ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY:

     The Taskforce was founded in 1954 by Archie Goodwin, Dr. Anthony Dunn, Lex Luthor, Adrian Veidt and Tony Stark in cooperation with an elite unit within British Military Intelligence. The Taskforce was instituted to assemble the best minds available to (1) study the history, abilities and philosophy of the metahuman criminal known as The Patchwork Man, and (2) develop strategies for eliminating the threat he presents to the world. The membership of The Taskforce, know as “The Working Group” and administered by MI5 agent John Drake, is top secret.

     Since 1954, most of the original founders of The Taskforce have either been killed or rendered unreliable. Currently the only remaining member of the original planning council is Lex Luthor. He was joined on the advisory committee by Annette Rosenberg in January, 1956. Due to security concerns, Tony Stark was asked to vacate his seat on the council in February, 1956. His knowledge of vital organizational details was then erased from his mind by Dr. Rosenberg.

     The existence and findings of The Taskforce are to remain confidential until it has formulated a plan of action that has a reasonable chance of ending in the apprehension or termination of The Patchwork Man.

     Mindful of the fate of T.H.U.N.D.E.R., for the safety of both The Taskforce and the Justice League Of America, no member of the JLA is not to be informed of The Taskforce’s work until these conditions are met.
 

SUMMERY OF INVESTIGATION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF SUBJECT’S BACKGROUND:

     The Patchwork Man's real name is Gabriel Duval Warner.

     Little is known of him since the Patchwork Man has been quite effective in eliminating all records of his existence. No one knows where he was born or when, although he is thought to be an American who probably grew up somewhere in the northeast.

     Despite the Patchwork Man's efforts, several fragments of information about his early past still exist, however, including two photographs. Both taken in the mid-1920s, they show a tall, thin man with a long, thick, unruly beard of purest black, a chilling smile and reptilian eyes. Both photos originated near Yale, where there is strong circumstantial evidence that Warner studied Philosophy. (Interestingly enough, there is one fragmentary record that indicates that a "G. Warner" also studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1920s.)

     These photos are important, though, as someone looking *exactly* like Warner can be seen in another photo that appeared in the Prince, Ohio newspaper, the Plan Dealer, a few years later. The article attached to the picture concerned a new arrival to the small town, an artist named "Gunther Duvoe," who was opening a boutique art gallery on Main Street. The newspaper was dated September 13, 1931 and turned out to be the newspaper’s final issue, as a week later the supposedly quiet town of Prince was gone, destroyed in a huge riot where many of the citizens were killed and the rest were forced to flee and create new lives elsewhere under different identities.

     There was only one person found alive in the ruins of Prince; the town's minister. Although dying of a gunshot wound, he was still able to impart the gist of what had happened before he died.

     Apparently, Duvoe had arrived in town only a few weeks earlier, seen for the first time sitting on the church steps as services let out on Sunday morning. His strange, gangly, bearded appearance disturbed many, but he did nothing overtly hostile--indeed his manner was always unfailingly polite. He said he was an artist and was looking to bring the joy of art to the small, sleepy town. For the next few weeks he was seen everywhere in Prince; singing in church, eating at the restaurants, strolling down Main Street, always looking at the citizens with piercing eyes, always asking polite questions about his new home town, about its history, its inhabitants.

     And then, Duvoe opened his gallery.

     On Main Street, he had rented an empty store with a very large window front, and in that window he placed his paintings. Dozens of beautifully grafted canvases, each one exposing one of the town's hidden secrets, hidden sins. The rapes, the incest, the murders, the bigotry, the adulteries, the lies, the unspeakable desires and the players who acted on them, all present and accounted for--all the hypocrisy of the sleepy town and its inhabitants laid bare.

     The town did not survive the revelations.

     As the fires burned and retribution roared though the town, Duvoe calmly packed his suitcase. When the minister arrived, gun in hand, to demand why Duvoe had killed the town, Duvoe said only, "I'm an artist. Truth is my stock and trade."

     In the end, it was the minister who was shot, and as the artist left, he taunted the minister, saying that Duvoe wasn't his real name.

     A sobering postscript to this story is that from 1930 to 1935, nine other small towns throughout to Midwest suffered similar riots of violence, with the survivors always refusing to discuss the reasons behind them. It is obvious that long before Warner took on the persona of the Patchwork Man and moved on to metahumans, he was already busy "studying" people.

     It is unclear where Warner spent his time between 1935 and 1938, although it is suspected he traveled to Europe--there is a record of a "George Duvall" fitting Warner's general description and studying at Cambridge briefly in 1936. This theory is further bolstered by anecdotal reports of bouts of "madness" affecting small villages in France and England. Most of these incidents were understandably lost in the glare of the Second World War--which is probably how Warner wanted it.

     The next concrete track left behind by Warner is chilling and, once found, took a long time for the experts at T.H.U.N.D.E.R., and later the Taskforce, to unravel: After the liberation of Auschwitz, a minor entry in one daily report was found that read, in its entirety, “Dr. G. Warner has arrived to continue his work.”

     It is presumed that by the late 1930s, between his studies (both formal and personal), Gabriel Warner believed he had had come as far as was possible on his own. To continue his research on human nature properly would require specific types of resources available in only one place on earth.

     It is unclear exactly when Warner made contact with the Nazi party or traveled to Germany, but it is known that Warner met Hitler several times. The relationship between the two was destined to go well; Warner was nothing if not posed, charismatic and erudite--especially about Nietzsche--and the two were of like-minds about many things. But Warner was still a stranger, an American, and considerably arrogant in the presence of the Fuhrer. Thus, it was necessary that Warner do something to gain Hitler's trust.

     So he gave Hitler his Superman.

     Young Klaus Kurtz's amazing metahuman abilities had been discovered around puberty by his parents. But being somewhat "questionable" Germans, the Kurtzs had raised Klaus with several "unsound" ideas that proved unfortunately tenacious when he entered compulsory military service. What the Nazis considered a quaintly obsolete view of morality made him all but useless to the Nazis, although luckily his naiveté also included a thick pillar loyalty that meant he would not turn against his fatherland.

     Understanding the immense power that he possessed, many people (including Hitler himself) had tried to persuade Kurtz of the wonders of Nazi dogma, but even the Spear Of Destiny was unable to move his iron will.

     Having learned of Kurtz through his own sources, Warner made Hitler a novel proposal: "Let me talk with Kurtz. If I fail to bring him into the Third Reich, you can kill me."

     Entertained by Warner's brashness, Hitler agreed, although he told Albert Speer later that he was annoyed by the arrogant gleam in Warner's eye which made Hitler feel almost like it was *he* who was being evaluated (as these events were only known of by the inner circle of the Reich, it must be noted that Albert Speer’s cooperation was invaluable in reconstructing these pivotal incidents).

     Warner traveled to the luxurious (if heavily guarded and monitored) country house just outside of Berlin where the Nazis had placed Kurtz. Warner walked inside, introduced himself and just started talking. Complete records where made of his conversations with Kurtz, but they were destroyed shortly after Hitler listened to them. Thus, all that is know is that little over a month later, Kurtz--now referring to himself only as the Ubermann--flew to Berlin specifically so he could bow before Hitler.

     Two days later, Warner's formal studies recommenced at Auschwitz, with the full sanction of the German state.

     Under the conditions that existed at that hell on earth, it did not take long for Warner to formulate findings he deemed "satisfactory." Indeed, this success allowed him to move on. Evidently, Warner had, himself, been changed by his meeting with Klaus Kurtz.

     Warner had never met a metahuman before, let alone one of such archetypal purity. Witnesses remember that Warner stated that the Ubermann had crystallized his "understanding" of humanity and its place in the universe, his reading of Nietzsche and other philosophers, and his own belief in the tide of history.

     Warner now began studying the origins and science behind metahumans. He took part, with the support of the Nazi party, in many of Germany's most sensitive programs, accumulating vast sums of knowledge that he put towards his own research. A top-secret deathbed confession, given to the S.S. by a leading Nazi scientist and discovered years later by NoMan while working for T.H.U.N.D.E.R., hints that Warner had privately worked out the atomic problems that would later bedevil the Manhattan Project researchers, devised early analogs of particle and chaos theory--even building a basic computer to map them--and accomplished all of this from a dingy basement lab under the furnaces.

     Chaos theory and the complex interplay it suggested between order and disorder especially fascinated Warner, according to the dying scientist’s statement. Warner studied how chaotic entropy infected even the most ordered things and, even more intriguingly, how a primal, more perfect order could arise out of utter chaos. No doubt, these findings struck a profound, private cord within his diseased mind.

     But Warner's greatest breakthrough would not come from anything he found in Germany. Instead, it would be inspired by reports he read from America: The appearance of the hero Uncle Sam was the thing that provided Warner with the vital clues he needed.

     Warner told the Nazis he wanted to devise a technique to create analogs of Uncle Sam using the mass consciousnesses of the Axis nations. As Warner expected, the Nazis poured money and resources into the plan, assigning many of their best scientists. It was one of these scientists who would later confess all to S.S. investigators.

     In that confession, the scientist claimed that Warmer possessed a messianic zeal and charisma that rivaled Der Führer, himself. Indeed, many of his peers on the project soon became willing acolytes of Warner’s twisted philosophy. Warner spoke of that philosophy often.

     The confession reports Warner often saying that he considered himself profoundly lucky to live in a time that also produced such a rare society as Nazi Germany: The one society throughout the whole of human history which had come the closest to "true understanding"—although, he granted,  with certain “foolish, futile flourishes” that would ultimately doom it. But to be fair, it was some of those exact same "futile flourishes" that Warner admitted he had manipulated to gain the “understanding” he had achieved.

     And, on further reflection, it wasn't just luck that he and the Nazis arose together. Warner believed that it was simply evolution and a validation of his own theories.

     Another of his principal theories dealt with the collective unconscious. Warner had long suspected that the collective unconscious was at least partly responsible for the current emergence of metahumans. And Uncle Sam was, to him, the proof: An idea made flesh. That it was, in Warner’s eyes, a simplistic, childish idea based on only the most facile concepts and insight—“the ethos of essential American hypocrisy given form and transformed into a transcendental force”--was not the point.

     Warner knew there had to be reason why the 20th century had become a time of miracles, with the reemergence of magic, old Gods awaking after eons of silence and new Gods being born. It became obvious to Warner that the stresses of the 20th century--its increased pace and attendant glut of knowledge and uncertainty--had sent a tremor through the collective unconscious, and its awesome powers were being freshly unleashed to create beings who were better equipped to deal with this new modern world on its own terms.

     In short, order out of chaos.

     Humanity was obviously entering the next stage in its natural development: Mankind was in transition, creating its own replacement species. Indeed, humanity was very publicly acknowledging its own obsolescence: As angels ascended all over the world, mankind busied itself with two world wars; pointless, nihilistic orgies of self-destruction--not unlike a spoiled child smashing his toys before they could be taken away.

     Warner stated many times that he wanted to directly contact the collective unconscious. There, where the mundane and the ascendant met, many of his questions about humanity and the metahumans would finally be answered. Warner couldn't have cared less about spawning new beings out of the collective unconscious; he only hoped that between him and the labors of the best minds in Germany he might uncover a workable theory for contacting it. Despite this, the work still proved fruitful, and Warner’s team created the nightmarish Kristalnockt and the stalwart Donar. Using information gained through the process of generating these archetypal phantoms, Warner and his followers then succeeded in designing a psionic accelerator that would allow a human mind to directly contact the collective unconscious.

     With the plans in hand, Warner then promptly killed his fellow scientists--although one survived long enough to be interrogated by the S.S. and dictate that fateful deathbed confession. The S.S. hoped to capture Warner, but it was far too late. Warner had already left Germany, along with the money he had carefully embezzled from the military over the years. After a long, hopscotch trip through the war-torn world, he eventually arrived home in America.

     Upon returning, Warner (again operating under his “Duvall” alias) bought a small building in Los Angeles, across from Pinegold's Theatrical Supply Store. His actions during this period are slightly easier to track, indicating that he was moving with a greater haste than was his usual want. It is theorized that Warner knew that the war would be over soon and worried that Uncle Sam might disappear as soon as his reason for being no longer existed. After all, the reason Warner returned to America was because he wanted to touch its unconscious while it was busy generating Uncle Sam and, thus, while (as he once characterized it in Germany) “its surface silliness, misplaced morality, childish impulses and all the soothing lies it tells itself and believe are being funneled away, leaving behind and laying bare the unvarnished Truth at the heart of mankind.”

     Warner built the device in the space of a few months, despite the periodic interference in his hirelings' acquisition of components by a new super hero operating in the area called the Red Knight.

     It in unknown exactly when Warner completed the device, but it is widely suspected that the last thing Gabriel Warner saw before he activated it was the red glow of a neon sign peeking through his window. The sign belonged to Pinegold's Theatrical Supply Store.

     It was two masks. Comedy and Tragedy.

     What happened next remained a mystery for some time. The burned out psionic amplifier was kept as a souvenir by The Patchwork Man, and it was later seen by NoMan after he tracked The Patchwork Man back to his lair during T.H.U.N.D.E.R.’s ill-fated intensive investigation of him, but this fact revealed little.

     As all Taskforce attempts to recreate the psionic amplifier were dismal failures, no one knew exactly what Gabriel Warner experienced within the psychic undertow of a continent, if that is indeed what he contacted, or what precisely he became because of it.

     This changed when Annette Rosenberg regained her sanity. The information Dr. Rosenberg shared with The Taskforce through several lengthy (and often emotionally difficult) interviews is absolutely vital in understanding what Warner has become and provides pivotal insights into both his current strengths and weaknesses.

     According to Dr. Rosenberg, Warner’s experiment across the street from the theatrical supply company all those years ago was a success. Inside the collective unconscious, Gabriel Warner had found precisely what he was looking, and only through Warner’s own limitless hate was his intellect able to remain intact in the face of it.

     Warner had seen the elemental group mind and more importantly he had *felt* it. Millions of thoughts, desires, perceptions, instincts and ideas; all distinct, all individual, all pulling in a different direction. And yet, as disparate as they all were, each of them was still apart of a unified whole; tied together in one gigantic mosaic of experience stretching forward and backward through time. It was both utter chaos and utter order.

     And while each piece of it screamed in a different voice, all were united in the same tone of hopeless rage, fear and paranoia.

     For Warner had been correct: The "foolish," "naive," "mundane" elements he was so contemptuous of were indeed absent from the surface of the American collective unconscious and busy elsewhere inside the heart of Uncle Sam. Thus, he was pitched headfirst through what was left: A shifting cacophony of brutal madness. A tapestry of hatred and loathing.

     A ragged patchwork of darkness.

     This is what Annette Rosenberg had touched. This is what still lived inside the mind of the Patchwork Man: Pure, raw, primal evil--humanity’s blackest heart completely unrestrained. Nothing redeeming, just madness, vileness and death, extending in an unbroken line from the first human being to the last.

     Before Dr. Rosenberg recoiled from Warner’s mind so far into herself that she almost never came back, she glimpsed what came next; Gabriel Warner’s thoughts when he awoke two days after merging with the collective unconscious. What had already been an irredeemably broken psyche had now undergone a profound change for the worse. While Warner was convinced that his mind was intact, indeed clearer than it had ever been before, the depths of his new madness simply melted the fragile boundaries between insanity and pure evil. Dr. Rosenberg reports she could taste Warner’s missionary zeal to remake the world.

    Gazing out the window at the glowing neon sign of Comedy & Tragedy, Warner now considered himself neither human, nor metahuman, but connected to something that was greater than them both. No longer Gabriel Warner, but The Patchwork Man: A guide who would educate man and god, dragging the latter out of childhood and preparing both for their new roles in a new world.

     The Patchwork Man would have to go to the metahumans, of course. They were still stuck in their adolescent paradigm of dime-store heroics, but he would use the appropriate tools and relate to them in a manner that they were comfortable with. They would call him a "super villain" and he would use these conventions to test them, push them, weed out the weak, foster the strong, show them the flaws in their reasoning, the fallacies of their obsolete world-view. Demonstrate that human morality was nothing more than a thin tissue of lies that even humans ignored when convenient, and that the only reason for its existence was because human beings were such fragile, weak, ephemeral creatures to begin with.

     But metahumans were not fragile, weak or ephemeral. They didn't need pretty lies to protect them. Their magnificent physiologies and abilities already mocked pitiful human standards--now their minds just needed to be freed from the shackles of nostalgia. They were the Over Men and Women. They weren’t meant to obey laws, but to make them.

     The Patchwork Man would shock them out of their complacency, always vividly illustrating by contrast just how petty and weak the creatures the metahumans thought they were protecting really were, and how futile all such efforts would always be. He would kill normals by the hundreds, by the thousands, until the metahumans became properly desensitized to their deaths.

     But most of all, the Patchwork Man would show the metahumans fear and teach them the only way to banish it forever, And in doing so, he would give them the will to do what was required. He would toy with them and despite all their powers, all their beliefs and quaint convictions in human justice, he would slice their precious feelings of control away. They would be cast adrift, feeling manipulated and weak, and they would learn to hate it; eventually--inevitably--becoming willing to do anything in their power to prevent it from ever happening again.

     Their power would allow them to do many things. Under the new Gods' rule, everything would change.

     And the mind of man would be an anarchic patchwork no longer.
 

SUMMERY OF FINAL CONCLUSIONS:

     The Patchwork Man's powers emanate from a link he forged with the human collective unconscious and the realm beyond normal space/time that it is thought to intersect. While this does not grant him true telepathy, it does give him empathy and perception to an unnerving degree. Moreover, his connection to the collective unconscious allows him an awesome level of intuition verging on precognition (which accounts for his grace and monstrous ability to dodge in combat) and is also the cause of his unsettling trademark: The ever-changing mask. During his activities, he'll wear only one of the masks--it will just *appear* to observers to change. If the Patchwork Man is filmed, it shows that the mask never, itself, physically shifts. Indeed, different people looking at the mask at the same time may see it oppositely. If a crowd looks upon the Patchwork Man, some would see the mask frowning, others smiling.

     The Patchwork Man's connection to the collective unconscious operates on a psychic band that is undetectable to all known telepaths. Something in this tie affords the Patchwork Man an almost unbreakable defense against psionic attacks and scans--as was tragically demonstrated by Annette Rosenberg.

     After his original mental journey to the collective unconscious, the Patchwork Man has since perfected this technique. He now no longer needs any mechanical apparatus to assist him and can travel there instantly, both mentally and physically. From this interdimensional space, it is theorized that the Patchwork Man can then choose a re-entry point almost anywhere in the normal 3-D universe, making his teleportation power nearly limitless. Theoretically at least, he should be able to use the same process to travel anywhere in time as well, although the trip would probably require complex calculations. It is likely that he is aware of this possibility and is actively studying it. The magnitude of what he could unleash if he were to ever succeed in this cannot be overstated.

     Still, the Patchwork Man is, more or less, just that: A man—despite his many efforts to convince his foes that he is something more than that. Gabriel Warner can remove the uniform he has fashioned for himself and walk unnoticed in the streets, using a host of counterfeit identities in order to manage his considerable financial holdings. While he is now apparently immune to disease, and seems to have stopped aging, he can be hurt. The other "super powers" he had manifested over the years are merely the result of devices crafted by his own awesome intellect, possibly bolstered by flashes of "inspiration"--echoes from the future which are thought to periodically shimmer through the collective unconscious. His cane is a example of this; the few fragmentary scans that have been possible so far hint that it is a powerful, incredibly versatile weapon designed to deal with practically any threat, super powered or not.

    Warner’s need for impressive weapons like the cane and a carefully cultivated veneer of invincibility is understandable considering that there is now substantial evidence that using his natural abilities to their fullest extent expends a great deal of energy on his part, explaining why he is so loath to fully engage in direct physical conflict for any prolonged period of time. Also, as Warner wishes to his conserve his strength between his scrupulously choreographed appearances as the Patchwork Man, he is increasingly reliant on his complex web of financial illegality to fund his plots and further his goals, often through subtle economic and political manipulation. Even as impeccably as his financial network has been designed and hidden, it is clearly an important weakness, and continues to be rigorously investigated.

     More importantly, it is abundantly clear that Warner’s all-too-human mind has fallen into common, prideful traps. His twisted philosophy obviously has blind spots that can be exploited.

 ***REMAINDER OF REPORT CLASSIFED***