himself sort of straddled it), and he never considered himself a meta-human. Though he spent many years protecting humanity with the aid of meta-humans, he made it clear that he's in favor of a world where humans are in charge, because he considered meta-humans an overall potential threat -- their actions/existence lead to superhuman disasters and cities being destroyed. It was, however, suggested that many of his years with the Justice League were genuine, and his perspective only began to change around the time when he got his powers, and more so when Sue Dibny was killed; she was killed by someone in the meta-human community, after all, and the fact that his mother died in the Coast City massacre only pushed his perspective further. That his part in the JLI frequently got taken for granted or disregarded certainly added to his resentment -- on more than one occasion he'd been essentially tossed out the door by the superheroes he'd dedicated his life to. Essentially, the seeds were always there, growing over time into something poisonous.
That said, although his morality and motivations changed seemingly drastically, his core personality -- ruthless, determined, and ambitious, remained the same, though enhanced in certain areas. Despite what some would say, he was never simply a slimy politician -- he has always lied and killed for his goals, the main difference being until recently it was only people whom he thought of as pawns he was sacrificing, not friends. He killed a terrorist when he originally formed the League, and he hired the Royal Flush gang twice to push the League together. He still delusional considers Booster Gold his friend, and says that killing Ted Kord haunts him. Generation Lost #1 sums it up somewhat succinctly by saying: "His methods were questionable, but his goals seemed benevolent. He sought to help. To better this world. But power corrupts." While a younger Max Lord didn't have the heart or courage to kill (or so he hoped) or anything else that would bring him down the darker path of morality, Max now has absolutely no qualms in whose life he has to take or what he has to do to accomplish his goals for what is "right."
POWER:
X-TREME Mind Control - Max Lord has the metagene power of Persuasion, meaning he can "push" people into doing what he wants via vocal or mental (it's more effective if it's vocal) suggestion; doing so triggers nosebleeds, or if he is doing something strenuous his eyes, ears, and mouth may bleed as well. Continuing in that vein, if he loses too much blood he can lose consciousness, though that doesn't release people from his mind control -- they'll fall unconscious too. He has to consciously release them or die. His power cannot affect animals or cyborgs/AIs, but it can affect aliens.
After coming back from the dead Max is capable of controlling minds to a more textbook capacity -- even up to thousands at once, although it's a huge strain on his body and mind to do so. He's shown to be capable of erasing memories as well, as well as implanting/changing memories and causing hallucinations/illusions within someone's mind (e.g., making Superman attack Batman because he thought Batman was someone else). Obviously, I will be limiting his power range so that he cannot mind control 100+ people without severely erupting blood from his face and/or winding up in a coma-like state for a few days after, the severity depending on how many people are involved and what he has them do, and the vast majority of his pushing will have to be by vocal suggestion. He also needs to be physically near big groups to be able to control them. Big mind wipes (or what have you) cannot be performed more than once, and are sustained only by the psychic energy of people around believing the same thing.