Time Trapper
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The Time Trapper is a fictional character and supervillain who appears in stories published by DC Comics. The Time Trapper's main foe is the Legion of Super-Heroes. The Time Trapper first appeared in Adventure Comics #318 (March 1964), though he was first mentioned in the previous issue.
The Time Trapper's main powers consist of vast control over time itself; accordingly, his traditional lair has been located at the end of time.
[edit] Character biography
The Time Trapper was originally a strange robed warlord from the extremely distant future, well past the time of the Legion of Super-Heroes. In his early appearances, the Time Trapper created a strange "Iron Curtain of Time" that prevented the Legion from going into their future. He also apparently commanded a vast number of slaves and had a female sidekick named Glorith, who he eventually murdered.
Later, it was revealed that the Time Trapper was a member of the fascist but well intentioned race of Controllers. The Time Trapper was defeated by the Legion and it was believed that his menace ended when the villain Darkseid removed almost all of his power during the Great Darkness Saga.
Later retcons made the Time Trapper not a Controller at all but of a wildly changing series of origins that some comic fans have speculated is the result of time being fluid. These origins include him being the Legionnaire Cosmic Boy, Glorith, Lori Morning, and the living embodiment of Entropy in the Universe.
One of the more noteworthy stories involving the Time Trapper came after the reality-altering miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths and the 1986 revamp of Superman's origin, which removed Superboy from Superman and Legion continuities. Given the problems this posed for Legion continuity, it was revealed in Action Comics #591 (August 1987) that the Time Trapper created a pocket universe from a slice of time in the distant past, and altered events in this reality so that an Earth resembling the pre-Crisis one was formed, complete with its own Superboy. The Time Trapper then further manipulated the timestream so that whenever the Legion would travel into the past to visit the 20th century (or Superboy visited the Legion's future), the two would be directed into each other's worlds. Ironically, this "pocket universe" lacked a Kryptonian Supergirl, and thus wasn't a perfect answer to patching Legion continuity. (This "pocket universe" was later revisited and made the point of origin for a non-Kryptonian Supergirl, also known as Matrix.)
Sometime after this, the Time Trapper was "murdered" by the Legion members Duo Damsel, Brainiac 5, and Mon-El, who formed a conspiracy to destroy him against Legion regulations. This caused a chain reaction throughout time and resulted in the sorcerer Mordru dominating the universe for a time. It also lead to some continuity conflicts and derided stories as the writers continually tried to correct their mistakes.
The Time Trapper seemed to have been killed by Parallax during the 1994 storyline Zero Hour, but was apparently reconstructed with the universe at the climax of that story. Keeping a promise he had made to the pre-Zero Hour version of Cosmic Boy, he did not intervene to ensure the post-Zero Hour origin of the Legion, but after this origin occurred, he briefly bedeviled the new universe's version of the Legion, with memories of all his prior incarnations intact. The identity of this incarnation of the Time Trapper is unknown, but he has long purple hair.
