E-MAN!

What is E-Man?

E-Man is a fictional comic book superhero created by writer Nicola Cuti and artist Joe Staton for Charlton Comics in 1973. Though the character's original series was short-lived, the lightly humorous hero has become a cult-classic sporadically revived by various independent comics publishers.

 

Charlton Comics

The character premiered in E-Man #1, the first of ten issues (cover-dated Oct. 1973 - Sept. 1975) published by the Derby, Connecticut-based Charlton Comics.The stories were humorous and lighthearted, in the style of Plastic Man, especially as E-Man could form himself into anything he wanted.Backup features were Cuti and Tom Sutton's "The Knight", starring a superspy agent of C.H.E.S.S.; Joe Gill and Steve Ditko's "Liberty Belle"; two stories of writer-artist Ditko's superhero "Killjoy"; the time-traveling "Travis", by Cuti and Wayne Howard; and, in the color-comics debut of John Byrne, three stories of "Rog-2000", written by Cuti and starring a wiseacre, cigar-smoking robot Byrne had created in his fan-artist days^.

First Comics

In 1983, during a period of financial uncertainty for Charlton,.^[4] the company sold independent publisher First Comics the rights to E-Man. First's E-Man ran 25 issues (April 1983 - Aug. 1985), with the company also publishing a seven-issue miniseries, The Original E-Man and Michael Mauser, that reprinted those characters' Charlton stories.^[5]
Staton did the artwork, with stories written by Martin Pasko, Paul Kupperberg, Cuti, and Staton himself.^[5] In the course of the run, Staton acquired certain rights to the character from First, although First Comics retained ownership of those stories that had been published by them. As Staton described in an interview published in 2001,

The deal with E-Man was that I had an arrangement with First Comics so that they bought the rights to E-Man from Charlton, and then I was to repay First all their expense out of my royalties. The rights to E-Man were then supposed to revert to me completely. But some of us needed more lawyers than we knew, and the end result of how it stands, as I understand it, is that I have the right to do any new E-Man stories I want to, and I have the right to license any new E-Man material I want. Ken Levin, the lawyer for First, controls the rights to what First published. To keep the rights unified, Ken and I decided he would represent the whole E-Man package. ... [W]hatever I get in, Nick [Cuti] gets 50%, but so far, it's been nothing.

 

Fictional character biography

E-Man is a sentient packet of energy thrown off by a nova. Traveling the galaxy he learned about life, how to duplicate the appearance of life, and good and evil. Reaching Earth, he met exotic dancer/grad student Katrinka Colchnzski (who attended Xanadu University), also known as Nova Kane (novocaine), and formed himself into a superhero dubbed E-Man, with a civilian identity dubbed "Alec Tronn" (electron). His emblem was the famous mass-energy equivalence formula "E=mc²", and his powers included firing energy blasts from his hands, changing his appearance, and transforming part or all of his body into anything he could envision (e.g., turning his feet into jet engines so he could fly).
Nova would later be caught in a nuclear explosion and gain the same powers as E-Man and become his partner; later still, she would lose her powers and become a normal human being again, only to regain her powers sometime afterward. During their early adventures they picked up a pet koala named Teddy Q, whose intelligence grew to the point where he had a job waiting tables in a cafe.