Vought-American
Vought American Consolidated, often simply referred to as Vought, is an American megacorporation involved in numerous industries, including pharmaceuticals, military contracting, entertainment and food service. Vought has its origins in the 1930’s, with Frederick Vought. Vought, a German scientist and businessman, had been fascinated by the research of Abraham Erskine into creating a super-soldier possessing abilities beyond that of a normal man. Vought and Erskine were for a time collaborators, but the rise of Adenoid Hynkel’s Nazi regime caused the two to break from each other as Erskine, who was of Jewish descent and a close friend to other Jewish scientists such as Jacob Barnhardt, rejected the new regime while Vought sough to gain support for his research from them. The Nazis were quick to embrace Vought, with Johann Schmidt in particular eagerly financing his research, which was originally carried out primarily on dissidents within Nazi Germany. Vought did use his prototype serum on his wife Klara Risinger, who became the first successful trial. This success was heralded in the Reich as a triumph for Aryan science, but Risinger’s gender precluded her from becoming the prototype for Vought’s Compound V. As a result, Vought would use the serum on Albrecht Krieger, creating the more propaganda-ready Captain Nazi.
As the Second World War began, Vought was called upon to create more samples of Compound-V to be put to use in the war effort. These calls picked up especially as Britain foiled German invasion attempts and the Soviet deployment of the first Red Guardian to combat Captain Nazi’s attacks on the Eastern Front. However, Vought had begun to reconsider his support for Nazi Germany–not primarily due to moral objections, but rather pragmatic ones. Vought’s close friend Josef Merkwurdgliebe, another Nazi researcher working on superscientific research, had been examining the logistics of the Nazi regime and concluded that the limits of fascist ideology would prevent true victory. Merkwurdgliebe convinced Vought that the best way to secure their legacies would be to defect. Merkwurdgliebe made contact with the American operatives Clarence Potter and Marie Fischer, who arranged for Merkwurdgliebe, Vought and Risinger to be taken to American custody and granted amnesty in return for handing over key research materials and helping create the hero Soldier Boy. Vought was somewhat dismayed to learn of the death of Erskine, but nonetheless offered details of Compound-V to the Americans. He additionally gave the US vital intelligence about the development of Trioxin, which enabled them to capture samples of it before Hydra could unleash it upon Europe in the waning days of the war. In the postwar era, both Vought and Merkwurdgliebe were offered jobs in the US government. Merkwurdgliebe accepted, but Vought declined, instead sensing a potential alternative.
Vought would found Vought American Consolidated in 1947, after securing heavy investments from Andrew Ryan and Howard Roark. Vought had appealed to the two arch-Galtists by framing Compound-V as a method for the great men of the world to further solidify their superiority for the right price. As Vought scaled up production of Compound-V, he additionally started a number of other ventures to gain greater profit as well as manage the fact that even as Compound-V began empowering some, many other heroes with origins utterly unconnected to Vought were making their debut worldwide. Namely, Vought began to make forays into general pharmaceutical products as a method of building capital. Most Vought products, such as Vitameatavegamin, were not particularly reputable, but were quite marketable. Some of Vought’s pharmaceutical output was actually quite cutting edge for the time, which caused some competition. In particular, Vought-American in the 1960’s became a major rival of Umbrella Pharmaceuticals as the two companies competed for government contracts to help research into Trioxin. Umbrella Pharmaceuticals ultimately secured the requisite contracts and eventually purchased all Trioxin samples from US custody in the 1980’s. Vought, meanwhile, continued to lean on the creation of superheroes. By the 1960’s, there were dozens of Vought-affiliated superheroes which included Soldier Boy, Crimson Countess, Liberty (really Risinger) and many more. However, while they were more willing to do the bidding of the US government against suspected subterfuge and in wars overseas, the Vought heroes were vastly eclipsed by the likes of the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and the Justice League, especially owing to their tendencies to be far less ethical than these heroes. For instance, the astronaut team the Four whom Vought had intended to be their counterpart to the non-Vought affiliated Fantastic Four made contact with a parallel world dominated by superhumans and geared most of their activity over the next few decades to make it easier for that world to invade ours, which Vought permitted to occur.
Vought would solve this problem in an unusual way. In 1968, Vought would make the acquaintance of Eddie Mannix, a now-elderly veteran of Hollywood. Mannix had worked as a studio ‘fixer’ for Capitol Pictures and before that had been a promoter for reclusive animator Joey Drew. Mannix was responsible for suggesting to Vought how he could successfully grow his company: branching out into entertainment. Most superheroes not affiliated with Vought did not have official merchandise or media centering on them, but bootleg figurines, shirts and comics centering on them did quite well, the latter nearing the popularity of pirate comics despite lower production quality. Mannix recommended Vought take a page from the Hollywood playbook and, if his heroes couldn’t triumph simply on the strength of their powers, they should win the crowd via media. Vought took Mannix’s advice to heart and hired director Roger De Bris to direct a film based on the life of Soldier Boy. The film–simply titled Omaha–was not an accurate depiction of Soldier Boy’s life, but on release in 1972, it became a major hit and Soldier Boy overnight became a household name. Similar media was produced about other Vought-afflicted supers and this paved the way for them to become celebrities. This newfound celebrity was not unheard of–after all, the Fantastic Four, Superman and Captain America all likewise were household names. Vought was simply unique in prioritizing the celebrity aspect over the heroic aspect.
This increase in media attention and popularity greatly boosted Vought even as other superheroes criticized the company. Despite Vought’s own death in 1983, Vought by the 1980’s was a juggernaut. It made movies with budgets rivaling the likes of the McBane franchise. Voughtland opened in 1982 to widespread attention and within the first five years eclipsed Thrillville, Pacific Playland and Walley World. And the number of heroes Vought created only continued to grow. They were aided by the passage of time-while many superheroes were still active, they were getting older. The slow-aging Soldier Boy was far more photogenic than Captain America, who despite the advantage of having been frozen for nearly 20 years was visibly middle aged. Further, superheroes were beginning to exit the scene altogether. Vought began promoting Black Noir far more after the paralysis of Bruce Wayne, Jr., the third Batman, for instance and began preparing the brand of their most famous superhero Homelander following Superman’s disappearance after a battle against Mxyzptlk (it later transpired Superman had begun to reside within the Sun to help keep it alive).. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Vought contracted with a number of governments and the SCP Foundation to play a supporting role in creating a veneer of normalcy, using the Four to hide the existence of a great deal of extraordinary phenomenon until their death in a conflict with the opposite-minded group known as Planetary.
In the 1990’s, Vought’s supers really amplified in notability–and notoriety. Vought supers participated in the Eugenics Wars against Augment-aligned mutants and other supers. While their material contributions were limited, slick PR helped make them out to be heroes of the conflict. A similar phenomenon was present during the 1996 Harvester and Martian invasions. Vought supers in the former case especially often fared poorly against the invaders, leading to several of them being killed in action and those who survived tending to be those who had avoided outright confrontation. The most notable of these were the Seven Guns, a team of 7 superheroes consciously chosen by Vought to echo the earlier Justice League and who served as Vought’s flagship team for the bulk of the next decade. Other Vought superheroes who debuted in this time included G-Girl, Hancock, Public Spirit and Captain Hammer. Many of these individuals tended towards personal behavior ranging from scandalous to outright harmful, but Vought’s public relations machine and ample efforts at engineering heroic deeds for these heroes helped keep their names in headlines and their faces on lunchboxes, even if new heroes like the Sailor Senshi, the Power Rangers, Captain Vyom, Captain Future and the Powerpuff Girls managed to make a dent in the public consciousness as well. Some have suggested that Vyom’s death in 1999 may have been a hit carried out by a Vought super though this remains unconfirmed.
It was in the 2000’s that Vought’s status as a megacorporation was well and truly secured. The Shiawise Supreme Court decision handed down by Chief Justice Thomas Brankin greatly increased the opportunities for Vought to hone Compound-V and continue to spread it by granting them increased immunity from oversight or regulation. The real clincher, though, was the passage of the Superhero Registration Act in 2006, which was subsequently signed into law by President John Blutarsky. The Act called for the registration of all superheroes with the government, the elimination of secret identities and the potential drafting of superheroes to fight in the War in Terror. Vought quickly noticed an opportunity and registered all of their superheroes with the government almost immediately, earning them praise from Secretary of Defense Tony Stark. This meant that in the ensuing conflict between the pro-registration and anti-registration factions, Vought swung its weight almost wholly behind the pro-registration side. Vought CEO Stan Edgar offered a $20 million bounty for any information allowing for the apprehension of Captain America. Moreover, with the increasing hostility towards the latter, Vought had Homelander officially make his debut, with the superhero quickly earning the favor of the pro-registration right-wing.
Vought did, however, have to reckon with a PR nightmare when John Horus of the Seven Guns personally murdered President Blutarsky and the whole Blutarsky cabinet out of the disgust with the Act, along with various wars in the Middle East pursued by the Blutarsky administration in 2007. Vought responded to the incident by immediately throwing the Seven Guns as a whole under the bus, giving all information needed to combat and apprehend the team to the Department of Homeland Security’s Counter-Terrorism Unit. Vought would replace the Seven Guns as their flagship superteam with a new team called the Seven, headed by Homelander and consisting of 6 other heroes. Vought also opened the Godolkin University in this time, creating a Vought-operated counterpart to institutions in the vein of the Xavier Institute (which was reeling from the death of its founder Charles Xavier and the aftermath of the Scarlet Witch carrying out M-Day, which had decimated the mutant population), Sky High and Whateley Academy. Vought had to reckon with the fallout from this decision, however. While they, unlike their old rivals Umbrella avoided being shut down by the federal government, were forced to withdraw their supers from supporting the military’s efforts overseas. Still, Vought managed to bounce back from this, hiring Sterling Cooper’s top PR team to help maintain their public reputation. Meanwhile, Vought amplified their lobbying on Capitol Hill, hiring seasoned lobbying Maggie Morris to shield the company from investigations. By the 2010’s, it was almost like the whole incident had never happened and Vought supes continued to earn public adoration amidst great personal misconduct.
Vought’s reputation did gradually take some hits over the span of this era, however, Vought was widely mocked for a series of claimed ‘battles’ between the Seven and the Furons, owing to several of them being clearly staged using CGI effects (which Vought admitted to, but claimed were ‘recreations’ of actual fights despite denials from XCOM). Vought was also criticized for Homelander’s comments following the deaths of the Guardians of the Globe at the hands of Omni-Man, where he all but explicitly stated that they had died because they were ‘too weak.’ Homelander would later issue a public apology for these comments. Several members of the Vought team the Superhomeys–notably Sistah Spooky, Major Havoc and Heavy Artillery–were killed in a bid by Vought to take out the superpowered alien known as Brightburn and the team failed in the mission to eliminate this threat. Vought collectively did not respond at all to the Galactic Federation’s conquest of Earth in 2015 or a resurrected Victor von Doom’s brief conquest of the planet in 2019. Longtime board member Donald Davenport publicly left the company in 2012, with rumors that he absconded with some teenage superheroes originally slated to attend Godolkin University circulating after he disappeared from the public eye. A number of scandals involving the Seven have come out in the last few years, culminating in Homelander’s raid on the White House in 2022 which killed President Victoria Neuman. This coup is rumored to have been carried out as a part of a scheme by the Sons of Jacob to install the defeated 2020 presidential candidate David Jefferson Adams in the White House, though this has not been confirmed despite Adams’ return to power and apparent friendly relations between him and CEO of Vought Ashley Barrett.