Character-Max Binary

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Character Details

Character Details
Real Name: Max Cliffton _coming_soon.png
Birthplace:
Specialty:
Team Affiliation:

Midnight Men

Character Biography

Max Cliffton was an Astronomer with a vengeance. He was obsessed with discovering the elusive "Planet X," a hypothetical dark planet responsible for the orbital discrepancies between Uranus and Neptune.

His obsession began as a young man when he got to meet Nikola Tesla and hear him expound on the radio signals he was receiving from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Max was sure that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the solar-system, and Tesla had to be onto something.

His studies and eventual thesis work was done under the watchful eye of Percival Lowell who made headlines for claiming to have witnessed the canals on Mars. Max knew he was just looking for press however, in order to bolster his research grants, and felt sure that Planet X was a far more realistic location for the source of Tesla's radio waves.

Theory after theory met with failure, and after Lowell died, Max's lack of results got him demoted right out of the observatory. World War I began, and while America was consumed with the fighting, Max met with another disappointment. The signal stopped.

For two years, Max was trying to figure out a plan to dodge the draft when he got his first bit of luck. The signal began again...only this time...it was coming from Earth!

He tracked the signal down to the Arizona desert where a meteor had struck mere days before. In the crater was a machine...a robot! At first he wasn't sure if this was some piece of German ordinance that had somehow been dropped from a plane trying to hit a US target, but the Germans were too far away, and their planes could never have reached this far, plus...it was emitting almost the exact same radio signal that he had been following.

Elated, Max took the robot back to his workshop and immediately started running tests. He got its main power system back online, and when it came to life, it immediately changed radio frequencies, and powered-up a weapon in it's arm. Max managed to dodge the laser blasts that cut through his home, but as the robot moved to follow him, it became unplugged from the generator, and powered down.

Now Max knew everything he needed to. The robot was hostile, and after it broadcasted the new frequency, he guessed that it was attempting to signal Planet X in order to tell them what it had discovered. Doubtlessly, they would be sending more, and Max knew that the world would be in danger.

Years earlier, when Max was visiting Tesla in New York, he had the rare opportunity to tour Dax Northender's Manhattan workshop. There he spied the design plans for a personal suit of body armor. He figured that if he could build a suit like that for himself, incorporating the robot's technology, he would have the necessary weapon for fighting the oncoming threat. Moreover, he could patent the design, and sell it to the government in order to mass produce them. Somewhere in his heart, he knew that the right thing to do was simply report his findings and turn the robot over to the government. But there was the issue of the fame of the discovery which he would undoubtedly be cut-out from. That...and there was an awful lot of money to be made from a lucrative patent. Tesla had proven that.

So Max worked for months, trying to build a practical suit of body armor to incorporate the robot technology into. In the end, his own designs met with failure. The suit was too heavy, or it afforded no protection, or it just wasn't mobile at all. In a moment of frustration he realized that he didn't have to come up with a design...Dax Northender already had!

He went to New York to visit with Northender, but he and Sam were out of the country attempting to discover the secret base of his long time foe, Dr. Count St. Cross. Max took the opportunity to break into Northender's lab where he found not only the plans for the armor, but the suit almost finished! It was perfect. Strong, light, durable, and affording an excellent range of movement...something Max never could have built on his budget. With the threat of imminent invasion, and the lure of untold millions, Max stole the suit and fled back to his workshop.

Over the next two years, he incorporated the Robot's arm weapons into the armor, as well as retro-fitting the protective plating with paneling from the robot's own body. The final touch was attaching the robot's jump jets to the back of the suit.

His suit complete, Max then warned the government about the imminent robot attack. He was laughed at. He tried the press. Again, he was laughed at and hailed as a crackpot with no proof. The problem was that the "proof" was the robot he found, and in order to get a patent on his suit, he would have to turn it over to the government, and chances are he wouldn't have it when the robots DID attack.

He didn't have to wait long.

They came in a fleet of hundreds, and descended on New York, almost without warning. An hour later, Max was on the scene having done little or no field testing at all. The suit handled beautifully, allowing Max to fly through their ranks, blowing holes in their hulls with their own laser technology. Of course there were too many for him alone to handle, but he was aided by Ace Maelstrom and project Sandstorm, as well as Dax Northender, Jurrasic Sam, and the Gotham Saint. Together, they beat the robot army from Planet X and Max was suddenly a hero. When asked by the press who he was, and where he came from, he took the name "Max Binary, Robot Killer."

Had he just left it at that, he might have been okay, but he went on to claim the discovery of Planet X (even though he hadn't actually found it,) as well as warn that there would be subsequent invasions, (doubtlessly because a robot killer with no robots to kill will not be an ongoing hero.) The more he talked, the more it became evident that he was not the type of heroic personality Dax Northender was, nor the charismatic swashbuckler Ace Maelstrom turned out to be. Max Binary was, in fact, self-absorbed, socially inept, and practically foaming at the mouth with more conspiracy theories and prophecies of robotic doomsday attacks.

Finally, one night, after Max practically beat-up an opinion columnist, Dax Northender drug him into a back alley and laid it out for him. He knew that Max's suit was built on-top of his own design. He also knew that Max was the one to steal it. He also knew that Max had long-term knowledge of the robotic threat, and should have turned everything over to the authorities so that a proper defense could have been planned. The bottom line, however, was that Max helped to save the day, and though a lot of people died, many more lived because of his brave actions. Dax would let him keep the suit, but he had to stop talking to the press about how brilliant and misunderstood he was, and he had to use the suit to help people. If he failed to live up to those conditions, Dax would take the suit back, and hand Max over to the authorities, explaining everything.

Max agreed, and that was the last time the two men spoke. Since then, Max Binary kept his opinions to himself, and used the suit to help people in need. He was always on hand at disaster sites, and was regularly seen helping to restore order to situations of social unrest. He did, however, find a sneaky way to get around Dax's rule about not talking to the press, as he commissioned an author to start writing science fiction novels about himself. They were fantastically pulpy tales about his exploits into outer space, and the rescuing of busty alien princesses. Dax left him alone, as the books were pure fiction, but when the time came to assemble the Midnight Men, Max Binary was on his list, (despite the reservations of Ace and Sam.)

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