GIlgamesh Wulfenbach

History

 

Overview

Gilgamesh Wulfenbach is a character driven by split loyalties. On the one hand, he is the son of Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, the absolute ruler of continental Europa and a powerful spark. On the other, he is deeply in love with Agatha Heterodyne, and does everything in his power to keep her safe and try to receive her love as well. To his father, Gil owes his lineage, his position of power in Europa, and excellent and painfully thorough education that has allowed him to be master of his destiny. To Agatha, Gil owes his heart. On top of these conflicting loyalties, Gil is himself an extremely potent spark, on almost the same level as Agatha and possibly greater than his father. He is charismatic, driven to achieve his goals, and has extreme potential as the next ruler of Europa were he to inherit his father’s empire.  
  

Origin

Currently, nothing is known about Gil’s mother, and indeed his father only became known to him many years after his birth. Gil was raised aboard Castle Wulfenbach, the airship-city-fortress that serves as Baron Wulfenbach’s base of operations. Gil lived with the children of the royal families of Europa who were being held by Baron Wulfenbach to prevent revolt. Baron Wulfenbach claimed his son around GIl’s tenth birthday, at which time Gil was whisked off to live in one of the great centers of culture and learning, Paris. He returned from his foray into the Parisian life to travel by his father’s side and learn the ways of ruling the empire, and it is during that period that he met Agatha Heterodyne (then known as Agatha Clay). 
 

A New Lab Assistant

Due to a comedy of errors, Baron Wulfenbach believes that a mechanical robot actually built by Agatha Heterodyne in a fever-dream state was built by a soldier-turned-criminal who was chasing Agatha at the time, and that this petty thief and Agatha are lovers. The Baron decides to take them both aboard Castle Wulfenbach: the thief so Klaus can study his ‘spark’ (the gift of genius that would have allowed the creation of the automaton had the thief possessed it) and Agatha to keep her ‘lover’ in line. Gilgamesh Wulfenbach doubts his father’s conclusions about the creation of the automaton, believing Agatha to be the real spark, and so Gil asks Agatha to be his lab assistant.  
 
It is during this time that Gil begins to realize how potentially powerful Agatha is, and simultaneously begins to fall in love with her. Agatha, however, is bent on escaping Castle Wulfenbach to find her parents; she eventually leaves the Castle during an emergency situation caused by one of the devices of The Other, the terrifying antagonist that threw Europa into chaos decades ago before being defeated by the Heterodyne Boys. 
  

The Death of Agatha

 After Agatha escaped Castle Wulfenbach, with some help from the people she had believed were her parents, Agatha fled through the Europa countryside, eventually landing with a traveling Heterodyne show (a sort of traveling circus based around the exploits of the Heterodyne Boys). Gilgamesh Wulfenbach tries to find her and bring her back to the Castle, once again bowing to the double loyalty of his father’s request to keep the girl contained and Gil’s own budding feelings for Agatha. Deeply afraid of Baron Wulfenbach, Agatha convinces the performers she is travelling with to help fake her death, including using the grave of one of the show’s fallen comrades to convince Gil that Agatha is truly dead.  
 
The feelings of loss that Gilgamesh goes through prompt an almost instant descent into a rage-fueled ‘madboy’ state (the intense emotional and creative state that those with the spark go into when they are doing their genius works), but it is a madboy rage carefully controlled. This is an important moment in Gil’s development, as it is the first time that the younger Wulfenbach displays in himself the terrifying power by which his father keeps an iron rule over Europa. Gil eventually accepts that Agatha is dead, and returns to Castle Wulfenbach to drown his grief in mad science. 
 

Interlude

After Agatha fakes her death, she continues travelling with the Heterodyne show, trying slowly to make her way towards Mechanicsburg, the ancestral home of the Heterodynes. During much of this period, Gil is practically unheard from (indeed, there is a one-off panel in the webcomic where Gil asks if he is even a major character anymore), although there is later evidence that he was working on bringing the constructs that raised and reared Agatha back to life. Baron Wulfenbach, wanting to assure himself that Agatha is well and truly dead, takes the bones that were showed to Gil and resurrects a body from them, discovering that the have been deceived. Gil learns that Agatha is still alive, and goes to find her in Mechanicsburg.