By 1939, Dr. Axel Brass convinced his arch-enemy Hark to join forces to make the world a better place for everyone. Together, they assembled a group of the best adventurers and heroes the world had to offer. They fought monsters and horrors, but soon realized that humanity was on a path toward its own destruction.

Inspired in the idea of making a better world, they began to build the world's first supercomputer, and probably still the world's most powerful. The computer they built was able to comprehend the universe as it really was - a 196,833-dimensional "snowflake" that described billions upon billions of universes. With this computer, they hoped to find a solution to world war, with the least loss of life and resulting in the best possible society. The computer would create and destroy universes in the attempt to find the answer.

They activated the computer in January of 1945, hoping to end the war with the snowflake. A group of seven metahumans emerged from the snowflake and attacked Brass and his colleagues, with the intent that they would destroy Brass' Earth to save their own. All the metahumans were killed, but so were all of Brass' teammates. Only he survived, crippled and wounded. He couldn't turn off the computer, so he stayed in the room with the snowflake, just in case anything else should come through.