Victor Swann
1436 - Bjorn Gustavson is born to wealthy landowners in Norway.
1451 - 15-year-old Bjorn Gustavson watches a sickness take his older brother, and begins his research into circumventing death.
1462 - 26-year-old Bjorn Gustavson joins other scholars in Aragon, Spain, pooling their research into science and the arcane, looking to prolong their lives. They call themselves el ciento; The 100.
1478 - 42-year-old Bjorn Gustavson and the rest of the 100 are cast from Aragon in the Spanish Inquisition, now only able to draw life from land they owned, where they would steal new bodies, and absorb strength and power from the misery of the people on that land. Over the centuries, many of them wither to death or stillness.
73 years ago - Bjorn Gustavson claims the body of gangster Victor Swann, and begins building the 100 as a organized crime organization.
38 years ago - Victor Swann begins working as a real estate developer, buying up property all over Southside Metropolis with promises of building a new Arena. The 100 kill private investigator Phil Canton as they take over Metropolis's underworld. His daughter Rose Canton is sent to a sanitarium.
37 years ago - Victor Swann & the 100 are hunted by Rose Canton, who begins a campaign of vengeance against them.
32 years ago - Victor Swann is the lone survivor of the original 100 when he fakes his death at the hands of Rose Canton.
31 years ago - Victor Swann engineers the murder of reporter Alvin Pierce, the father of Jefferson Pierce, for looking into his businesses before he ends all construction on the arena, stepping back to reap the misery of Southside Metropolis.
30 years ago - Victor Swann selects Tobias Whale as the new leader of the 100, allowing him to hide his own involvement.
15 years ago - Victor Swann attempts to corrupt Jefferson Pierce when he arrives in Southside Metropolis to claim his body, but is unable to defeat him. His body is consumed in the failed ritual.
You're not going to find a lot of references to Victor Swann online. I actually couldnt find ANY, and I consider myself pretty good at researching comic characters. But we're adding him, because he serves a very particular purpose in a very particular story that we've all agree does quite a bit to enhance the overall world of DC comics.
Victor Swann's Comic HistorySwann appears in a grand total of five issues; all from one miniseries: 2009's Black Lightning: Year One by Jen Van Meter. It was already established back in the original Black Lightning series that the gang he was fighting was the 100, a criminal organization established back in 1970 in the pages of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane as the enemies of back-up character Thorn. At this point, the 100 had developed a much more complex backstory involving centuries of strange magic and science. It was, truth be told, kind of a mess. If Van Meter was going to try to incorperate any of it, she was going to have to get creative.
What she did was create a backstory for the 100 that simplified it a great deal, giving them origins in the Middle Ages of Europe. The immortal leader of the 100 in the pages of the series, Swann, was drawn with grotesquely long limbs and fingers, always in shadow, like a sort of baba-yaga nightmare. He fed on the despair of the people on the land he owned. What Van Meter did, in essense, was create a personification of the ways poor communities are forever trapped by the influences of the past, and turned it into a person that the hero could punch. |
Our Victor Swann StoryWe actually never intended to use this character, or even reference the 100 at all. It was easier to just say that Black Lightning fought the criminal organization under the leadership of Tobias Whale, and have that be the crux of his origin. What eventually made us realize that this character and his influence on Jefferson Pierce and on Southside Metropolis are worth including is just the fact that you can't really do this in any other medium. Once you got rid of all the weird sci-fi nonsense from the history of the 100 and just used it as a way to create this weird pseudo-demonic presense that so well personifies all the economic and cultural influences that lead to the downfall of a city, it was so clearly something we wanted to include.
Swann, for his part, doesn't need a lot of development. We just transposed what was established in the Year One story. He's only ever been drawn by series artist Cully Hamner, but I would LOVE to see some more takes on this very weird but very useful character. |