Character History
Professor Night's secret identity is Taylor Kendall, and he lives in Kendall Manor, just outside Star City, with his Sikh butler, Pratrap, and his adopted daughter and biological niece, Linda Kendall, a.k.a. Twilight, the Girl Marvel, who partners him in crimefighting. Beneath Kendall Manor are the Halls of Night, Professor Night's secret base, where he keeps his advanced computer system, trophies of past cases, and his car, the Night-Wagon. The Halls of Night are also linked to the mythical underworld. The Professor and Twilight are afflicted with Porphyria's Complaint, which reportedly makes them less effective during the day but more alert and athletic at night, although they have nevertheless functioned well in daytime scenarios.
Professor Night's villains include Jack-A-Dandy, Lounge Lizard, Evening Primrose, Fake-Face and the Walrus and the Carpenter. Most of his enemies are criminally insane, and locked in the Miskatonic Mental Institution (a play on Arkham Asylum, and H. P. Lovecraft's Miskatonic University in the city of Arkham).
While Professor Night has been active as a hero since the 1930s, he and Twilight spent almost thirty years in suspended animation when their souls were stolen by one of their supernatural foes, explaining why they appear younger than their history with Supreme would suggest.
Professor Night and Supreme have long enjoyed a professional partnership and are also close friends, fully aware of each other's secret identity. When visiting the Prism World of Amalynth, Supreme sometimes takes the Professor Night-inspired identity of Doctor Dark (a reference to Superman's Batman-like identity of Nightwing). If accompanied by a partner, such as Diana Dane, Supreme assigns them the Twilight-inspired identity of Duskwing (referring to the Robin-like identity of Flamebird)
Read more about this topic: Professor Night
Famous quotes containing the words character and/or history:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)