- I am the eternal record of each man's twistings and turnings through life… Men call me Fate!
- --Fate in The Final Curtain
| Fate | |
|---|---|
 | |
|
Real Name |
Unknown (refered to as Fate, Fortune, Kismet, and Destiny) |
|
First Appearance |
Hand of Fate #8 (1951) |
|
Original Publisher |
Ace |
|
Created by |
Unknown |
Origin[]
Fate is a powerful embodiment of fate and destiny, describing himself as “the eternal record of each man's twistings and turnings through life” and as as one who “bridges the gap between this world and the next, holding in [his] grasp the skeins of each man's destiny”. He often referred to those who did not heed his warnings as “foolish mortals”.
Though not ill-disposed towards humanity (sometimes being depicted as bending destiny to save the lives of innocents or of those who atone for evil deeds in their past), Fate has no qualms about meting out judgment as he saw fit in certain circumstances where hubristic individuals tried to meddle with the forces of destiny, or discovered knowledge which no mortal man is allowed to possess. When committed by other beings, he views murder as a form of interference in the destiny of others, and opposes it strongly.
He is not the only supernatural entity in his universe. He is familiar with the workings of the Underworld (though he is not technically the one to render judgment on the dead, who are instead, if wicked, condemned to punishments by panels of other dead souls) and sometimes crosses paths with Satan, the “Master of Evil”, and with his own brother Death, who reluctantly bows to Fate.
Fate's ghostly appearance.
In the first issue (numbered as #8), Fate only served as the narrator of the first story (The Revolt of the Heads), being depicted in the opening splash panel as a ghostly figure. However, it is a major character in the leading story of the very next issue, It Is Written: I Die Tomorrow.
There, Fate is depicted as having the ability to shift between the chalk-white-skinned hooded figure, who is translucent and incorporeal, and a a corporeal form, with the appearance of an elderly man, who can pass for a normal human being. Even in “human” form, he carries a book in which the destinies of all mortals is written. It is forbidden for a mortal to read in this Book of Fate, but this is possible, as is demonstrated when, after bumping into Fate in the street, Paul Hulick, a gambler, accidentally knocks Fate's book out of his hands and reads out the page describing his own death. Fate reveals that he possesses precognition even about this event, as he was in the streets to begin with to ensure that Paul's death still proceeds as foretold even though he has learned of it in advance.
Despite all of this, the contents of the Book of Fate are not immutable, nor is Fate without pity. Under certain conditions, such as if the subject of a page of the Book atones for the sins which led them to their planned demise, Fate is permitted to personally rewrite their fate. However, he must have access to the page in question to do so. Paul Hulick was not so lucky, as, having ripped the page out of Fate's Book, he refused to give it back to him, believing that it returning to Fate's hands would be what sealed his fate; instead, he ended up meeting his demise in the circumstances originally predicted by the page as a consequence of his efforts to keep the page away from Fate. Regretful of how badly things had turned out, Fate was reinforced in his belief that mortals should not be allowed to read any part of his Book, though this saddened him.
Later in the same issue, Strange Rendezvous at 17 Rue Noir featured Fate, in his ghostly appearance, and invisible to all but the reader, following arrogant chessmaster Guido Nicola throughout the strangest game of his life, played with human-sized, living pieces against a mysterious masked opponent. Throughout the story, Fate seems a mere narrator, observing unseen, but in a plot twist, it is finally revealed that the masked opponent was the wrathful ghost of a chess player who had preceded Nicola as champion: Jan Kovacs. Declaring Kovacs the loser of the game (first because, being already dead, his wager of life and death with Nicola was unfair; and secondly, because he used his psychic abilities as a ghost to use foreknowledge to beat Nicola), Fate banishes Kovacs' ghost back to the underworld and destroys his chess pieces. After Nicola runs home, Fate has a last confrontation with him; chiding him for his vanity, he calmly explains that, having seen what no mortal must witness, Nicola must die too, which he achieves by simply pointing a finger at the human.
In The Hand of Fate #10, Fate was back to acting only as an observer, invisibly watching and narrating the events of Bride of the Golden Skull without interfering, and not appearing in any form in the other stories. This was also the case in Roots of the Evil Tree, the title story of Issue #11, but in another story, The Final Curtain, he took a more active role: being aware of the “evil, murderous thoughts” forming in the mind of ambitious actor Hugo Morrisey, he tries to warn him off the path of a killer, as he views murder as a form of interference in the destiny of others. After Morrisey commits the murder anyway, Fate forces him to witness the final moments of his victim with his own eyes, and then permanently dyes his hands red to mark his guilt. After he persists in his evil, Fate takes him down to the Underworld, to be judged by the spirits of his victims; denying him passage into the “World of the Spirits”, they condemn him to the ‘Hill of Perdition’, declaring that after a single successful performance he shall die and be condemned to unsuccessfully push a boulder up a hill like other craven men.
In Issue #12, Fate appears as a player in two stories and as a narrator in a third. In the first, The Man Who Pawned His Soul, after a man buys magic dice that always win from Satan, he attempts to appeal to his conscience to get him to stop ruining the lives of other gamblers by using the dice. However, when his pleas are ignored, he can but watch helplessly as the man ruins himself, with Satan eventually arranging for the man's death and collecting his soul. He narrates Dr. Chaney's Macabre Experient throughout without interfering. Finally, in The Grave Will Not Wait, he is pitted against another supernatural entity, Death; when a man (Kim Lampson) who finds his death unfair makes a bargain with Death to let him live in exchange for arranging the deaths of others and thus giving more souls to Death, Fate tells Death that he will let him make the bargain with Kim, but only because he knows that the deal will came to naught — insisting that what he has written in his book will come to pass without one iota altered. Indeed, though Kim attempts to fulfill his bargain, Fate arranges for him to only stumble upon long-dead ghosts whom he only thinks he is successfully killing; he returns to the original location of his death to find that no time at all has passed, and is returned to his original death.
In Issue #13, Fate appears as a narrator in Necklace of Death, before playing a more substantial part in Fate's Final Scoop: when a jaded newspaper man tries to start a devastating fire to have created headlines he's written up in advance, Fate appears to him just before he commits the deed, warning him that eternal damnation awaits him if he commits this hateful act. When the man, dismissing him as a hallucination, goes through with it, causing the loss of thirty lives, Fate comes to him the next day and drags him in spirit to a tour of the Underworld, showing him the Three Weird Sisters and the “Pit of Eternal Damnation”, a pit of lava into which unrepentant souls are cast. Though Fate admonishes him that it is not too late for him to avoid this fate, the murderer explicitly rejects his warnings, even as Fate gives him glimpses of each of the Three Weird Sisters, in turn, doing her part to arrange his imminent death, finally bearing witness to said death.
In Issue #14, Fate appears to Ramon Blagdon, a professor of psychology who has cracked the secret of astral projection. Fate admonishes him to remain a teacher and thus on the side of good, but Blagdon claims that his newfound powers make him Fate's equal, and that he shall rewrite his destiny and those of others to suit himself. He wastes no time in using his powers for murder, ignoring Fate's warnings, and even attempts to summon forces of evil. Though quickly changing his mind, Blagdon cannot keep the demons from appearing to him again and again until he finds himself unable to return to his body, drawn into their hellish world which exists “beyond the limits of human minds”.
Issue #15's lead story, Dead Ringer, returns to the Fate/Death partnership; under Fate's guidance, Death arranges for a plain to crash with a single fated survivor, hitherto-unlucky Hubert Newton. However, among the victims of the plane crash was a much richer lookalike of Newton, Vic Murrain. Newton steals his identity papers and belongings, intending to make the world believe that Newton died and that he is Murrain. Fate, disapproving of Newton using his lease of life to steal another man's destiny, appears to him and try to warn him off this course of action, but as usual he is ignored. After much back-and-forth, Newton finds himself buried under his own name, still alive in a supernatural sense, bound to remain alive and awake in the coffin for twenty years until his actual appointed death. Later in the same issue, Fate also appears in The Mystery of the Tarot, acting both by himself and through some of the effigies of the tarot card he controls, most notably “the Magician” and (of course) Death; and in Ring of Evil, where he attempts to warn a young couple not to steal the Ring of Thier, actually a magical item which was “fashioned by an evil power when the Earth was young” and carries a curse, from a tomb. After one of the two thieves, Nada, puts on the ring, Fate appears to him again to explain the curse to her, and watches as she kills herself rather than endure it. He also plays a part in The Doom of the Lucky Devil, attempting to tell a gangster to change his ways before he transitions from pettier crimes to murder; but the gangster, Daniels, is convinced that he's in the Devil's good books, and is led by his “luck” to the ghost town of Devil's Camp looking for a lost gold mine. After meeting the Devil in person, Daniels ends up becoming one more doomed ghost trapped in the very literal ghost town.
In Issue #16, Fate narrated Spectres Stalk the Bloody Tower before having a more substantial part in The Clock of Doom Strikes Loud!, where he is seen in the beyond, meeting a poor, but greedy man in “the Chamber of Death” (an ethereal place decorated with menhirs, and containing an infinity of floating clocks each counting the lifetime of a human being), backed by demons and gargoyles. When he finds three doors leading back to life, Fate lets him take each of them in turn, living through three alternative lifetimes where he is dealt a luckier hand than he was in his original life. However, each time he wastes his new chance at life through greed, and ends up murdered in retribution or consequence of his own evil deeds. Returning to the Chamber of Death for the final time, Brandon sees Fate pointing at his personal life-clock and seeks to allot himself more life by turning the hand back, but goes too far, turning it as far back as a few seconds before his birth; this erases him from Earthly existence and he finds himself in Hell, taken custody of by the Devil, who says he has been amused by his “antics”.
Issue #17 saw Fate, in The Sorcerer's Spectacles attempting in vain to stop Vernon Hutchins from abusing the power of magic spectacles which allowed him to bring down demons on anyone he looked at — with the predictable result of Hutchins dying when he carelessly looked at himself in a mirror while wearing the glasses. He made a very discreet appearance at the end of Orchids of the Dead, confirming that he had observed the events of the story, though he was not seen at any point in it, nor did he narrate it. In Mirror Macabre, as well as narrating, Fate had a brief part in the action, appearing in the netherspace between the Underworld and the living world — to ask the story's antagonist if he would now change his way after he is given a forceful glimpse of the Underworld's torments by the man he murdered, but manages to escape back to the world of the living. He is, as usual, ignored.
Issue #18's first story atypically saw Fate intervening in a story without already being its narrator: in The Phantoms' Vengeful Return, he appeared in the climax to sentence murderous circus director Cal Massey to be haunted by the ghosts of the artists he murdered. By contrast, he narrated Potion from the Unholy Cauldron in caption-boxes without making his customary invisible appearances in the comic to watch the events unfolding (with Shakespeare's three witches, referred to as the Sisters of the Night or Sisters of Hecate — their relationship to the Three Weird Sisters depcited in an earlier issue being left ambiguous —, being the ones to deal out supernatural justice on the story's human evildoer).
In Issue #19's The Lives of Otto Marlin, Fate returned to his usual modus operandi, appearing to the wicked scientist Otto Marlin before he killed an innocent girl called Vivian Lake in an effort to study reincarnation and a means of harnessing its secrets for time travel and mystical power. After he ignores the warning, Fate declares that the girl herself will be his doom, and he finds himself thrown backwards through his own past reincarnations, living his life backwards compared to Vivan — who, in each successive time period, ends up causing his death, until finally they reach their first incarnations, as a pair of prehistoric spiders, with the female devouring the male. However, his appearance in Stampede of the Centaur was once again limited to being the face of the narration in caption-boxes, without ever appearing in the actual settings.
In Issue #20's Death and the Bridegroom, he appears with Death again, appearing this time to work with him as an equal to end the careers of an old poisoner and her younger, black-widow accomplice by throwing them at the mercies of the ghosts of their many victims. He also appears as a narrator in Issue #21's Strange Gift from the Unknown, Revenge of the Haunted and Phantoms of the Forgotten. In the first, he complains about people blaming him (and such things as “bad luck”) for their own failures and shortcomings. He tests this by actually giving such a man a useful warning, which he ignores out of pride. Meanwhile, Revenge of the Haunted is notable for featuring a glimpse of the pages of Fate's Book, usually unseen but for the cover; its pages are depicted as resembling an account-book. The final panel of Phantoms of the Forgotten depicts Fate writing in the Book himself, with a blood-red quill.
In Issue #21's To Behold His Doom, after a man acquires “the Devil's Mirror”, which can foretell the future, Fate atypically does not try to make him foreswear its use altogether, but rather, to use its power for good, to save lives. However, he only uses it selfishly and ends up causing his own death while trying to run from the same. In Issue #22's Shattering The Time Barrier, character development for Fate continued as he was confronted with a man who committed monstrous deeds out of a sense of righteousness, trying to use ghosts under his control to rid the world of murders and dictators, not unlike Fate himself; recognising him as even worse than some of the evil men of whom he'd stood in judgment, he looks kindly upon a ghost who arranges an ironic “fate” for him.
Issue #23's Hell Beyond The Crystal Ball once more featured Fate vainly trying to get a man to back out of a deal with Satan, operating under the alias of “Natan” and a disguise ironically mirroring Fate himself — a robed figure with a crystal ball for a head, claiming to foretell the future.
Roger Dunning's brief stint as a new Fate.
Issue #24's The Man Who Would be Fate feature Fate temporarily abdicating his place as “ruler of the universe” to a human magician, Roger Dunning, as an answer to Dunning's feeble attempts to impersonate him using his magical powers. However, after enjoying a few moments of near-godhood, the new Fate realises that Fate is not an undisputed ruler, but under constant threat from the many dead spirits in the Beyond who have a grudge against Destiny. They overwhelm him, and he loses his grip on Fate's power, which returns to the original. 12 Symbols To Hell confronted him with another dark mirror of himself, the “Great Astrologer of the Universe,” Ozias, who had living versions of the signs of the Zodiac at his command, although he and his human associate ended up bringing about their own destruction as Fate predicted. He closed off the issue by narrating a self-contained tale, Beast of the Bayous.
In Issue #25-A's Who'd Believe Kasimir Raades?, Fate comes together with Death once again to thwart an inventor's attempt to claim immortality for himself at the cost of many lethal experiments on unwilling victims. He calls Death “Brother” and refers to himself and Death as Gods. The two appear again in the same issue in Death Wears No Face, where it is reaffirmed that Death has a duty to do as Fate says, but a degree of fondness is shown between the two characters; after Death is made to stare into his own eyes and feel the same terror as mortals, Fate lets him rest, trusting that the man who thus temporarily cheated his doom will find him in time.
The final issue of The Hand of Fate, Issue #25-B, featured two last Fate stories, featuring him narrating and observing the action: The Last Hiding Place and When His Number's Up. The latter made its last additions to Fate's lore by showing him writing down his observations on scrolls, depicted as distinct from the Book, whose writing Fate, in this story, does not seem capable of altering, at least without great difficulty.
Powers & Abilities[]
In It Is Written: I Die Tomorrow, Fate displays the ability to shift between a human-looking old man in ordinary clothing and a ghostly form wearing a pearl-gray shroud, with unnaturally pale skin and a hood obscuring the top half of his face. In his “ghostly” form, he could choose to be seen by only one individual (in this case, Paul), remaining invisible to all others. He is also shown to be the only person with the power to rewrite the contents of his Book.
In Strange Rendezvous at 17 Rue Noir, Fate unveils far greater abilities: he sends blasts of electric-like energies at the living chess pieces to destroy them, can physically seize a ghost and cast him into the Underworld, and can mete out a sentence of death on ordinary mortals by simply pointing a finger at them. His ghostly apparition can also shift sizes at will, appearing gigantic at times, and at another, no larger than a chess piece.
In The Final Curtain, Fate displays the ability to transport mortals through space in a supernatural fashion, similar to the Ghosts of Christmas in Dickens' Christmas Carol (minus the time travel element), and also to place a curse of punishment on a murderer by staining his hands permanently with the blood of his victim.
It is mentioned in The Grave Will Not Wait that Fate is the one entity more powerful than Death, who “bends the knee” to him; his decisions are “final, irrevocable”. Death calls him ‘Master’, and he seems to have the power to stop or warp time. In Fate's Final Scoop, he can give the soul of a still-living man an astral tour of the Underworld, and also bring forth the Three Weird Sisters as apparitions before his eyes while in the waking world to threaten him with his impending fate, implying the Sisters are also under his command.
In The Mystery of the Tarot, it is revealed that he is responsible for the power of foretelling of tarot card decks; a glimpse of Fate' own realm, a green void where three-dimensional versions of the tarot card figures surround him, is seen.
Public Domain Appearances[]
- The Hand of Fate #8-25B
Trivia[]
- The character is very similar to DC Comics' “Destiny”, used twenty years later by Jack Kirby as the horror host of Weird Mystery Tales, both being hooded figures with gaunt faces who embody the concept of destiny and carry a supernatural book in which future events are written. The DC Destiny gained greater prominence in the 1980s and 1990s when he was incorporated by Neil Gaiman into The Sandman as one of “the Endless”. In fact, in The Mystery of the Tarot, Fate lists other names he has been called by men, which include “Fortune”, “Kismet” — and “Destiny”. Despite the similarities, whether Fate was a direct inspiration for Destiny is unknown.