Brightforge
Real Name: Duncan Forger, First Appearance: Liberty’s Dream #69, Dec 1969
Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d10
Relation: Frenemy, Approach: Raw Power
Traits:
- Forgehammer: When Brightforge Boosts another character, he may either Attack a nearby target with a value equal to the bonus created, or gain a bonus of the same size as the bonus created to his next damage save.
As the Silver Age began to shift and change in the aftermath of Dimensional Devastation and Venture’s new leadership, every comic line found itself lightly experimenting with new ideas and concepts. In the case of Liberty’s Dream, one such experiment began in 1969 with the slow transition of the Animate Townships from individual locations that the Animaster would create and then immediately abandon into an increasingly thriving patchwork of communities scattered throughout the Underhill, neighboring both Earth and fae societies and learning from both. This new nation required a new approach for Reverie; she couldn’t just march in and overthrow Animaster when he had actual guards and armies. It also meant new characters, and one of the most initially promising but quickly forgotten was Brightforge.
Aden Forger was a high-ranking loyalist in New Anima, the capitol of Animaster’s growing nation. Born of fire, he crafted both weapons and luxuries for the small but growing Animate nobility, and his crafts earned him similar luxuries from his fellows. From his creation, however, Aden was troubled by the strict hierarchies that the Animaster enforced. He crafted himself a costume and went to explore the other townships, quickly discovering how brutal his master’s rule was and vowing to work to fix it. As Brightforge, he raided weapon shipments, melting them down and turning them into tools to benefit the common Animates, and liberated food shipments from warehouses to feed the starving.
Reverie encountered Brightforge during one of her attempts to stop Animaster from conquering a small fae enclave. Any hopes that she had of the Animate hero becoming a fellow revolutionary, however, were quashed. Brightforge pointed out that his people were dependent on the Animaster for new children, and that he couldn’t be so simply overthrown. While Brightforge fought to help people, he saw Remedy as a foreign interloper with no care for what her interventions might inflict on the people who suffered the most. He was willing to quietly help her curb the Animaster’s amibitions of conquest, but he would not seek revolution. Instead, he hoped to continue to sabotage the Animaster, weakening his rule until his people could assert themselves and force him to step down and turn over the secret of their creation.
Unfortunately, while Brightforge was a popular character at first, the limits that had been placed on him by this philosophy meant that he wasn’t a commonly-occurring one. To make things worse, by the early 1970s Reverie’s writers had shifted to focusing on the fae and integrating her into the return of the Fomorians, allowing Animaster to fall by the wayside for several years. In the process, Brightforge largely vanished; he would make a few occasional appearances once Alchymia returned, but never became a core part of her supporting cast.
Behind the Scenes:
I don’t have a lot of notes about what Animaster is up to in the 1970s, even though he is overall one of Reverie’s main opponents. It made sense that he faded for a bit when the Fomorians became the Big Thing, and this character got created to buff that storyline up.
Brightforge is definitely a low-key Vietnam critique, creating a situation in which even if the bad guy is worth overthrowing you don’t necessarily want to come in swinging. But that’s not very superheroic, so when we get back to Anima it’s full of a lot more large-scale revolution and cool fights and his core conflict isn’t really brought up (in fact, I think by the 90s the Animates just know how to make more of themselves and the core conflict straight up doesn’t exist.)
And that’s in for the Silver Age! We’re roaring ahead into the Bronze Age next, with a few Bronze Age people slated to go up before my winter break. I’d sort of hoped I might align the break with the end of ages, but things did not quite work out that way.
