Ann O'Brien
Encyclopedia
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
superheroine created by American comic book artist Art Adams
Art Adams
Arthur "Art" Adams is an American comic book artist and writer. He first broke into the American comic book industry with the 1985 Marvel Comics miniseries Longshot...
. Along with Axwell Tiberious, she is one of the two primary characters in Adams' Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics is the largest independent American comic book and manga publisher.Dark Horse Comics was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson in Milwaukie, Oregon, with the concept of establishing an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals. Richardson started out by opening his first comic book...
series Monkeyman and O'Brien
Monkeyman and O'Brien
Monkeyman and O'Brien is an American comic book series created by artist Art Adams in 1993. The series was published from 1993 to 1999 by Dark Horse Comics in various types of installments including short features in anthologies, backup stories in other series, a three issue limited series, a two...
.
Publication history
The fictional characterFictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
Ann O'Brien debuted in the anthology Dark Horse Presents
Dark Horse Presents
Dark Horse Presents was the first comic book published by Dark Horse Comics in 1986 and was their flagship title until its September 2000 cancellation. The second incarnation was published on MySpace, running from July 2007 until August 2010...
#80 (December 1993). Her story was next continued in a backup story entitled "Who Are Monkeyman and O'Brien?" in Mike Mignola
Mike Mignola
Michael Joseph "Mike" Mignola is an American comic book artist and writer who created the comic book series Hellboy for Dark Horse Comics. He has worked for animation projects such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire and the adaptation of his one shot comic book, The Amazing Screw-On Head.-Career:Mignola...
's 1994 series Hellboy: Seed of Destruction
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction is the first Hellboy comic book mini-series, published by Dark Horse Comics. It was conceived and illustrated by Mike Mignola and scripted by John Byrne.This was, in part, the basis for the first Hellboy motion picture....
. The character was further developed in a number of short stories in Dark Horse Presents, a three book limited series
Limited series
A limited series is a comic book series with a set number of installments. A limited series differs from an ongoing series in that the number of issues is determined before production and it differs from a one shot in that it is composed of multiple issues....
entitled Monkeyman and O'Brien, and a crossover
Intercompany crossover
In comic books, an intercompany crossover is a comic or series of comics where characters published by one company meet those published by another...
miniseries Gen 13/Monkeyman and O'Brien. The character's last appearance to date was in 1999 in a comic strip in Dark Horse Extra.
Fictional character biography
Ann Darrow O'Brien was the young, smart, and wealthy daughter of an eminent scientist and explorer who, at the start of the series, had disappeared two years ago and left his daughter and her assistant Akiko Oki living in his palatial Bay Area estate. To the surprise of many, the young Ann had been keeping the estate solvent. But in the first story, Ann's amoral half-sister Oniko (who left the family 15 years earlier to join a mysterious criminal enterprise) and her two henchmen enter the estate to take it over. The sisters have a brawl in an unused dimensional transportation chamber, and Ann accidentally hits a button that kicks off a "life form retrieval beam." The chamber explodes as it summons the giant, simian genius Axewell Tiberius, who's combating an unknown, apelike enemy. The henchmen escape with Oniko and the still-alive head of that enemy, while Ann and Akiko befriend Tiberius and give him a place in the estate's library.O'Brien discovers that the blast in the chamber had released a mysterious radiation that affects both her and Oniko. Immediately after the explosion, her eyes turn orange—the same color as Tiberius's. The next night, she needs almost no sleep to feel refreshed. The next day she finds that her sneakers no longer fit her feet: "I was growing faster than a teenager!" She performs better and better at physical tasks, lifting tons of free weights and at one point making a 60 mile run in 30 minutes without much effort. She frets a little about the ongoing growth spurts (wasting plenty of money on clothes that become too small in 24 hours), but finally settles in at seven feet tall and 250 pounds.
Her new strength, size, and knowledge (from working alongside Tiberius) transform O'Brien from an estate manager to a renowned and fearless adventurer. She joins Tiberius in a series of 1960s-inspired adventures, only a few of which are dilineated in the comics. (Author/artist Adams makes references to more adventures, like the "Shrieking Bin-Yak," which are never seen by the readers.) Her eventual goal: Help Tiberius find a way to his home world dimension.
Personality and powers
Named for the classic "damsel in distress" hero of King Kong, "Ann Darrow," O'Brien quickly grows up from a smart-but-meek estate manager to a confident adventurer. She often beats Tiberius to the punch and plunges into their dangerous situations; she seems to take more pleasure out of a knock-down brawl or chase then her cohort. She's generally gregarious but obviously doesn't suffer fools; when a reporter asks if she has a sexual relationship with Tiberius, O'Brien needs to be restrained from beating the guy up. While obviously beautiful (both President Bill ClintonBill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
and the evil Shrewmanoid have expressed a longing for her), she's a bit awkward in dealing with her massive size. In a dream where she gets blasted by a growth ray and accidentally knocks over half of San Francisco, O'Brien cries that she'll "never have a boyfriend." For his part, Adams has never introduced a romantic foil for O'Brien.
O'Brien's powers have never been carefully explained, possibly because creator Adams is more interested in telling the monster/sci-fi tales than bogging down in details. She has superhuman strength, unusual speed (although not on the level of a Quicksilver
Quicksilver (comics)
Quicksilver is a fictional character that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appears in X-Men #4 and was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby...
or the Flash), and is extremely hard to hurt. In a crossover with Gen 13, she was able to defeat an evil version of Caitlin Fairchild
Caitlin Fairchild
Caitlin Fairchild is a fictional comic book superhero, who appears in the Wildstorm series Gen¹³. She was created by writers Jim Lee and Brandon Choi, and artist J. Scott Campbell.-Early life:Fairchild is the daughter of Alex Fairchild of Team 7...
with some ease - she had to hold back some of her strength so as not to kill her. It's unclear if her powers have changed since her origin, as Adams has dropped some clues that could be red herrings. In Monkeyman and O'Brien #3 she is bitten by the Shrewmanoid, bleeds, and then heals within 5 seconds. No one had noticed this power before; Tiberius is inspired to "run some tests." Over the course of the five years Adams drew her, O'Brien changed physically, becoming more muscular, sporting wilder hair, and developing a more chiseled, "supermodel"-looking face. It's probable that these were just changes in Adams' artistic style.