Elijah Snow

Origin

Elijah Snow was born at midnight on January 1, 1900. Along with a number of other "Century Babies," Snow possesses great power and seems destined to change the world.

Creation

Elijah Snow was created by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday.

The Early Years

His exact place of birth is unknown, but it was most likely somewhere in the southern United States. All that is known of his youth is that he was obsessed with the Unknown and the Mysterious. By the time he was nineteen, he was already traveling around the world in search of various myths and legends. In the castle of a resurrectionist (possibly Victor Frankenstein), Snow found a map of the world - a map of the world's secrets, made by a conspiracy of powerful men.

Snow traced the map to England, and to the leader of the conspiracy, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and his cohorts - the Baron, an invisible man, Dracula and others - considered themselves to be an intellectual elite, holding back from the world those ideas and discoveries for which the world was not ready. Snow decided to change all that.

He killed Dracula with his power of "heat subtraction," and then became Holmes' student. He demanded to know everything that Holmes and his conspiracy knew, so that he could use it to change the world for the better. Snow studied with Holmes until the detective's death in 1925. It was then that Elijah Snow began his search for the strange in earnest, and began writing a guide to chronicle his findings.

Planetary

To fulfill his belief that the strange nature of the world was what made it all the more wonderful, The Planetary Guide was published every year as a kind of map to the incredible places of the world. Hidden African kingdoms, mysterious portals in Australia, science-fiction submarines, robot assassins and much, much more.

Like the other Century Babies, Snow ceased to age somewhere in his thirties. His apparent immortality spurred him to protect the world that he had explored, and he formed The Planetary Organization. Planetary opened branches all over the world, with a staff that is presumed to number in the thousands. The heart of the group, however, is the field team - a three-member team which, by the 1990s, consisted of Jakita Wagner, Ambrose Chase and The Drummer.

The Four

As the century drew to a close, Planetary came into direct conflict with a group called The Four, whose activities were in direct conflict with those of Planetary. The Four wanted to suppress the possible emergence of metahumans and super-science on earth in preparation for an alien invasion in the 21st century, and Planetary endangered that mission.

The leader of The Four, Randall Dowling, captured Snow and forced him to submit to a series of blocks on his memory. In return, the rest of the Planetary field team would not be killed. Snow agreed, with the command that his field team was not, under any circumstances, to try and find him again. Dowling altered Snow's memory and set him free to make his way however he might.

Return to Planetary

Snow's second-in-command, Jakita Wagner, attempted to lead the remaining field team against The Four, with limited success. When one mission ended in the death of Ambrose Chase, she decided that it was time to disobey orders and look for Elijah Snow.

She found him in a diner in a rural part of the United States, with no memory of her or of Planetary. She "recruited" him into the group, ostensibly as the new third member of the field team. He accompanied her and The Drummer on several missions, learning about the organization. Wagner's true goal, however, was to remind him of who he was so that he could fight The Four.

In his search for the missing pieces of his life, Snow met with super-spy John Stone, who was able to prod Elijah's mind carefully enough to bring Dowling's memory blocks down.

The Fourth Man

With his memory restored, Elijah Snow began a systematic attack against The Four, sabotaging their work and uncovering their secrets. He discovered that they were working with an extradimensional army which was planning to occupy Earth in the early days of the 21st century. He organized the Planetary team to capture or kill the agents of The Four, ending in the deaths of two of them. The other two have been incapacitated, and Snow is presumably now able to continue the work he started nearly a century ago.

"It's a strange world."

"Let's keep it that way."

Powers and Abilities

Century Baby: individuals born exactly at the "turn of the century", they as such possess metahuman powers in order to protect Earth.

• Cryokinesis: Able to control temperatures, specifically able to extract heat to freeze things, and able to generate winter-like weather conditions. His main power is heat subtraction, allowing him to congeal poison gas, selectively freeze an entire city block or freeze the water in an opponent's brain. He can drop the temperature around him at will, freeze someone while the maintaining the normal temperature around him; create frost and ice; turn water to ice; turn things or beings to ice.
• Longevity: Despite being over 100 years Elijah hast aged beyond his 30's.