We all know the story…
Once upon a time there was a young man called William
Hand who came into the possession of a powerful device…
He created a costume…
and, taking the name Black Hand, he turned to a life of
crime…
but was invariable foiled by Green Lantern.
As it transpired, destiny had other plans for William Hand.
He took his own life…
Only to be raised again as an avatar of death…
The
first and most powerful Black Lantern.
But it has been a long…
and often pathetic journey for William Hand…
to become a man his family could be proud of.
It wasn’t always this way.
Sure, life started out well enough…
William was a very clever fellow,
a veritable genius among the criminal fraternity.
He was also an ambitious man…
with a plan for every occasion.
He was confident that he had all the angles covered.
But for all his mighty intellect William had two things
against him from the very beginning:
The first, of course, was the indomitable will of the
Green Lanterns,
and
the second was an inexplicable passion for proverbs.
Things started out harmlessly enough.
A few cock-sure clichés in the heat of battle,
seeking
solace in sayings and wise words of wisdom.
It
became an addiction…
and then the madness crept in.
Pretty soon he was a pathetic gibbering wreck, a slave to
his need for quoting clichés.
With
his device’s power to steal Green Lantern energy…
and use it against them…
he should have been a formidable enemy.
But in the end…
he has been defeated by the old one, two…
again…
and again…
and again!
And
it wasn’t only Green Lanterns.
William didn’t have much luck with any other heroes
either…
or
aliens,
or pretty much anybody really.
And
it’s a safe bet that he regretted calling himself Black Hand that day.
Just when all seemed lost something very strange happened
to William,
something which put him on a new road.
Gone were the proverbs and plans, the clichés and clever
crimes.
All
that remained of William was a fascination with death.
And we all know how that turned out…
