Arthur Finlay

Photon

Arthur Finlay

## Biography

### Early Life

Arthur Finlay was born on June 12th, 1970 in Lerwick, Scotland to a family of entrepreneurs. When Arthur was very young, the Finlay family struck it rich in oil with help from the Black Gold Project. The money was enough to put Arthur in the finest schools. From a young age, Arthur was extraordinarily gifted and excelled in school, especially in physics, which became his passion. When he was seventeen years old, he elected to spend a semester abroad in Boston at aa local preparatory school.

While at this school, Arthur studied under a polish scientist named Jakub Lis, who introduced him to the idea of photokinesis - the manipulation of light. While working with Lis, Arthur developed a fascination with it, and began using simple trickery to deceive his classmates and his host family. Jakub’s true obsession was using photokinesis to create light energy constructs, and Arthur proved to be the tool he would need to complete it.

Arthur was staying late after school one night, doing test runs of a gauntlet to create light energy, when their entire city was obliterated by Adrian Veidt’s bombs. Arthur survived the attack, as he was wearing the gauntlet, and at the last second was able to create an energy shield around himself, surviving the incident with minor burns on his hands and chest. When he finally brought the shield down, he discovered Jakub had been incinerated.

In the coming days, Arthur made the return voyage back to his home and moved back in with his parents. He discovered that witnessing such a horrific attack had two effects on him. The first was crippling social anxiety and selective mutism. The second was that the strange energy from Veidt’s bombs had activated his metagene, now letting him manipulate light at will instead of needing gauntlets.

Arthur kept this a secret, as the public had a resurgence in their hatred of metas, and Arthur was able to keep his abilities at bay. After presenting his and Jakub’s creation to a scholarship committee, he was on the fastrack to college, and found himself in the reconstructed Opal City attending MIT, Jakub’s alma mater.

In college, he started to come out of his shell a little. Fellow engineering student Helen Jacoby took a liking to Arthur and the two started dating. She noticed his odd behavior and eventually discovered his secret meta powers, but Helen was not bothered by this. Arthur completed his undergraduate early and flew through his masters and doctorates. Hours after presenting his thesis- a fully functional version of his photokinetic gauntlets - Arthur asked Helen to marry him.

Shortly after their wedding, the young couple moved to Coast City, where Arthur was hired to be one of the head engineers of STAR Labs. He ended up selling the patent for his gauntlets to STAR Labs and continued his research there. While working in Coast City, he developed eyes for one of the labs’ PR workers, Sue Dearbon.

His workplace crush turned into obsession, as he found himself retreating from Helen and following Sue home and creeping around her office throughout the day. However, he soon learned that she was dating Ralph Dibny, and got engaged within his first few years at the lab and was planning to transfer to their Central City branch. Arthur put in a transfer request but was denied. Meanwhile, his wife gave birth to two children, Thomas and Emma, during this time.

After Sue left and got married, Arthur began retreating to his former self and became borderline agoraphobic. One day, Helen left with the kids and never came back, only sending him divorce paperwork in the mail. Arthur then put in his two weeks at STAR Labs and drove to Central City.

In Central City, he tracked down Sue and her new husband and broke into their house while they were sleeping. He temporarily blinded Ralph in order to get to Sue, where he attempted to rape her. It was just then when Ralph revealed his metahuman powers, to both Sue and Arthur’s surprise.

### Photon

Arthur was arrested, but his metahuman abilities landed him in Belle Reve Penitentiary, where Amanda Waller recruited him to Task Force X on a mission to steal technology from a HIVE warehouse. While on the mission, Damien Dahrk took psychic control of Arthur and turned him on the group and disabled his explosive arm-band, forcing the Squad to retreat.

He felt indebted to HIVE, and so he became one of their contracted goons. He adopted the ops moniker of Photon. He was contracted out to the first iteration of the Legion of Doom. After successfully escaping that mission, Queen Bee hand-picked him to train a young metahuman strike force that had failed to fight the Titans, and so Photon ended up commanding the second iteration of the Fearsome Five.

Photon became a well-known frequent enemy of the Titans, always slippery enough to get away, and becoming a lackey to do HIVE’s bidding. He also ran afoul of Checkmate during Dick Grayson’s time undercover there. He once tried to kill Ralph Dibny, in a plot that ended up giving Sue her own powers, backfiring on him big time. He was also recruited to be part of Kaldur's personal strike team Onslaught during his time undercover in NEMO.

He was one of the villains assembled by the Joker after Mxyzptlk brought him back to life, and Joker dialed up Arthur’s powers to the extreme, giving him pyrokinetic abilities in addition to his photokinesis. He was involved in a lengthy battle with the Outsiders. Miss. Martian was able to eventually render him unconscious until Joker’s powers were taken away.

Since this incident, Arthur has seemed different to those who knew him. While he was always introverted, he was intelligent when the time came, and it appears his intelligence has decreased, which has led some to suspect M’gann of doing a little extra meddling with his brain- possibly at Sue or Ralph’s request, but that has not been confirmed.

## Notes

* In the comics, Arthur Light was the supervillain Doctor Light, who trained under Jacob Finlay. I thought the name Arthur Light was stupid and wanted there to be one Doctor Light (Kimiyo), so Arthur became Arthur Finlay, and his mentor became Jakub Lis.
* M'gann possibly psychically altering him is a reference to when Zatanna performed a psychic lobotomy on Light in *Identity Crisis*.
* His obsession with Sue Dibny is a nod to *Identity Crisis*, where it was revealed that he raped her.
* His look with his Mxyzptlk powers is inspired by his look in Grant Morrison's JLA book in the late 90s.