The Black Death

Who was this devil, the leader of the Black Wings Cult, who could kill from afar? The Avenger himself would receive the black orchid of death before he found out.

In the roaring heart of the crucible, steel is made. In the raging flame of personal tragedy, men are sometimes forged into something more than human.

It was so with Dick Benson. He had been a man. After the dread loss inflicted on him by an inhuman crime ring, he became a machine of vengeance dedicated to the extermination of all other crime rings.

He turned into the the person we know now: A figure of ice and steel, more pitiless than both; A mechanism of whipcord and flame; A symbol to crooks and killers; A terrible, almost impersonal force, masking chill genius and super normal power behind a face as white and dead as a mask from the grave. Only his pale eyes, like ice in a polar dawn, hint at the deadliness of the scourge the underworld heedlessly invoked against itself when crime's greed turned millionaire adventurer Richard Benson into The Avenger.