Samaritan (comics)

Samaritan is a fictional character in the comic book series Astro City. Created by writer Kurt Busiek and artists Brent Anderson and Alex Ross, Samaritan is the premier superhero of the world, much in the vein of Superman and Captain Marvel. Despite his powers, however, the mind of the man called Samaritan is that of a weary and worn time-traveler with little time to himself and no future to return to.
Fictional character biography
In the dystopian future of the 35th century, a man is selected to go back in time to prevent a catastrophic event whose consequences ultimately ruined the future world. Launched into the timestream, he is caught up in empyrean fire, the strands of energy that make up time itself. Crash-landing near Astro City in late 1985, he spends the remainder of the year learning to master the empyrean forces which had suffused his body, and to alter it to change back to a more normal appearance (the empyrean forces had changed his hair to a bright shade of blue; he uses his powers to bleach the blue coloring away, rendering it white, and restores it when he appears as Samaritan.). Desperately working to control his powers, he barely succeeds in time to prevent the , the event he has been sent to amend. Upon placing the Challenger on the ground, he is besieged by the media, who press him for details on himself. Briefly dismissing himself as just "a Good Samaritan", he departs immediately to better figure things out.
Eventually deciding that he could do a lot of good with his powers, he adds a cape to his outfit and takes the name "Samaritan", basing himself in Astro City. Additionally, he uses his Zyxometer, a living bio-computer shaped like a diamond with tentacles, to create a civilian identity for himself as "Asa Martin" (an anagram of "Samaritan"), a fact-checker for Current, a news magazine based in Astro City. With the quiet his job affords, Martin programs the Zyxometer to do his daily duties at Current, enabling Samaritan to simultaneously continue performing his heroics and protecting the people. However, this causes Asa to appear to his colleagues as standoffish. His sense of duty has led to a similar problem as Samaritan, leading him to attempt to ameliorate it with what he considers non-essential activities. For example, he consents to attend dinners and banquets held in his honor, lest he seem arrogant by those he serves. The plaques and trophies given to him at these events end up in an alternate dimension, nicknamed "the Closet", that he can access.
Infidel's beginnings are not in the far future, as are Samaritan's, but in the distant past. In seeking knowledge, a youth named Kiyu left his tribe in what is now modern Kenya, only to ultimately become the slave of an alchemist. He studied and improved upon his master's work and achieved immortality by being infused with empyrean fire. Then, after his master denounced his efforts as blasphemous, he killed both his master and attacking villagers and went off to study the secrets of the universe. His researches occasionally involved human experimentation, which resulted in constant harassment by outsiders over many centuries. To symbolize his refusal to accept dogma and superstitions as law, he assumed the name "Infidel". In order to escape all distractions, he used empyrean energies to travel into the far future, where humanity was extinct. There, he built an empire dedicated to increasing his knowledge, using kidnapped slave labor from the past. However, when Samaritan changed history by rescuing Challenger, Infidel saw his empire disappear, replaced by an unfamiliar society. Infidel was imprisoned as a madman, but he escaped to 1962, where he escalated the Cuban Missile Crisis in order to restore his timeline and rebuild his empire. Samaritan, however, survived the changed timeline and forcibly reversed it.

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