Origins 3: Johnny Apollo -The Z Man

 

Not ful;ly finished yet 3.75 inch Z Man action figure made from a Spinmaster Superman

 Oh yes. Johnny Apollo is The Z Man.  Who the what?!  Well, as a callow youth, before I became the UKs greatest comics creator (there are people who will seriously quote me on that) I was watching a TV police show called Z Cars.  I joked to someone that the cops must therefore be "Z Men". A while later my youthful genius mind thought "Z Man" would be a great character name.

I had an average super hero costume and then thought "If he is the Z Man he should have a Z on his chest" and so Johnny Apollo was created.  He was a member of a socialite vigilante group which used technology and tricks of the period (1930s) to fight crime. A whole series was plotted out but then the artist decided (wait for it) that he was much better than I deserved and he was going to concentrate on getting into Marvel comics. Where is he now? Who knows -I can't even remember his name!

Anyway, officially, in print, the Z Man appeared in a late 1980s/early 1990s copy of Black Tower Adventure in part 7 of Once Upon A Time in which he, quite by accident, rescued the trapped sorcerer Sigismund Benfrigisund who had been trapped since Adventure 1 (1984) which meant fighting the three supernatural entities involved in that trapping -as detailed in the first published Kotar and Sabuta story The Deadly Dilemna of Sigismund Benfrigisund. 

Unfortunately, I sold all the copies of the comic and the finished art ended up being caught in a fire. Luckily, I have the rough pages -I stopped doing rough pages a long time ago-  so as usual no apologies for the quality.  Outline figure on page three spanning four panels is Benfrigisund.

During part II of The Green Skies Johnny is talking to a Selenite Council member and explain how he was on an Eight Just Men mission in Germany when he boarded a secret German experimental rocket. Circumstances meant that the rocket took off but it had no controls and shot into space. Cutting a long story short the rocket smashed into Pluto and Johnny was found, mangled in the wreckage and a Plutonian life form found him and they did their best to "reconstruct" him. They did too good a job and Johnny found that he had super human abilities.

Unknown to anyone, Zom of the Zodiac was behind a lot of what was happening -part of his multi millennia old plan.

As a respected figure, when the alien invasion fleet entered our solar system, the Selenite Council decided that Johnny would lead the counter invasion fleet despite his misgivings (there is a lot more involved).

And how did that turn out? Well, due to an unplanned intervention, Johnny confronted the alien flag ship...

...and the unplanned intervention results in the alien flag ship being decimated and Johnny... well, the last that was seen of him he was blown out into space at an incredible rate and, presumably, dead.

The Solar system fleet scanned space to try and locate Johnny and failed. To all intents and purposes that was the end of the Z Man.