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#89 - Tex Thompson
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This one is a deep cut for even the players, so I'll try my best to explain.

Harry "Tex" Thompson was a blonde-haired boy who struck it rich in the oil fields of Texas. Instead of a future as a rich oil baron, Thomson decided to seek a more adventurous lifestyle and traveled the world as Mister America. Thompson gained prominence as a mysteryman and even earned a position in the All-Star Squadron. Thompsons life forever changed when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called upon him to undergo intensive training to become a special commando and secret agent behind enemy lines. For this mission, he was codenamed Americommando. For the remaining years of the war, Thompson was aimed to rise through the ranks of the Nazi Party and gain the confidence of Hitler in an effort to assassinate him. This would culminate in the 1945 siege of Berlin, where Thompson infiltrated Hitlers bunker and killed him. Returning home, he was lauded Americas greatest hero and became a senator with presidential aspirations. Tex organized a program to defend the United States from the Soviet menace, an effort that would rally Robotman, the Atom and Dan The Dyna-Mite Dunbar to his cause and kickstart the Atomic Era in Cold War America. Among other long-standing efforts Thompson produced was the Area 51 project.

As Thompson grew in popularity, he also developed an animosity for those mysterymen who refused to unmask for the public interest. Thompson would ultimately co-chair the House Un-American Activities Committee alongside Joe McCarthy, and during the hearings that would see the Justice Society refuse to unmask, Thompson would wind up dead under mysterious circumstances right at the height of his presidential campaign. Thompsons body was found in a seedy area outside of Washington, strangled to death and badly bruised and beaten, part of one of the strange what if that litter the history books. With this scandal brewing, the Justice Society would temporarily disband in order to avoid connection to the mysterious death of their one-time ally.

Now, the mystery of Tex Thompson to me is one of the best little side stories in the campaign. So far, the tale is only woven into the characters of the Golden Age. People like Iron Munro, Sandra Knight and the like. Thompson is a relic of the past - his death put a nail in the coffin of the anti-Communist hysteria of post-war America. For me, this era of comics history is fascinating; mirroring the continuity of the DCU, comics at the time were suffering from the same rabid morality policing thanks to the book Seduction of the Innocent, which was fueling a hysteria suggesting that superheroes turned children into fetish-crazed, sex-crazed hooligans. In many ways, we've never really moved past this sort of dull, oft-retrodden refrain, in every movement in mass pop media. Comics nearly died off forever, and all but a few superheroes escaped the Comics Code Authority's purge of superheroes - including the sad but unstoppable demise of the JSA's comics at the time. So the death of the Justice Society? It also happened in the real world. It's the tale of HUAC, but spun through the eyes of the mysteryman I so richly adore in modern comics now. A story that's largely open and shut, but still a curiosity. How did Thompson die? Why did he turn on the team that created him, essentially - brothers in the All-Star Squadron?

Well, the story has recently developed. You see, in Area 51, Eve Manners revealed the tale of the predecessor to the shadowy UFO storage bunker. Area 50 was a much different beast than its tiny little cousin. The scope was wide, the efforts and initiatives dark and disturbing. In fact, the lead scientist, Randall Dowling, put together a body of work that traces a line directly to Darkseid's Anti-Life Equation, his Warhounds and more. And who saw to the funding of Area 50? Why it was Tex Thompson, of course. And who was at the site during its most egregious human experiments? Why it was Robotman - the same Robotman who is suffering from an unusual case of sensory deprivation-caused dementia. the same Robotman who was the first to stand at Tex Thompson's side decades earlier.

Tex Thompson to Darkseid. There's only one hop between them, and Eve Manners has brought that to light.

It all comes back around, you see. And just as relevant to the story in the present is this forgotten tale of the past, with long-reaching tendrils that snake right into the save haven of Z'onn Z'orr, a fortress that is protecting itself from the stormy present. But can it stave off the ghosts of the past? That's the real question.

Tex Thompson. An American patriot? Maybe. Or maybe he was a villain with incalculable vision.

#88 is a drafted character - someone's second to fall!