Manchester Black: the telepath of the Elite who wants to break Superman's code

Manchester Black: who the founder of the Elite is

Manchester Black is a Superman enemy who almost never uses his fists. He is a British metahuman, a psychic, and his weapon is a question: what use is a hero who refuses to kill when the criminals start over? He asks it in front of the cameras, and the public agreed with him for a long time.

The character is born in Action Comics #775, cover-dated March 2001, written by Joe Kelly and drawn by Doug Mahnke. The same issue launches his team, the Elite. No civilian identity is attributed to him: Manchester Black is his only name, and nothing in the sources makes him come from the English city whose name he bears — they place him in London. A marked accent and a Union Jack tattoo complete the portrait.

In the gallery of opponents, he is neither a brute force like the tyrant of Apokolips nor an industrialist like the head of LexCorp. He attacks the rule the Man of Steel has set for himself, not his body. His path follows the same broken line: enemy, dead, returned, recruited by Superman, traitor, and then victim.

Action Comics #775: the 2001 entrance

The issue is titled «What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?». The Elite lands there as lethal vigilantes: they settle cases by executing the guilty, and public opinion applauds. Superman stands against them. The team then takes the hero to Io, a moon of Jupiter, for a fight broadcast live.

Black is about to kill him by psychic means, causing him brain injuries. Superman's answer is a lesson in dosage: a vision capable of seeing through matter to locate the mutated portion of his opponent's brain, and then a heat beam reduced to the strict minimum aimed at it. The telepath's powers go out, he does not die, and the whole Elite survives and ends up under arrest.

On the exact gesture, the sources diverge: removal of the mutated zone for some, temporary neutralization for others — this second reading fits the sequel better, since Black will recover his powers after escaping government custody. The issue's debate answered the success of more violent series of the time, with The Authority at the front. The comic and its animated adaptation have their own analysis: here, #775 is only his first chapter.

Manchester Black's powers, and his weak point

The title of telepath is defensible but incomplete: the stories put his telekinesis first of all, and one team profile even sums him up with the single formula "British telekinetic". His real range is wider.

• telekinesis;
• mind reading;
• mind control;
• thought projection;
• illusion generation;
• dream manipulation;
• memory manipulation;
• lie detection.

The scale counts as much as the list: he has already held thousands of minds at once. Against the Kryptonian arsenal, that offsets the difference in strength: a mental power goes around invulnerability instead of meeting it head-on. The same principle as with the trickster of the fifth dimension: the hero's skin protects nothing when the attack goes through the head.

The weak point is anatomical: his abilities depend on a mutated portion of the brain, the one Superman aims at in 2001. Otherwise, Black is a strategist. He works as a team, sends third parties in his place, bargains his way onto one side in order to serve the other. A brawler is measured by his blows; he is measured by his setups.

The Elite, his team — and the confusion with The Authority

The Elite is not Manchester Black: it is the team he founds, that he leads first, and that will outlive him. Around him, code names — Coldcast, Menagerie, The Hat. The comics portray them thinly: Coldcast manipulates electromagnetism, Menagerie is a Puerto Rican woman in symbiotic armor, and The Hat pulls any object from his magic hat.

The group's strength is less its powers than its argument. The Elite acts fast, shows the bodies, and leaves Superman to explain why he does not do the same. It is a contest of legitimacy, and it works: the public prefers those who kill. A Superman who had given way on that point, an entire continuity staged him, and he does not win peace there.

Last trap, the most frequent one: the Elite and The Authority are two different things. The Elite of 2001 echoes the debate that the success of The Authority had opened, and twenty years later Black will join an Authority — the one Superman puts together, beside the hero's official team. Two teams, two eras, one man in the middle.

2002: Lois's fake death and the suicide

In between comes Our Worlds at War, a crossover from August to October 2001 spread across some twenty titles, including Action Comics #780-782 and Adventures of Superman #593-596. Black crosses over to the government's side starting with Adventures of Superman #593, cover-dated August 2001. The squad attributed to him is not corroborated: better not to detail it.

The character's peak comes in 2002. Black has discovered the secret of the journalist with glasses and launches dozens of supervillains against the hero's circle. Then he strikes at the exact point: he makes him believe he has killed the Daily Planet journalist, in order to bring him to kill in return. Superman chooses imprisonment.

That is where the argument turns against its author. By pushing a hero to become an executioner, Black has become exactly what he claimed to fight: a supervillain. He kills himself in Action Comics #796, cover-dated December 2002. For a character who wanted to demonstrate a flaw in the refusal to kill, it is the opposite demonstration that gets published.

Vera Black, his sister: the Elite taken over another way

The team does not die with him. Vera Black, alias Sister Superior, is his sister, created by the same duo Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke. The profiles place her first appearance in JLA #100, cover-dated August 2004 — a date consistent with what follows, but resting on a single encyclopedic source.

She becomes the Elite's second leader and changes the frame: the group becomes a special-operations unit attached to the Justice League, instead of a commando acting against it. That produces Justice League Elite, twelve monthly issues from September 2004 to August 2005, written by Joe Kelly and drawn by Doug Mahnke. The roster brings together Sister Superior, Coldcast, Menagerie, Manitou Raven, Green Arrow, Flash (Wally West), Major Disaster, Kasumi and Naif al-Sheikh, with a base in Somerset, New Jersey.

Vera's motive is written in black and white: she sees this team as an atonement for her brother's acts. Hence a confusion that skews every summary: Manchester Black and Vera Black are two distinct characters, and the 2004-2005 series is not his. He is then dead since December 2002, and will not reappear until a dozen years later.

Black Dawn (2017): Manchester Black against the Kent family

A first return is placed in 2014, in Teen Titans (volume 5) #1, cover-dated September 2014 and released on July 16. Caution: the profiles give him a role as a S.T.A.R. Labs executive, but no review consulted names him. The return that counts arrives three years later.

It is Black Dawn, a six-part arc in Superman (volume 4) #20 to #25, written by Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason, drawn by Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza and Patrick Gleason. #20 comes out on April 5, 2017, #24 on June 7, #25 — the conclusion — on June 21. A cataloguing split: the first part is titled "Black Dawn" by some sources, "Superman Black" by others.

The content changes the nature of the threat. The instability of the powers of Clark and Lois's child is not a growth accident: it is the work of Manchester Black, who manipulates the boy. Black takes him hostage in #24, and Jon's powers return to normal after his defeat. The arc closes on the Kents' departure, from Hamilton County toward the hero's great city. The prosecutor of the 2001 code has become a family opponent.

2021-2022: from enemy to recruit, then to traitor

The most unexpected turn arrives on July 21, 2021 with Superman and the Authority #1, a four-issue miniseries signed by Grant Morrison on script and Mikel Janín on art. Superman recruits Manchester Black himself there, for a clandestine team charged with the missions that the Justice League cannot take. The man who wanted to demonstrate the hero's weakness becomes his employee.

This miniseries is the prelude to the Warworld Saga, which runs from March 2021 to August 2022: Action Comics #1029-1046, Superman volume 5 #29-32 and Superman: Warworld Apocalypse #1, written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson. Superman's Authority counts Apollo, Midnighter, Enchantress, Manchester Black, Guardian and Lightray. On the arena-world of the lord of Warworld, Black is tortured, and it is Superman who pulls him out of there.

The betrayal is revealed in Action Comics #1049: throughout the mission, Black was informing Lex Luthor, to whom he passed information and technology. He has not changed sides, he has changed clients. And that choice is going to cost him far more than the bars of 2001.

Action Comics #1050: Luthor uses him, then discards him

The issue goes on sale on December 27, 2022, for a cover dated February 2023. Luthor holds Manchester Black there in a LexCorp laboratory and uses his psychic powers like a machine. The device bears a name, "Project : Blackout", and mixes technology recovered on Warworld with Bendix's.

Its effect is considerable: making the entire world forget that Clark Kent and Superman are the same man. Black dies in the operation — with a reservation the sources keep, since it is Luthor who states it. For a character who had made the hero's secret identity his lever in 2002, ending up as a part of the mechanism that erases it has something cruel about it.

The end of the path says everything about the character: he is no longer the opponent, he is the tool, and the man who carried his ambition as far as the White House throws him away after using him. He returns all the same: in Superman (2023) #38, out on May 27, 2026, signed by Joshua Williamson and Dan Mora, he watches Superboy-Prime while waiting for his hour, at the heart of the event "Reign of the Superboys". The mechanism of this resurrection is not corroborated: that he has returned is established, the how remains to be checked.

Manchester Black on screen: animation, series, video games

The most faithful adaptation is an animated film, Superman vs. The Elite, released on June 12, 2012, directed by Michael Chang from a script by Joe Kelly himself: 76 minutes drawn from Action Comics #775. Robin Atkin Downes voices the adult Manchester Black, Grey DeLisle the child, George Newbern Superman, Pauley Perrette Lois Lane. Kelly explains that he had to go beyond the frame of the issue so the story would hold as a film, keeping its heart: the relevance of Superman's moral code.

The television version is very different. David Ajala plays him on a recurring basis in season 4 of the series carried by Kara Danvers, across six episodes aired between November 4, 2018 and March 17, 2019. This Manchester Black is the fiancé of Fiona Byrne, a telepathic alien killed by the Children of Liberty, and his engine is revenge. His counterpart is not Superman but the Martian telepath J'onn J'onzz.

Episode 4x13 takes up word for word the title of the 2001 comic: Black escapes prison and forms his Elite with Hat, Menagerie — Pamela Ferrer, played by Jessica Meraz — and a Morae alien, then hijacks President Baker's Claymore satellite to turn it against the White House. He flees with a Legion ring and dies two episodes later, killed by J'onn. On the list of Superman's series and animated shows, he therefore exists in live series and in animation; no live-action film has ever taken him up. Two games host him: LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, where Robin Atkin Downes voices him again, and Scribblenauts Unmasked.

Conclusion

If you keep only one thing about Manchester Black, keep that he belongs to a rare family of enemies: those who attack an idea. Luthor wants to win, he wants to force a confession. His failure of 2002 is therefore also the clearest victory of the rule Superman imposes on himself: the hero refused to kill when every reason to do it had been manufactured for him.

The rest of his path is worth reading because it refuses the straight line. You can approach him through the 2001 comic and its animated adaptation, through the 2017 return against Clark Kent's son, or through the 2022 ending in which his last employer reduces him to a machine part. In all three cases, the same character: a man who wanted to be right more than to win, and who failed at both.