DC Comics' Doctor Fate: Facts Only Huge Fans Know

Doctor Fate is one of the DC Universe's oldest and most important heroes. First appearing in a comic in the 1940s, he traces his origins all the way back to Ancient Egypt. Doctor Fate participated in the first building blocks of inter-comics continuity when he joined the heroes of other series, including Superman, Batman, and the Flash, in forming the Justice Society of America. 

Doctor Fate's powers come from the Helmet of Nabu. Nabu was an ancient, otherworldly wizard whose successors became some of the most powerful sorcerers in the universe. Since then, Doctor Fate's joined the Justice Society and multiple Justice Leagues, passed his powers on to dozens of heirs, saved the world more times than we can count, and appeared in more comics than we could read in a lifetime. Now he's jumping to the big screen, with Pierce Brosnan playing him in "Black Adam."

That's a lot to cover. Fortunately, your friends here at Looper have sorted through all these thousands of pages of comics to find the most exciting, juiciest, and just plain weirdest stories from the career of Doctor Fate.

Fox and Sherman finally revealed how Fate learned all these magical or scientific powers in "More Fun Comics" #67. Young Kent Nelson was accompanying his father Sven on an archaeological dig in the pyramids. There, Kent finds the perfectly preserved body of an ancient Egyptian priest named Nabu, who compels Kent to swing a lever, releasing a gas that brings Nabu back to life. But the tomb also contains another, poisonous gas that kills Sven. For the next several years, Nabu trains the now-orphaned boy in his secrets.

Comic fans mark this as Nabu's first appearance, but his name is much, much older. Sometimes spelled "Nebo," it appears in some of the most ancient records discovered in the ruins of Babylon and Assyria, and even in the Bible. The New International Encyclopedia describes Nabu as one of the most important gods in Babylonian religion, the son of the gods' ruler Marduk, and the god of wisdom and writing. This identifies him with the equivalent Egyptian god, Thoth, which makes it fitting that Nabu identifies himself as "the wise servant of Thoth" in #3 of the most recent Doctor Fate series.

Later writers would cast Nabu as a morally ambiguous dictator, but Fox was already pushing the character in that direction — even if he didn't seem to know it. In "More Fun Comics" #61, Doctor Fate is flying through space when he sees "a strange nebula" with a flaming globe at its core hanging around Earth. Somehow, this breaks Earth's orbit around the sun, almost freezing the planet before Doctor Fate destroys the nebula with an "atom shatterer" he "found on distant Uranus." (We're not gonna go there.) But then he finds a whole fleet of nebulae coming for the earth and traces them to "a 'pirate planet'...that swings through Earth unhalted by any orbit." What to do? Well, if you're Doctor Fate, you throw the whole planet into the sun and kill everybody on it.

You'd think one genocide's already one too many, but Doctor Fate went for two in "More Fun Comics" #65. The fish-men of Nyarl-Amen, who look kind of like reverse mermaids, rise out of the sea to conquer the earth. Fate hunts down their underwater city and blows it all to smithereens, and just in case there was any doubt in your minds, the narration assures us that "its fallen ruins shelter no single thread of life except a fish or two."

When he takes his son on their fateful journey to the pyramids, Sven Nelson tells him, "I think people from another planet built them!" He's proven right when Kent wakes up Nabu, who claims he taught the Egyptians how to build the pyramids, and that he "was born on the planet Cilia as she swung in her orbit passed [sic] the earth."

It seems odd to complicate the magical origin story of a sorcerous superhero with other planets, and most of Doctor Fate's writers seemed to agree, since we never hear about Cilia again. Marty Pasko and Walt Simonson ignored it entirely when they retold Fate's origin in "First Issue Special" #9. Roy Thomas and Todd McFarlane mentioned it in passing in "All-Star Squadron" #47, but they also tied Nabu to the Lords of Order, who became kind of a Grand Unifying Theory of the DC Universe, being retconned into the origins of Fate and other characters. When Thomas returned to the story in "Secret Origins" #24, Nabu was a Lord of Order and just a Lord of Order, with no other planets in sight. 

Cilia finally made a return in "JSA" #42, where Geoff Johns combined the two origin stories, revealing the planet was the Lords of Order's birthplace and writing that the jewelers of Gemworld (from the fantasy series "Amethyst") forged the planet and all its surviving inhabitants into Fate's amulet.

In J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen's 1987 "Doctor Fate" miniseries, things are looking dire for the forces of Order. Taking an idea from the Hindu sacred texts, the comic reveals the DC Universe exists in a cycle of four ages, or yugas, and that the recent "Crisis on Infinite Earths" set in motion the Kali Yuga, where Chaos takes over. The rest of the Lords of Order want to abandon Earth to its fate so they can take control when the cycle restarts. Nabu sides with Kent, but they're both too old to fight the losing battle with Chaos. They train a successor, and Nabu fully merges with Kent, appearing as a mouth on his stomach. 

Sharing a body doesn't mean they get along better, though. DeMatteis digs into the implications of Thomas' retcon to create an antagonistic relationship between the master and student. The miniseries confirms that Nabu is responsible for the death of Kent's father. Pasko's version of Doctor Fate's origin story softened the trauma by revealing that Nabu magically removed grief from Kent's mind, but DeMatteis shows how that actually makes it worse, being a form of mind control that robbed Kent of the opportunity to mourn healthily. In a sense, Nabu stole Kent's childhood. Kent also blames Nabu for Inza's death, and we learn by the end of the miniseries that Nabu also prevented them from accessing Nabu's full power, necessitating the merger into one Doctor Fate.

After he finishes training Eric and Linda, Kent Nelson asks Nabu, who has been artificially prolonging his life for the past forty years. Nabu agrees, in a sense. He allows Kent's spirit to move on. But Nabu angrily quits the Lords of Order over their refusal to help humanity fight off the Kali Yuga and decides to live life as a human himself. So he takes over Kent's corpse, insists everyone call him "Kent," continues Eric and Linda's education, and does his best to enjoy all the pleasures of the flesh he can. "Annual" #1 reveals Kent's body wasn't in such good shape when Nabu got hold of it (even though it's a day or two old, at most), and it shambles down the road like something out of "Night of the Living Dead" until Nabu's magic fixes it up to pass for a healthy 70-something.

That wasn't the last Doctor Fate zombie comics readers ran into. In "Blackest Night," Green Lantern's enemy, Black Hand, creates Black Lanterns and Black Rings to resurrect all the dead heroes and villains of the DC Universe. That includes one of the many Doctor Fates, who you can see in the crowd of undead superheroes in "Blackest Night" #1.

In the first issue of DeMatteis and McManus' series, Doctor Fate has to save magical dabbler Joachim Hesse from a legion of demons he's summoned from another dimension. Fortunately, Fate's able to clean up Hesse's mess — for the most part. One demon escapes and finds his way to Eric and Linda's apartment. They fight with him for a while until Nabu asks how they know the demon wants to fight. He chats with the imp in his native language and discovers he's actually a nice guy — so nice, in fact, that he doesn't want to go back to hell. To keep from attracting attention, he disguises himself as a dog, and Linda names him Petey after the dog from "The Little Rascals." It doesn't quite work, since Petey keeps forgetting himself and talking, forcing Eric and Linda to pretend they're ventriloquists. Eventually, they decide he's better off pretending to be a baby.

Meanwhile, Nabu teaches him English, and the Jewish-American DeMatteis gives Petey a distinctively Yiddish accent. Along with adding to the rapid-fire comic patter DeMatteis perfected on his classic "Justice League" run, Petey proves himself an asset on Doctor Fate's adventures. He even becomes Doctor Fate himself in #23 thanks to the reality-warping powers he gains inside the amulet.

In the 1990s, everything in comics had to be edgy and trendy, and no one got hit harder than Doctor Fate. In "Fate" #0, John F. Moore and Anthony Williams introduced Jared Stevens, an antiquities smuggler. (Kids love Han Solo and Indiana Jones, so what could be cooler than combining the two?) He's got a bad attitude and a worse hairdo: a mullet with a red streak down the middle. While he's transporting Fate's helmet, cape, and amulet, he finds himself caught between Kent and Inza on one hand and demons named Bloodstain and Thunderspawn (sigh) on the other. 

When Kent and Inza die yet again, Jared has to use the artifacts' powers himself. Nabu offers to work with him, but since Jared's a bad '90s dude who doesn't play by the rules, he tells Nabu off and melts the helmet down into a knife and a giant shoulder pad (siiigh). Just to complete the totally dated look, Jared also gets a face tattoo, a harness full of pockets strapped across his chest, and maroon tights that leave nothing to the imagination. At least his shoulder pads aren't as ridiculous as the ones his sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy Charnelle wears.

In Bill Willingham and Justiniano's 2005 miniseries "Day of Vengeance," one of the DC Universe's most powerful heroes, the Spectre, goes berserk and tries to exterminate all magic. Leading the charge in against him is not a person, but Bobo, aka Detective Chimp, who's exactly what his name says he is. Spectre's casualties include Hector Hall and Nabu, who, with his dying wish, asks Detective Chimp to find a new steward for his helmet. But it doesn't fit the chimpanzee, and he can't think of anyone else to give it to, so he lets Captain Marvel (not that one; the one from "Shazam!") kick it into space so fate can find a new Doctor Fate.

Eventually, in "Helmet of Fate: Detective Chimp," the helmet makes its way back to Bobo. It's been torn apart by its journey beyond space so he can finally wear it. Of course, you wouldn't really trust a monkey with unlimited power, and he learns why the hard way. Bobo's too good of a detective for his own good — he's so overwhelmed by the connections he sees everywhere that it paralyzes him. Bobo realizes the helmet needs a different kind of mind to handle it, so he sends it back into space again. In the meantime, it takes him days to forget everything he learned, and he makes the most of that time to solve hundreds of cold cases.

Gerber revealed the new Doctor Fate in the "More Pain Comics" stories in "Countdown to Mystery." The helmet finally lands with the original Fate's nephew, a psychologist also named Kent Nelson. The helmet finds the younger Kent in a dark place: depressed, living on the street, and tossed into a dumpster. That's where he discovers the helmet. Kent struggles with both his new responsibilities and the demons Negal and Ymp, who seem to have the upper hand in Gerber's last story.

Gerber died before he could write what happened next. He was an iconoclastic writer, most famous as the creator of Howard the Duck. He had plenty of friends and fans, and four of them — Mark Waid, Mark Evanier, Gail Simone, and Adam Beechen — paid tribute with their own endings to "More Pain Comics" in "Mystery" #8. 

Beechen's and Simone's sign-offs are especially poignant. Beechen brings in the Elf with a Gun (a surreal running joke from Gerber's "Defenders" comics for Marvel). Simone weaves in the last message she received from Gerber and pays homage to his creations in Kent's delirious ramblings: "Ducks and bog monsters and a team of loner freaks who become friends somehow and a Bizarro and a dancer with an ostrich and God, God, what wonders yet to be put to paper?"

In the most recent Doctor Fate series, Paul Levitz and Sonny Liew introduced yet another steward for the Helmet of Fate. This time, probably reconsidering the wisdom of putting all the wisdom of Egypt in the hands of a white dude, they created an Egyptian-American Fate, much like James Robinson did a few years earlier in "Earth 2" #9. Khalid Nassour is a med student who's looking for a gift for his girlfriend in the Brooklyn Museum.

The Helmet of Fate, on display with a statue of the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet, starts telling him he needs to fight against Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, who's setting plans in motion to flood the earth. Bastet herself shows up throughout the series to keep tabs on Khalid. Instead of appearing in all her glory, she prefers to possess Khalid's cat, Puck, leading to the surreal image of divine pronouncements coming out of the mouth of a kitty cat.

Nabu created the various Doctor Fate, but they're far from the only superheroes on his resumé, as the ambitious "The Return of Hawkman" story running through "JSA" Vol 1 highlights. In the Golden Age, Hawkman's wings were Ancient Egyptian artifacts. However, from the Silver Age onward, they were alien technology from the planet Thanagar. "JSA" #22 squares the circle by revealing that Prince Khufu, the original Hawkman, took his powers from a crashed Thanagarian ship carrying gravity-defying "Nth Metal." And Nabu, with some help from Black Adam, is right there to turn the scrap into a belt that allows Khufu to fly.

Years earlier, "Crisis on Infinite Earths" had brought characters from other publishers into the DC Universe, including Charlton's scarab-powered Egyptologist the Blue Beetle. Writers spent most of the next decade fitting them all together. In "Time Masters" #6, one of the times being mastered is the age of the pyramids. Team member Bonnie Baxter tries to recover the secrets of the Library of Alexandria but discovers that the immortal villain Vandal Savage has taken over the throne, and he throws her in the dungeon for her trouble. And who else is there? You guessed it — Nabu.

Nabu combines his own ancient magic with present-day science in the form of Bonnie's inter-era communicator to make a weapon capable of beating Savage: a blue scarab. The character may be most associated with Doctor Fate, but Nabu's fingerprints are all over the DC Universe.

Doctor Fate helped found one of the most beloved incarnations of the Justice League in J.M. DeMatteis, Keith Giffen, and Kevin Maguire's classic run on "Justice League International." He doesn't stay long, but he helps Batman, Martian Manhunter, and the rest of the gang apprehend the Gray Man (another servant of the Lords of Order whose immortality has driven him insane, leading him to steal dreams and warp reality). Fate takes the Gray Man to his masters in "Justice League International" #7 and watches as they condemn him to death.

Decades later, J. Michael Straczynski and Jesus Saiz continued that story in "The Brave and the Bold" #30. They look into what Fate was thinking as he watches his masters obliterate and replace one of their servants and wonders if the same will happen to him. He broods above Earth, and the Green Lantern comes to check on him. "A lifetime later," Green Lantern is stranded on a distant, deserted planet with no charge left in his ring. Doctor Fate materializes out of it and explains that he left a fragment of himself inside the ring that day so he could see what would happen to him in the future. His worst fears come true: His real self had died while his fragment was in the ring.

Cleverly, Straczynski uses a superhero named Fate and another powered by willpower for a philosophical discussion about fate and free will as they debate whether Fate should save Green Lantern or himself. It's a deep and brilliant read.