Quote The Raven…

 

“I probably should be dead, you know? I’m not Vulcan, I wasn’t born to this stuff. I’m not Lightning, I wasn’t chosen for this stuff. And I’m certainly not Magno, he thrives in situations where everyone else perishes. But I guess luck’s on my side, because I keep flipping cards, and though I hit a bad streak every now and then, I haven’t bust. I’m still here, as persistent as a raven on the head of Athena.”

 

Danny Dartin was one of many superhumans who operated outside the law as a masked mystery man during the anti-superhuman Roosevelt period. Under the identity of the Raven, he brought justice to those beyond the reach of the law while being a wanted criminal himself. He was an effective crime fighter and brought many evildoers to justice, but today he is best remembered for founding Nevermore Investigations in the early 1950’s and the work it did bringing justice to those plagued by threats more esoteric than gangsters.

 

The Birth of the Raven

 

When Danny Dartin underwent hyperstasis in 1934 and found that he was an enhancile who could run faster than a bullet and lift cars above his head, he knew his options were limited. He could either register with the National Reconstruction Agency and work under the blue eagle, working where and when and how they dictated, or he could, like many before him, rebel against the system and work under his terms. He chose the latter.

 

He knew he risked incarceration in the federal government’s new superhuman prison in West Feliciana, Louisiana, a massive, experimental compound known as “The Farm.” He knew they could bring him down. Gold Star was on the side of the government, and Gold Star was by far the most powerful being on the planet. But Danny was never one to back down from a gamble. Gambling was one of the two great loves of his life, the second being Edgar Allen Poe.

 

Danny put his superhuman muscles towards labor and operated as a field hand, miner, builder, whatever he could be paid for around rural Idaho. In keeping with Dr. Stone’s predictions in Princes of Dawn, he kept just enough to live comfortably (thought more than a little of his earnings ended up in the pockets of casinos) and gave the rest to the community. He thought of his powers as a gift from God, not something that was truly “his,” and remembered to be humble–when he wasn’t holding a full house.

 

His calling card was a raven, a bird he chose for his symbol under the hopes that he would be as vexatious to the government and Gold Star as the raven was to the narrator in Poe’s poem. He would admit in later years that he probably wasn’t on anyone’s radar in those early years. “I was sort of playing superhero.” he would tell an interviewer in 1956, “I asked people to call me the Raven and I left my logo all over the place. Pick an old barn up near Ada county and you’ll probably find a spot where I pushed the metal in with my fingers to make a raven–or at least by take on a raven. An old farmer once said I made ravens that looked like three bananas stuck together.

 

Eventually, Danny’s thoughts turned to superheroics. If he was going to be an outlaw, he wanted to be an outlaw all the way. He always did have a nasty habit of going all-in on nothing more than a three-of-a-kind. “I got to thinking I could do more than labor and I thought about my old pulps.” he explained, “I thought about one guy in particular–the Moon Man. People still don’t know who he was. The guy busted up a gang called the Red Six in New Orleans while wearing this dome on his head. You saw a lot of masks back in the day, especially those little domino masks, those were as common as tights I swear, but you didn’t see a lot of guys with dome-heads. When I started being the guardian of Pendulum City, the hood I wore was my best attempt at a moon-dome. You know it’s funny, looking back I thought I’d just find a dome-head at a costume shop or something. You never think about details like “where do they sell big dome-heads anyway?’ until you’re ready to start jumping from rooftop-to-rooftop on patrol.”

 

The Raven Rises

 

Danny moved to Pendulum City after hearing how its police struggled against the Arthur Wells Gang, one of several gangs which in those times acquired power by controlling the black market of superhuman trade. They threatened to report superhumans that didn’t do their bidding to the NRA, and their members were protected from retaliation by being on the NRA. They created the very “underworld monopolies” which the NRA was established to smash, which gave the NRA the excuse to expand their powers–which in turned increased the pressure the Gang could apply on superhumans. The deterrents of the NRA became their deterrents, but they couldn’t threaten a person known only by a raven symbol.

 

Danny acquired two allies in his war against the Arthur Wells Gang. One was policeman Mike Collins, the other was Lola Lash, the daughter of Pendulum City’s chief of police. Together, they helped Danny stay (mostly) on the good side of the police, though he was always technically a wanted man, and police chief Lash was a firm believer in the NRA and superhuman registration.  Lola and Danny quickly fell in love–he was the bad boy her father hated, she was the daughter of the man who wanted to unmask him and put him behind bars. Their romance was fiery and passionate, but it would fizzle out in later years.

 

In 1935,  Mike Collins asked Danny to change his costume to something more fashionable.

 

“You look very Halloween.” Mike told him, “You look like you’re about to go trick-or-treating with the kids. Look at what the Blue Beetle is wearing in New York City. Look at what Candlelight is doing in Mainline City. It’s suits, my friend! Thugs fear a man in a clean suit! Get yourself a purple suit as dark as night!”

 

 

Danny took to wearing that purple suit, though it was a few shades above “dark as night.” He also removed the lower portion of his hood after reading an interview given by the Blue Beetle where the champion of New York City said that a partial mask communicates strength and confidence while still being discreet while a full facial covering communicates cowardice.

 

Danny still thought Moon Man was onto something with his outfit, but he found he couldn’t argue with the Blue Beetle.

 

It was while wearing his new outfit that Danny took down the Red Circle Gang, a gang from Boise who moved to Pendulum to control the superhuman trade black market after the Arthur Wells Gang was smashed. The Red Circle Gang wasn’t much of a challenge for Danny–he learned how to handle mobsters with the Arthur Wells Gang –but his activities brought him to the attention of the NRA. He had finally become the pesky raven he always wanted to be.

 

The NRA wasn’t about to waste Gold Star’s time on a low-powered vigilante from Idaho, but they weren’t about to ignore the Raven either, so they sent Agent X, “the phantom fed,” to apprehend him.

 

X, alias Jim Clay, Mr. Risk,  was a notorious superhuman hunter. With his natural ability to shapeshift and all the hi-tech gadgets he could possibly need paid for at taxpayers’ expense, he identified and captured the superhuman inventor Whiz Wilson, William Quan Judge graduate Marvo the Magician, the vigilante medico Dr. James Bradley, better known as Dr. Nemesis, and school teacher Robert Blake, better known as Buckskin, a descendent of legendary Pueblo chieftain Swift Elk.

 

X was the reason the Raven rose from being one out of many superpowered mystery men operating in secret around the country to a celebrated superhero of the people. The Raven became the Bugs Bunny to X’s Elmer Fudd. X tried to capture the Raven over three years. All he did was burn through the NRA’s budget as plan after plan failed. Eventually, X had to ask Gold Star for help, but by then it was too late. It was 1938, and Gold Star had turned against FDR and the NRA. Superhuman registration ended as soon as Alf Landon cruised to an easy election victory with Gold Star’s support.

 

“Don’t get me wrong, I had to up my game considerably for X.” the Raven said in his 1956 interview, “I acted like he was no big deal because that mad and sloppy, whenever I sent a note to the papers asking if the feds could send Y and Z to help their buddy X, he got pissed. But he was a damn sneaky bastard. He nearly had me that one time he shapeshifted into a newspaper boy that wanted my autograph. I always did drop by guard around kids. I think the reason I did so well against X was because he got cocky. He went after me thinking I was some Idaho hayseed and that the entire police department was on his side. You can’t solve overconfidence, not by a long shot. I know I’m one to talk, I’ve taken some damn foolish bets, but in this case I think I bluffed better than he did. He made his feelings about me well-known to the papers. He called me a wanna-be Robin Hood and a menace to society. I never said how scared I was of him.

 

“I think he thought I would just give up. And if I was a rational man, I probably would have. What was a simple enhancile going to do to the guy that busted Dr. Nemesis? That guy was a walking chemical warfare unit! I think X thought he was dealing with a normal, sensible person. It was just his bad luck he was against a gambler. What I’m getting at is that I didn’t outwit X, though that was why Magno said he wanted me on the Four Fighters. I out-bluffed him, and I guess that’s worth some consideration. I did think it was pretty clever that one time I attached one of his tracking devices to the leg of an actual raven. God that was fun…”

 

When President Landon established the Statesmen Program in 1938, the Raven, like many superheroes, was hesitant to reveal his identity to it. “I thought for sure that the Statesmen was a plot by the feds. I thought that if I went up to the secretary at the Boise Center she’d change shape into X. “Aha! Got you at last, Raven!” I’m glad I was wrong. I wish I joined with the Statesmen earlier. Their seminars on the superhero life might have saved me a lot of grief later on down the road…though I suppose that depends on whether I would have listened to them or not.”

 

Wartime Activities

 

When war broke out in 1940, the Raven was approached by the magnetic superhero Magno to join a strike force consisting of himself, the son of Vulcan who took his father’s name as his own, and Lightning, champion of the Old Man of the Pyramids.

 

Together, they were the first incarnation of the Four Fighters.

 

 

It was on the Four Fighters that the Raven got his first taste of the occult, and it was a taste he found unpleasant. “I think I would have left if Magno wasn’t on the team. He was a hyperstatic like myself, and though that was really all we had in common, it was more than I had with Vulcan or Lightning.”

 

Vulcan was the son of the infamous forge god of the same name who made his home in the heart of Vulcano Island 16 miles north of Sicily. Vulcan was infamous for creating improvements on models found in nature–and then sending those models out into the world alone to succeed or fail by their own devices. He thought of himself as an architect, not a father, and as soon as he was done creating one life-form he focused all his attentions on the next. He was the the creator of Ahi, the first daughter of the goddess Pele, and Amy Beck, a quasimorph daughter of two supercriminals raised by the superhero Dancing Star and currently a student at Martin’s.

 

The young Vulcan was born within Vulcano island, told by his father to “show this troubled world of man what the greatest man looks like,” and then teleported to the Roundhouse, the headquarters of the superteam known as the Intercessors. The Intercessors had previously dealt with Vulcan and had asked him that, if he had to abandon his creations, that he abandon them at their door.

 

Like all Vulcan’s creations, the young Vulcan was born without a name. The young Vulcan named himself after his father to spite him. He wished that through his deeds mankind would come to associate the name Vulcan with him, not his father, and in this way the young Vulcan would take something important from a being he could otherwise do no harm to.

 

The young Vulcan was intended to be Vulcan’s take on a human and had what Vulcan considered the best qualities of man increased to godly degrees–courage, analytical reasoning, pride, honor, and creativity.

 

It was his boundless creativity that the young Vulcan found most vexing about himself. His father had given him the ability to create and control fire, and he could create this fire in whatever shape he desired, but it would always only be fire, only a puppet animated by his will. It would never be alive. No matter how beautiful, life-like, or graceful his fire constructs were, they were never alive, they only seemed to be.

 

The young Vulcan envied the creative powers of the older. While the older could bring life from out of fire, the young Vulcan could only create and control inert flames. The young Vulcan’s greatest desire was to find some way of creating life from his fire, but when his father offered to bestow upon him that gift under pressure from the superhero community, he refused. He would create without the help of his father, and to that end tirelessly researched what mankind knew about artificial life.

 

The young Vulcan was the coldest member of the team per the Raven’s recollection. “He was always preoccupied, always had his mind in the clouds thinking about his books on artificial life. At first I thought his coldness was just to block out all the stuff around us, but I came to realize that he was more like his father than he would have admitted. They’re both obsessives. Why I remember one time he made a kriegman vanish without even looking at it–not burn, vanish. There wasn’t even smoke and ashes left when his flames were done eating the machine. He wasn’t the kind to worry about disabling the machine and capturing the operators, oh no, he was a long way from Captain Marvel. The Brass loved him though. He was a damn effective killing machine and the Brass loved him for it.”

 

Lightning, who sometimes went by the name Flash Lightning or Lash Lightning, was raised from a young age by an immortal from the time of Akhenaten whose name was long ago washed away in the river Cocytus just like the name of the wizard Spectro. He was a student of the great wizard Shazam and shared his belief that mankind needed a champion. He however disagreed with his mentor that this champion needed to be chosen, that they were to wait until time and circumstance produced him. He believed that the world’s mightiest mortal needed to be raised into greatness.

 

The Old Man of the Pyramids vanished into the Astral shortly before the death of Akhenaten’s son Tutankhamen to seek the necessary power to create his champion. Unlike his mentor, who bonded six names of legend to his name under the alchemical principle of congelation to great a spell to empower his champion, the Old Man of the Pyramids looked to the alchemical principle of calcination and dissolution–in a word, destruction. In timeless realms, he came upon a kind of lightning that had nothing to do with the the electro-magnetic forces commanded by Magno. This lightning was the lightning of Thor and Zeus and Pele. This was the lightning of the gods, and it roared forever as a tangled mass of serpents and dragons against a black sky without stars.

 

The Old Man of the Pyramids took a bolt of this living lightning and forged it into an amulet–an armband that would allow its wearer to project this destructive force. He wanted to spend longer in the Astral and refine his amulet, but the Nazi’s Ragnarok Wave rippled throughout the Astral and he realized he had to act now. The Earth was filled with superpowered champions, but clearly they stood to benefit from the immediate addition of one more. Thus from out of nothing he formed his champion–a created man like Vulcan, but a created man who was loved by his creator. He named his creation Lightning, for it would be his destiny to command the living lightning.

 

Raven remembered Lightning as a bright-eyed child. “He never stopped asking questions about everything–what’s a raven, who do you like ravens, who’s Poe, what’s poker. He was a little annoying, but a good guy. I hated to see him on the battlefield, we all did. He was made in the form of a man but his heart was that of a child. He didn’t want any part of the violence. He never went for a kill-shot, not ever, and it pissed Vulcan off to no end because it made him look bad. They probably would have fought if Vulcan cared enough to fight. I think Vulcan envied Lightning. He would look at him sometimes and his eyes would just be brimming with hate. Lightning’s dad didn’t abandon him. His dad did. And though he was brutal by the standards of Magno and myself, he knew that people would sooner compare him to Lightning than us, and it made him mad that compared to Lightning he was “the violent one.”

 

“I remember Magno was real protective of him. I think he saw Lightning as another Davey. When he recruited Lightning for the team, I don’t think he understood how much like a child Lightning was. He came to regret recruiting him, but he couldn’t make him leave. Lightning was made to do what he did. It was his purpose. I think he ended up pushing Lightning to join us because he saw Nevermore as the Nancy Drew to most superteams’ Dick Tracey. We investigated more than we fought.”

 

Magno, whose identity remains unknown to this day, was a superhero’s superhero–bright, cheerful, hopeful, and courageous. He was inspiring and larger-than-life in a way the Raven and others could only pretend to be. He had the ability to create and control magnetic fields, though no one knew how he gained such an ability. He could also impart this ability to others, similar to how Captain Marvel could create other “Marvels” like himself, and used this ability to empower his young friend known only as Davey. A teenager when the war broke out, he missed the draft only by two years. When Congress lowered the age of enlistment specifically to weaponize young superhumans like Davey, Magno pulled strings to keep Davey on a home front defense superteam called the Home Fires until he could be enrolled in the newly-built Martin’s School for Superhumans.

 

“He was the leader, no question about it.” Raven said about Magno, “Who else could it have been? He founded the team, after all, and what were the rest of us? Vulcan was as personable as a frozen cactus, Lightning was a kid, and I was in way over-my-head and everyone could tell except Magno.”

 

With Vulcan and Lightning already wielding powers beyond Magno, Magno was able to focus all his efforts on empowering the Raven. “I still got the powers.” Raven would explain years later, “He charged me enough so that they’ll only start fading around 2025 or so. I never thought much of the power. I did what Magno told me to do with them, and that mostly consisted of me backing him up with less skill. It made me feel sort of silly. He gave me some of his power and the best I could do was mirror him. Eventually his power recovered, and mine grew to around his level, but the feeling never quite left that I was just Magno Jr. Still, I liked the metallic playing cards he gave me–all spades and clubs to go with the black bird theme. I always wanted to incorporate cards into my gimmick but I just never could find a way.”

 

In 1942, Danny left the Four Fighters on good terms. “I just needed to go.” he explained, “Being around true superheroes made me feel a little useless, and truth be told, the war had rattled me. Too many close calls. Too many dead bodies. It shook me in ways it didn’t the other three and I felt like they were carrying me. So I asked the Brass to let me go and after seeing my record they told me I could take all the time off I wanted.”

 

Vulcan left the team shortly after, and Raven wouldn’t know why until he sought him out in 1950 eight years later. With the team down to just Lightning and Magno, Lightning turned to sorcery taught to him by his father to make up for the lost members. He worked rituals to summon two spirits–Captain Courageous and the Unknown Soldier.

 

Though the Raven never met the two spirits in the 1940’s, he would meet them in the 1950’s, and the Unknown Soldier would become a member of Nevermore under the name the Unknown.

 

Captain Courageous was a thoughtform of courage, a being sustained by courage. Though he was in a form of a man, he was only as human as Lightning and Vulcan. He could sense courage, sense where it was flagging, and arrive to galvanize cowering men into fearless warriors. This was his true power, and it made him a living weapon of psychological warfare, far less elegant than usual weapons, but far more effective. Men would fight against overwhelming odds in his presence even onto death. He could also consume courage from his enemies, taking their courage into himself while they cowered.

 

Captain Courageous understood little about being a man, but he understood enough to value the latter application of his power over the former. The latter made men surrender without bloodshed. The former led men to their deaths.

 

The Unknown Soldier was a powerful ghost summoned from out of the ghost kingdom Pax by Lightning, violating Pax’s neutrality in the process, though this fact wouldn’t be known until many years after the war. The Unknown Soldier was a powerful ghost in the sense that his Ka was magnified at the expense of his Ba, Rn, and Shut. No one knew who he was, and he himself knew only that in life, he had fought on the side of the Allies and that he was killed by the Axis. Nearly all his spiritual energy was placed behind his Ba, and that made him an incredibly powerful spirit.

 

With an unrelenting, mechanical will, the Unknown Soldier fought against the Axis. What else could he have done? It was all he remembered, it was all he was.

 

And then when the war was over, he was left quite confused as to what to do next.

 

The Raven After The Four Fighters

 

After he left the Four Fighters in 1942, Danny felt like reinventing himself. He asked Skyman for a favor, an airman suit, and modified it to this liking. Now armored, winged, and looking more like a raven than ever, he patrolled Pendulum City not from the rooftops this time, but from the clouds.

 

He was back in his element–one man, one city. Life was simple again. But in a month he started to miss working in a group. The Four were a perplexing group, but it was nice having someone at his back, it was nice having someone to talk to while on patrol. He joined the Statesmen under the alias Frank Borth and began networking with the superhero community. He looked for a partner and found one in Dianne Grayton, the Spider Widow.

 

Danny knew that Lola wasn’t comfortable with him palling around with a superheroine that looked like the Black Cat or Miss Fury, so he was careful to pick a partner that didn’t look a thing like a supermodel.

 

The Spider Widow was the daughter of the Black Spider and inherited his ability to mentally control insects. She had the looks to match her powers. She was a warty crone, the stereotypical image of a Halloween witch complete with wide-brimmed hat and robes. She was perfectly hideous.

 

But after their first team-up, she took off her mask and kissed him.

 

The Raven learned that Dianne Grayton was actually a young, beautiful socialite beneath the ugly mask–and that she had become a superheroine out of boredom against her father’s wishes.

 

Beneath the gloves of his costume, no one could see his wedding ring. And his name was Frank. And no one knew the Spider Widow wasn’t really a crone.

 

He could not help but compare her to Lola. The old fire of dating the bad girl had gone of out their relationship, but here it was fresh and hot. The disobedient daughter of the Black Spider–she used to tease him about her father sending black widows to punish him one day and that turned him on like nothing else.

 

When faced with the tremendous gamble that was Dianne, Danny did what he always did–he pushed his luck.

 

And then, he did it again when he and Dianne crossed paths with another bored superheroine socialite–the famous Phantom Lady.

 

The playful Phantom Lady liked the Raven, as she liked all masked mystery men, and she liked him even more because Spider Widow liked him.

 

He had them both, because he could.

 

The Raven loved being fought over. “It was like a dream.” he explained, “Two beautiful women fighting over me even as I was dressed as a giant chicken. I felt invincible, like I had every card I wanted and knew the order of the deck. I was a selfish. Heartless. I deserved what happened to me next.”

 

Lola found out about Dianne and Dianne found out about Lola, and Lola wasn’t about to fight superheroines for him.

She just left him, and when his old friend Matthew found out what the Raven had done to her, he went with her.

 

Finding out about Lola ruined the game for Spider Widow. Lola wasn’t part of their world of costumes and danger. She was normal, she was vulnerable, she was heart broken by Danny’s betrayal of her trust.

 

Danny didn’t look like a hero to her anymore, and she only dated heroes. She left him, and made sure everyone connected to the Statesmen knew about what Danny had done.

 

Phantom Lady shared Spider Widow’s disgust and left for the front. She didn’t like that her frivolous take on superheroics had led her to the arms of a cheat and thought that a taste of war was just the thing to mature her. She was taken under the wing of the Spy Smasher, the greatest Spy and Counter-Spy of all time, who turned her from a playful adventuress to an effective agent.

When she faked her death in 1945, Danny wasn’t invited to the funeral.

 

The Founding of Nevermore

 

With Matthew and Lola behind him, the Raven struggled to find something to fill the empty spaces of his new, vacuous life. He thought back to the war and how even in the midst of its horrors, he had a purpose and comrades to talk it. He began to think about the war with something approaching nostalgia, and as the years went by and his nightly patrols of Pendulum became less and less eventful, his nostalgia grew to longing.

 

One day in 1950, he resolved to seek out his old comrades and see what had become of them–and to see if they were interested in reforming the Four Fighters.

 

He found Vulcan living in a metal city at the bottom of the world, a city resting like a black egg in a nest lined with white feathers.

 

Vulcan had left the Four Fighters in 1942 to study the artificials of the newly built Hera City, an enormous city-sized computer built in Antarctica to cool the vast amount of heat generated. He found inspiration in the AI constructs that flowed throughout Hera City like neural impulses through the human brain. These constructs called themselves the Hesperides and were built of information encoded on electricity, light, photite, and most importantly for Vulcan–differences in heat.

 

Vulcan believed that he could use phonons, vibrations which ripple through atoms and create heat, to encode his fire with information and thus life. It took Vulcan years of experimentation, but he finally learned how to create information-rich fire.

 

The outer rim of Hera City is a nature preserve which takes advantage of the city’s vented heat to grow jungles in the middle of frozen wastelands, and Vulcan filled these jungles with beings of living fire with such control over themselves that they could nest in a tree without burning a single leaf.

 

Vulcan never told his father about his success. He had no reason to gloat. The triumph of having created life was sufficient in and of itself.

 

Vulcan welcomed the Raven to Hera City and showed off his creations like a proud father, but declined to return to superhero work. He gave the Raven a gift when he parted–a pet firebird, black as his namesake, who would provide the Raven warmth and light in his darkest, coldest moments.

 

The Raven named the firebird Black Igor after Igor Stravinsky, the composer of the Firebird opera.

 

Magno had formed another superteam (he seemed to like founding them) called the Aces. The Aces consisted of himself, Davey, the Raven’s old sparring partner X, a hyperstatic cold reader named Zaza the mystic, and patriotic partners Lone Warrior (who realized the humor in his name in 1955 and changed it to American Warrior) and his brother Dicky (who realized the humor in his name much sooner and changed his name to Dauntless in 1951).

 

Magno invited the Raven to join the Aces, but the Raven was only interested in partnering with Magno. Initial contact with the rest of the Aces told the Raven that any long-term partnership simply wouldn’t work out.

 

Zaza instantly distrusted him because of his reputation as a womanizer. The Lone Warrior and Dicky, who fought in all ten years of the war without rest to avenge their scientist father slain by Axis assassins during the infamous attack on ARGO’s Groom Lake facility, didn’t like how the Raven returned stateside only after two years. But interestingly, X didn’t have a single dirty look to throw the Raven’s way. He felt their differences were in the past. It was a new age, with new rules. X thought of the Raven as a worthy foe.

The Raven still thought he was a total tool.

 

Upon hearing that the Raven wasn’t interested in joining, Magno wished his old friend well and told him where to find Lightning.

 

Lightning became a prestigious superhero who sometimes teamed-up with the champion of his creator’s mentor, Captain Marvel. He lived in a floating pyramid high above the Earth and watched for trouble below with scrying spells that warned him of danger. His father had created for him an Eve for his Adam, Astrapi the Sylph of Storms, who sometimes went by the name Lightning Girl.

 

Lightning was glad to see the Raven again, but said he couldn’t join his superteam. The Raven had asked at a bad time. He and Astrapi were working on creating a child–a Lightning boy to physically embody the power they could only summon and manipulate through Lightning’s amulet. The Raven couldn’t begin to understand how they were going to create a child being products of magic themselves, but he understood the desire to be a father. It was a desire that came to him when he was quiet and introspective, and when he compared the desire to how he had squandered his life on fleeting pleasure and immediate gratification, it hurt him worse than any bullet that ever punctured his skin.

 

He was glad that Lightning was having a child, and glad that he chose to focus on fatherhood rather than playing super-games with him. But Lightning had a favor to ask his old friend: the two spirits he summoned during the war, Captain Courageous and the Unknown Soldier, were in need of someone worldly, and the Raven was the most worldly person Lightning knew.

 

The Raven didn’t know how to feel about being called the most worldly person Lightning knew. Logically, he knew Lighting was right on the money, but emotionally he was ambivalent. Should he have felt embarrassed, angered, saddened? He honestly didn’t know.

 

Feeling that he owed Lightning  for their friendship and being glad to contribute in whatever way he could to his nascent family’s happiness, the Raven visited Captain Courageous and the Unknown Soldier with hope in his heart–maybe he could put together a team with them? It was a longshot, he never met them during the 40’s, but he was always a fan of longshots,

 

Captain Courageous, feeling guilty over all the men that followed him recklessly to their deaths, decided to forsake his powers and become a man. He lived simply as a writer named Carl Compton who wrote biographies on brave men, particularly brave men forced by circumstances to lay down their lives. He has written books on the lives of those who perished in the presence of Captain Courageous, and has told Lightning that when he was written the story of every man to perish because of his powers that only then would he feel like becoming Captain Courageous again.

Carl Compton’s biographical research was slow going. He didn’t know how to talk to people. He wasn’t created to talk to people. Every time he tried to talk to someone they felt agitated, as if there was something wrong that only they could solve. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, in fact people reported that it made them feel important and in control as if they were about to go on stage with full confidence in whatever it is they were going to do. Rarely did they guess that Carl was filling their soul with courage by his mere presence.

 

After his first couple of interviewees marveled at feeling like they needed to find someone to wrestle or confess their undying love to, Carl strictly interviewed people through letters, never face-to-face.

 

That made it somewhat difficult for the Raven to see Carl, but he had always been good with locks, even enchanted ones. It was all a matter of dexterity, just a matter of applying what he learned about stuffing cards up sleeves in a different direction.

 

The Raven wasn’t at all nervous about chewing out Carl to his face for cowering from the world, but then again he couldn’t have been nervous even if that was his natural reaction to browbeating a thoughtform.

 

Carl had no interest in superheroics, but the Raven figured he could put his skills as a writer to use in growing the brand of his superteam. The Raven agreed to help Carl as a go-between for him and his interviewees by making sure no one was disturbed by Carl’s “telepathic aura of recklessness which he developed in childhood.” In exchange, Carl would write the Adventures of Nevermore book series chronicling, but never embellishing, the case files of Nevermore Investigations. “Carl’s books were better than anything any advertising agency could have come up with.” the Raven said, “Leave it to a guy made of courage to capture all the exciting stuff about the job.”

 

The Unknown Soldier’s life after the war was far less mundane than Carl’s.

The Unknown Soldier became the Unknown after a stay in New Orleans’ House of Spirits. The House was known as a place where ghosts could meditate under the guidance of manesologists and manipulate the components of their souls. It was known as a place where ghosts could regain lost memories, and that was what the Unknown Soldier hoped he could accomplish, but an unforeseen complication arose in his meditations and instead of enhancing his ba, the portion of the soul responsible for memory and personality, he enhanced his ib.

 

The ib is the least understood component of the soul. It is the part of the soul that belongs least to the individual. It is the part of the soul connected to the human noosphere, the sum total of human thought and intent, and is commonly translated as the heart. By empowering his ib, the Unknown became a little like Captain Courageous, he became attuned to certain aspects of human existence. In the Unknown’s case, he was attuned to mystery. He was drawn to places with stories whose general events were known only to a handful of people and whose details were known to even less–sometimes to no one at all. He flittered about the world gleaning impressions from clues that sparkled to his eyes with the light of the unknown. A jacket washed up by the docks of a city showed him visions of a man with a gun prowling around at night, a skull muttered promises of buried treasure on a forgotten island, an abandoned doll projected images of a little girl fallen into the fairypaths–and though the transformation wasn’t what the Unknown Soldier expected, for the first time since the war ended he had found a purpose–solving mysteries and piecing together the clues only he could find.

 

But the Unknown wasn’t making much progress solving mysteries. Witnesses were incredibly valuable to his research, and yet his idea of asking them questions was to materialize as a cloaked figure and demand answers from them

 

He couldn’t help it. He could barely remember what he was like as a living person let alone how to converse like one.

 

“That was basically the start of Nevermore.” the Raven commented on the start of the agency, “The Unknown was attracted to mysteries like a bee to flowers and I was along for the ride as a favor. It wasn’t the superteam i wanted, but it was the one I got anyway. I didn’t know the first thing about the occult. I think I read the first few pages of on manesology while waiting for my doctor’s appointment, that was it. But he knew. The Unknown knew the unknown, unsurprisingly. He read every book Lightning had in his giant floating pyramid, and some of those books are older than the human race–yeah, they go all the way back to the Dyeus people, they’re that old. We made a good pair. He knew the world of secrets but didn’t know a thing about the physical world. I didn’t know a thing about the world of secrets, but I knew plenty about the physical world. Lightning called me the worldliest man he ever knew.”

The Unknown would uncover a mystery and the Raven would help him solve it. It wasn’t at all like the throwback adventures the Raven had in his head when he decided to restart the Four Fighters, but it did have adventures, and for the early 1950’s was perhaps more useful than another traditional superteam.

 

“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was riding the current of the changing times.” the Raven said, “After the war you had this huge explosion in superteams because a lot of superhumans were upset with how the government treated them during the war, lowering the age of enlistment to use superhuman kids and whatnot, so they formed their own paramilitary groups. You couldn’t swing a dead supercat without hitting one. But at the same time, all the stress the war placed on the near Astral impacted peoples’ lives in ways traditional superteams weren’t equipped to solve. Things were pretty weird in the 50’s–people look back on it as a time of peace and rebuilding, because compared to the 40’s it was, but they forget about how the consequences of the war weakening the Archon walls fell on the 50’s, and when they do remember they think about things like McQuarrie Science Base getting attacked by giant monsters, they don’t remember the Fortean weirdness that seeped down into the everyday life of common people. Hauntings increased, thoughtform possessions increased to the point TIMS had to expand, spontaneous combustions increased, people fell asleep and woke up in different realities, people walked into different time periods, people had prophetic dreams. It was a time of strange happenings and strange events–and Nevermore was able to tackle it head-on because the Unknown was attracted to the strange like a magnet.”

 

When Magno heard about the Raven’s long-term team-up with the Unknown, he sent Davey to join them. Davey had felt that he was trapped in Magno’s shadow while on the Aces and jumped at the opportunity to join a different superteam.

 

“At first I took Davey on as a favor, just like how I took the Unknown on.” the Raven explained, “But Davey was the one that transformed us from a pair to a team, and though I didn’t hold him in high esteem when he first joined, I soon did. Davey had the same electromagnetic power Magno gave me during the war, but he was way better at making use of it than I ever was. He could use it to find anything metallic no matter how small, even if it was an old penny or a rusted nail. He tried teaching me how his “metal detector” trick worked, but I could never get the hang of it. Davey’s trick came in real handy more than a few times. Off the top of my head, I remember how one time he used it to find an old bullet that killed a vengeful ghost and another time a cursed coin that kept teleporting itself into the pocket of the man who stole from a rural Mexican mission. But Davey’s biggest asset was his heart. Say we came upon a troubled, violent ghost–the Unknown would start asking them questions, I would keep my distance, but Davey would talk to it, ask it why it was in so much pain, ask if he could help it any. That’s what made Davey great–he was Nevermore’s heart.”

 

With Davey on the team, the Raven finally decided to name their little group. “I’m glad they didn’t mind me throwing my ego around.” the Raven reflected, “Imagine if I was Magno and decided to call my team the Magnates or something! I wanted to use a Poe name because, well geeze, can’t you tell I like Poe, and because Poe wrote detective fiction. Everyone remembers the horror stuff, but the man was seriously talented. Ever read Murders in the Rue Morgue? You should. He also did comedy–Mellonta Tauta. But that’s all beside the point. My justification for the name was that we would make problems that seemed inexplicable, unsolvable, never more trouble those vexed by them.”

 

The three were soon joined by a fourth–Davey’s old teammate on the Aces, Zaza the Mystic.

 

Zaza the Mystic, known in her civilian life as Zaza Mirga, was the wife of police lieutenant Bob Nelson and made sure the Raven knew that. She was of Gypsy heritage and played up the “Gypsy queen” image. She did everything a person would expect Maleva from the Wolfman to do–she told fortunes, read palms, and gazed into a crystal ball. She did such things because it was fun, because it made her very interesting at parties, and because it gave her a chance to practice cold reading–the source of her powers.

 

Zaza wasn’t a thaumaturgist. She never flung her soul across the Astral on a journey of self-discovery and cosmic empowerment. She didn’t have magic powers–though she didn’t mind people thinking so. She also wasn’t a telepath. She couldn’t read minds and didn’t have extra sensory perception. What Zaza could do was analyze the people and situations to a superhuman degree. She called this power “super-induction” after inductive reasoning. She could draw astonishingly accurate guesses about a person based on a photograph, and if she talked to someone, she could write their biography in an hour.

 

The specific thought processes Zaza would go through to arrive at her guesses often only made sense to her. She would look at a picture of a woman and conclude from the way she styled her hair and the way she stood that she was a runaway heiress–and she would indeed be a runaway heiress Zaza understood from an early age that it was useless trying to explain how she “knew” things–so she decided to by a Gypsy fortune teller. When people saw her credit her crystal ball for her guesses, some simply concluded she was a William Quan Judge graduate like Spectro with powers beyond their understanding and didn’t ask questions. Others concluded that there was a trick, but seeing that she was doing a bit, knew that asking her how the trick was done was useless.

 

As a member of the Aces, Zaza often felt useless. Her ability to read an opponent’s body language coupled with her black belt in yubiwaza allowed her to hold her own in a fight–but only hold her own. She knew that her true usefulness laid in investigation, and when she heard the Raven had a team of investigators, she couldn’t help but join, even though she couldn’t stand the Raven for his lecherous reputation.

 

“Zaza was fun.” the Raven would reminisce, “She hated me. Oh how she hated me. She made it clear from day one that she wouldn’t tolerate any Spider Widow and Phantom Lady shenanigans from me. I still tried. Yeah, I shouldn’t have. Yeah, it was wrong of me. I did it anyway. She flipped me over her shoulder and put me in a sleeper hold.”

 

Together, they were the first incarnation of Nevermore–the Raven, Zaza, Davey, and the Unknown. The four of them would journey into darkness, confront the bizarre, and bring the weird to light.