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Born and raised on the farm, his father is killed in an 'accident' (which was actually staged by Derek Steel--see below) and his mother kills herself. Campbell is sent to live with his maternal grandfather (he disowned Cam's mother when she married the highly unsuitable Campbell Callahan I rather than Derek Steel; the man is eighty eight if he's a day) only to discover that the rich old coot was once the original Steel Sentinel. He spends his teen years being trained by the old man and launches into a career as guardian of Steel City. 

A member of the founding family of Steel City and filthy bleeding rich, Derek Steel is an unscrupulous business man. Originally engaged to Campbell's mother, she left him at the altar for another man. Shortly after she married Cam's father and they had a son, she discovered that she didn't like being a farmer's wife as much as she thought she would. Pride kept her from divorcing him and going back to her father's waiting 'I told you so!'.

However, that didn't stop her from striking up an affair with Derek. He kept trying to convince her to divorce Campbell I, but she wouldn't do it because of her child. So, in an effort to get her back into his clutches, Derek set into motion a series of events that were meant to kill the eight year old boy and his father. His plan backfired. Not only did Campbell II survive, but his mother was driven so mad with guilt that she committed suicide.

A psychologist that loses his family in a tragedy, Jim Hollingsworth goes in for grief counseling at the insistence of his friend, Leonard McKay (see below). The counselor refers him to Stash Laboratories, which is conducting a new drug trial with revolutionary anti-depressants. They work wonderfully, pulling Jim out of his funk for awhile, but they eventually drop him violently.

When the doctors won't up his dosage anymore, Jim takes matters into his own hands and tweaks the formula. The result is an emotion enhancing toxin that enhances the feelings of the person that's been dosed with it to the point of insanity. It can turn mild affection into dangerous obsession; anxiety into terror. Dosing himself with it before he realizes what it will do drives him mad with grief. He vows vengeance on the company directly responsible for the death of his family--and succeeds in killing them--only to find out that the man behind it all along was his best friend Leonard.

Leonard had been having an affair with Jim's wife Annie throughout their marriage and that the child he's just avenged was not his own. With this revelation of ultimate betrayal, he attempts to kill Leonard and decides that all mankind is rotten and should be punished. Thus is born the Hollow, the terror of Steel. The first Hollow is eventually murdered by a one-time partner-in-crime, the Morrigan.

Holly Hawk/Aquarius

An employee of Stash Labs, Deidre is a single mother to a five year old boy and brilliant scientist. Her pet project is working on a formula that will work as a universal solvent in order to help with the planet's trash problem. It dissolves living matter on contact.

Unbeknownst to Deidre, however, is that Stash isn't interested in the formula for noble purposes. Instead, they intend to develop it into a biological weapon and sell it to the highest bidder. When the formula is done being perfected, the higher ups at Stash give the order for Deidre to be disposed of. She's locked in one of the labs and exposed to the toxin as a test run, but an unforeseen event occurs. Through a comedy of errors, the molecular structure of the formula binds itself to her cells.

As a result, she's got a perverted version of the Midas touch...everything she lays her hands on dies. She goes after the higher ups at Stash with her newfound powers, but when she's finally tracked down and fighting the police in Steel Square amidst a crowd of people, her son--who was being babysat by Holly Hawk that particular afternoon--runs through the throng of people, reaching for mommy. Her poisonous touch kills him. She's so broken up that she allows the police to take her in, only to have Holly break her out again when she goes rogue.

Born into poverty with a younger sibling, Julie, Lee witnesses her sister's death at the hands of their psychotic and abusive mother. Lee kills her mother out of self defense, having failed to save her sister and winds up in a facility for troubled youth as a result (she's just a kid--no prison time). While there, she picks up some skills from her newfound 'friends', including impressive skills with a crossbow.

Immediately after her release at the age of eighteen, she's mugged on the street. She chases the mugger down and finds that theft is quite a lucrative business. After this, she takes up petty theft and graduates to cat burglary. Her alias, the Talon, is a nod to the birdman of Alcatraz. During her stay at Juvie, before she made any friends, a wounded Peregrine Falcon took to her and she nursed it back to health. She's uncommonly fond of birds as a result.

A pathological liar in the interests of building himself up to his peers as a child, Albert Lumley grew up to be a successful museum curator in Steel. As a boy, his favorite lies to tell were those about the supernatural because the facts involved could never be verified. Once he grew up, the tendency to lie stayed with him, but he did a relatively good job of fighting it back.

When the Steel museum receives a donation of a large, century old mirror, Albert indulges his nostalgia and plays at calling forth Bloody Mary. Unbeknownst to him, this mirror is the prison for an otherworldly entity which has had many different names over the centuries. It was Jack the Ripper, Vlad the Impaler, Elizabeth Bathory, etc. etc. Upon being called forth, the demon leaps into Albert, becoming a parasitic, symbiotic presence. It can only take over at night, however, but Albert is slowly driven insane by it, since it's still a constant presence in every reflective surface.

A young and ambitious college student from a less than happy family, Christopher comes to Steel to prove that he can make something of himself. After years of being ostracized for everything from his looks to his intelligence, he's ripe to become a super villain with a push in the right direction. The Hollow takes Christopher under his wing and employs him as a research assistant under the guise of extra credit schoolwork (Hollow has managed to get into a university as a teacher at this point). When Hollow is murdered, Christopher takes up the mantle of his mentor and seeks vengeance. This Hollow will eventually be the Squishykins. 

Born out of wedlock to a brilliant mystery novel writer, Edwin is raised as the stepson of a Nobel prize winning physicist. His mother and stepfather have several children and daddy plays favorites in the extreme. It's the evil stepmother syndrome--he treats Edwin like garbage because he knows the boy is so much brighter than his own children. Edwin's interests lean more towards literature than math and sciences (Sherlock Holmes is his hero). Despite this, Edwin does everything in his power to gain approval from the only father figure he's ever known, but he always falls short.

As a teenager, Edwin decides to try and find his biological father in Steel City, only to find that his dear old dad--whom he thought was a business man--is actually a mobster. After his father rejects him harshly, Edwin is left alone in the big city. He can't go home (no job, no money) so he swings a job with Steel University's college paper, through forging his records as a student. In an entry level position, Edwin is responsible for the daily crossword puzzle and one afternoon, in the Uni cafeteria, Professor Hollingsworth pops over to give him the proverbial pat on the back for a job well done. Eddie basks in the praise of a father figure. Furthermore, Hollingsworth does a little wink-wink-nudge-nudge retort in the form of a clue of his own. Eddie figures it out and, as a nice little nod to the old guy, puts it and another corresponding clue into the next day's crossword.

It continues this way for a long time, Eddie and Jim getting to be like father/son, almost; until the day that the Hollow is murdered in cold blood and it's reported that Hollingsworth and Hollow were one and the same. Grief stricken and with a thirst for vengeance, Eddie throws himself together as a villain--The Clue (as a nod to the relationship he had with the only man he's ever considered to be a father-figure)--and heads out to kill the Morrigan for what she's done.

A brilliant computer engineer and inventor, Demetri Solohov is convinced that his knowledge is so vital to the continued evolution of mankind that he begins working on a means of storing his consciousness in an artificial body. Once the technique is perfected, he installs a chip in his brain and in that of his wife, which will transmit all the information that makes up who they are and transfer them to android bodies in the event of their deaths.

A freak car accident proves to be the means of the couple's demise, and while Demetri is successfully transmitted to the body he created, his wife's data is not. Instead, due to severe interference during transmission (EMTs trying to zap her back to life), her consciousness is floating around in pieces, which leapt into whatever supercomputers were nearby and accepting data.

Demetri's mission is to find all the pieces of his beloved (no matter whose computer she might be holed up in) and put her back together again. Piece by piece, she starts coming back together in stages (much like a child learning, year by year). The sad thing is, the final piece of data he collects--that which will make her whole--is corrupted and destroys everything like a computer virus eating a hard drive. All that work for nothing.

A seventy year old man during the Holocaust, Gabriel Friedman is the victim of Nazi experiments at Auschwitz which result in his apparent death. After burial, Gabriel rises once more, clawing his way out of his grave, he finds that he's become a young man of twenty once more. How this happened is a mystery, but the experiment that was meant to kill him gave him incredible regenerative powers.

Naming himself the Golem (a reference to Jewish folklore--a creature that was once inanimate made animate again), he finds that he can't be killed under any circumstances. Though to begin with he is a good man, the power eventually goes to his head. Gabriel has his own antagonist in the immortal Nazi, Hans (see below).

A young Nazi guard of Norwegian descent at Auschwitz, Hans Delbruck was singled out to be subjected to the same experiment which granted Gabriel Hammerquist immortality to see if the results could be duplicated to make an immortal Nazi. Hans did not volunteer for this and views himself as an abomination after he rises from death with regenerative powers.

To this end, in an ironic twist, Hans vows to track down and eliminate Gabriel in some fashion and then kill himself, because creatures such as they should not be allowed to exist contrary to nature. Over the decades following WWII, the original roles of Gabriel and Hans are reversed. Gabriel becomes megalomaniacal and evil, while Hans finds little ways to redeem himself after coming to grips with the horrific things he was a part of during the Holocaust.

A seemingly ordinary little boy, Simon Gillory discovers he has the miraculous power of suggestion at a birthday party during a game of Simon Says. When he gives verbal commands, those around him are powerless to resist and must obey. This power gets him far in life and he uses it cautiously so as not to attract attention to it, until he finds, and subsequently falls in love with, the girl of his dreams.

This causes him to become careless with his power and he raises the ire of one of Steel's more powerful mob bosses. Since Simon's commands must be given verbally to be effective, hit men are sent to find him and cut out his tongue, rendering his power null. However, with this terribly unfair slight (honestly, tell one mob boss' daughter to go take a flying leap and everyone's upset!) he becomes a true villain, developing his skills in mind control through other means.