Night Thrasher

Night Thrasher is a fictional character, a superhero in the Marvel Comics universe.

Night Thrasher (real name Dwayne Michael Taylor) is the founder and leader of the New Warriors, and head of the Taylor Foundation. Although he possesses no superhuman powers, he has trained himself extensively in many martial arts, and is adept at building technological devices.

Overall Night Thrasher was very similar to DC Comics' Batman, with almost exactly the same origin story (driven to fight crime after parents murdered in front of him as a child) and power set (trained human with gadgets).

Character Biography

Dwayne Taylor has had a hard life. As a child he saw his wealthy parents slain before his very eyes. This event drove him to hone himself into a human fighting machine in the pursuit of eventual revenge. Over time this desire for specific revenge mutated into a general desire to punish wrong doers.

Though he was unable to fully remember his parents death, being unable to remember the face of their killer, he assumed that this was due to his mind trying to block the memory. What he found out only much later was that the entire circumstances of his parent's death and his own rearing by his guardian Chord and an elderly Oriental woman named Tai were not at all what he had believed.

In the meantime the driven, conflicted young man lived a dual existence of prodigal tycoon, taking up control of his father's powerful conglomerate publically, and training himself to the utmost standard as a warrior privately. He eventually took to the streets to fight crime in NYC, but some early setbacks and the urging of his guardian Chord led him to assemble a superhero team to assist him in his private war.

Night Thrasher meticiulously researched several young solo heroes, and selected a handful of them as targets for recruitment. His choices:

Richard Rider, previously known as the Xandarian powered Nova; a powerful and experienced hero who had seemingly lost his powers.

Marvel Boy, aka Vance Astrovik, a powerful mutant Telekinetic with ties to the Thing and Captain America. (later changed name to Justice)

Firestar, a powerful mutant microwave generator with ties to the X-Men and the Hellfire Club.

Almost immediately after gathering his chosen prospective teammates, the four young superheroes became envolved in an emergency; the former Herald of Galactus Terrax had re-formed and was causing a good deal of destruction in downtown NYC. Arriving at the scene they found another couple of superheroes already trying to contain the rampaging former Herald:

Namorita, cousin of Namor, a mighty superhuman with broad capabilities, particularly in water.

Speedball, a little-known Connecticut based hero with strange kinetic energy abilities.

The six young heroes battled the raging villain and managed to nuetralize him via the use of ersatz (but effective) teamwork. In the aftermath the Avengers showed up and stole the show, leaving some of the young heroes bitter about being slighted, but nevertheless the six agreed to form together into a new team, calling themselves The New Warriors.

The Warriors fought crime together fairly successfully for a respectable amount of time, but Dwayne stumbled across some alarming inconsistencies in the sham that was his life. He first discovered that his company was involved in very shady practices, and this initial inconsistency led him inevitably to unravel the lies that he had been fed since childhood. Nothing was as it seemed. In the end a very bizarre mystically oriented conspiracy was revealed, along with new villains in the form of the Folding Circle, and Tai's true role was made clear.

During this time Dwayne became very erratic, did some questionable things, formally disbanded the Warriors (though the other members ignored him and carried on), and even went over to the other side for a while.

In the aftermath of this event, the Warriors were never quite the same. The line up changed a bit, and Dwayne was an off again on again presence. He suffered further issues along the way, including losing his girlfriend (and sometime Warrior ally) Sillouette to his alleged half-brother, a strange individual known as Bandit. Dwayne was also no longer the undisputed leader of the Warriors; most of the group turned to first Nova and then Marvel Boy aka Justice for leadership.