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Terra-Man
 
Terra-Man
 
Personal Info:
 
Real Name: Tobias Manning
Also Known As:
Place Of Birth: Unknown
First Appearance: Superman Vol.1 249
Known Associates:
Group Affiliation: None
Base Of Operations: Mobile
Grudges: Super-Man and Blue Devil
Creators: Cary Bates and Dick Dillin
Gallery:
 
Powers:
 
Weapons: Terra-Man has an array of alien weapons modelled to look like ordinary western objects. Chief among these are six shooters that carry tracer bullets, an energy lasso and alien plants with which he casts illusions.
Flight: Terra-Man can fly using a flight platform.
 
Origins:
 
Back in the year 1888, notorious outlaw Jess Manning was wanted for robbing stagecoaches. Manning was a widower with a 10-year old son, Toby. Wounded in a gunfight, Jess decided to let Toby try his first solo hold up whilst he recovered from his wound. Toby took to his task naturally - stopping a stage and forcing the man riding shotgun to hand over a strongbox full of Golden coins.
It just so happened at this time that an alien being called the Collector arrived on Earth seeking fuel for his spaceship. What he was after was common shale, which he found in abundance in the Cripple Creek area. When the Collector spotted Jess and Toby looking at their loot, he decided to steal it for himself. Jess fired and hit the alien in the shoulder. Enraged, the Collector fired a solar ray which fatally wounded Jess. Using a mental link, the alien learned of Jess' plans to raise young Toby as an outlaw. An outlaw himself, the Collector decided to carry out Jess' plan for his son.
The Collector used a hypnotic grid to wipe out Toby's memory of how his father died, then adopted the boy and took him into space. But the mind-link had worked both ways, and before Jess died, he placed a bullet in the ground and surrounded it with a sketch of the spaceship's shape.
The Collector placed an Oxygenator-thermostat in Toby's body, enabling him to breathe comfortably in any atmosphere as well as in space. The Collector schooled the boy in the use of various sophisticated weapons, which Toby eventually adapted to resemble objects he recalled from his childhood in the old west, like the energy lasso he used to capture an Arguvian space steed - a kind of winged horse - which he named Nova and rode through space.
For some time, Toby - now called Terra-Man because he came from Earth, or Terra - robbed for the Collector, but as he grew older, the memory of the figure drawn by his father took on more meaning. Eventually, Terra-Man bushwacked the Collector and avenged his father.
Travelling through space at ultra light speed had the effect of slowing down time for Toby, so that, after nearly a century, he was still a young man. He returned to Earth, where he had his first encounter with Superman
 
Notes: