BLACK HAND – “ONE PICTURE IS WORTH 10,000 WORDS”

 

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…