Character History
Sherri Caniff sends Manny McDoon to help Orion Assante, leader of Calmerica, with his ever-increasing governmental and strategic worries. Assante wants Australia, Manny’s homeland, to join Calmerica and become one country. Manny, a psychic, agrees to help.
With his intelligence, powers, and laconic humor, he quickly becomes one of Orion’s most important advisors. Orion brings him to meetings and Manny reads the minds of their competitors so they can outmaneuver their every move. He also helps Orion with his judicial role, reading the minds of the disputants and helping Orion gain a reputation for being very fair.
Great Japan also wants to annex Australia, and Manny realizes, using his powers, that Great Japan is putting subliminal messages in Australian TV. They create their own subliminal messages, and Manny psychically enhances them so that anyone who sees them will have positive feelings about Calmerica. Australia eventually joins with Calmerica to become UNOW.
Manny next helps Orion plan their annexation of SCAUR (South America) by working with a drug kingpin, Diamond Diego. Diego agrees to help them topple SCAUR’s government as long as he gts a position of power. Diego wears a psychic disruptor helmet and is obviously aware of Manny’s powers. They go down to Diego’s home and Manny psychically imprints all of his drugs, so that anyone who takes the drugs will have positive feelings about UNOW. The drugs also increase his abilities and he is finally able to read Diego’s mind, learning that he plans to double-cross them. Unfortunately, imprinting the drugs with his powers is very draining, and Manny is left in a very weakened condition for a long time. They manage to take over SCAUR without much violence. Diego is killed.
They next end up having a conflict with Africa that starts when Sherri is kidnapped. Manny uses a psychic amplifier helmet to send video signals comprising false news reports only to Africa, and no where else. This ruse helps them trick the kidnappers and get Sherri back.
He continues to get weaker, the more he uses his powers to such a great extent. He takes a break to try to recover in Orion’s old headquarters near Mt. Rushmore. Sherri later dies, and Orion goes into a deep spell of grief. He runs away and joins Manny in seclusion for a long period. Fadi tries to find him, but Manny won’t tell her where Orion is.
Orion becomes obsessed with the idea that he is becoming Grendel, and wants to find Eppy Thatcher, to see what happened to him. He asks Manny to find him psychically. Manny doesn’t want to do it, but eventually relents. Donning the psychic amplifier helmet, he finds him, and is horrified to share his insane thoughts. The experience is painful, and Manny dies soon after. Orion finds Thatcher, and the meeting gives him the idea necessary to defeat his enemies and unite the world as one country. He has Manny’s face carved into Mt. Rushmore as a way of marking his great sacrifice and contributions to the world.
Powers
Manny is considered to be a powerful psychic in his world. He is capable of effortlessly reading and sending thoughts with those in his vicinity. He cannot normally bypass a psychic disruptor helmet, but with the aid of drugs, he can.
He can sense things that others can’t, such as subliminal messages. He is able to create psychic imprints in other objects and media, as he did with subliminal TV messages and with drugs.
Using a special helmet that amplified his powers, he is able to search minds, and send messages, across the continent and world. He was able to affect the content of the news in Africa.
However, using these extended powers are painful and tiring, and can cause him long-term weakness and even death.