Chisman is the sole survivor of the explosion at the Animal pizzeria in Earth-212: a man turned into nearly a hundred kilos of dairy bacteria by the ambrosia drug, who also, as twelve identical brothers in 1870s New York, founded the pizzeria that made him.
| Type | Character |
| Chronicle | MYM (Never 9-11) |
| Spelling variants | Chismas, Chisna, Chismal |
| Relatives | Verónica, the Emerald Lady (sister) |
| Spanish entry | Chisman (Never 9-11) |
Origin
He was the Italian of the Animal house, in his thirties, dish towel on his shoulder, preparing pastries for his sister’s quinceañera; among the trays was a canister of ambrosia (see Ambrosia Delivery). The explosion killed everyone else. He woke a week later in a laboratory, no longer wholly a man: “the bacteria that give life to dairy make up my essence.” He also died socially, dead to the world. His origin — a neighborhood oven, not a lineage, planet or military lab — fit into Earth-212’s cathedral of superheroes.
Powers and abilities
- Bullets pass through him as through cheese.
- He stretches his hands thirty meters, a hundred and fifty when needed.
- He can become a very dense sphere and roll over what stands in his way.
- In darkness his bacteria perform a kind of photosynthesis and glow.
History
He stopped hiding and declared in public: “I am Chisman. I am a monster. I am a victim of this horrible transformation.” During the Great Blackout, a seven-story mozzarella tower grew from his body and glowed like a lighthouse; six spores lit the only lit square in Queens, and people ran toward it. He gave away free cheese that day, and six hundred pizzas in another century.
In gaslight New York, across the Brooklyn Bridge, before the shop that will become the Animal pizzeria, stand the twelve Chismen: identical brothers in pinstriped suits giving out free pizza against the cold, Tammany-style. When the pizza runs out they touch elbows and become one person again. He founded the pizzeria himself; the canister exploded in the shop he had opened a hundred and sixty years before dying in it.
He went down into the tower of Mars Inc. heedless of gunfire, found the rift and paid the tube a mass equal to his own to open it. He dragged the fallen out of the tunnel with his elastic hands when the shadows impaled them. He chased the black stone through the conduit to Battery Park as a sphere and narrowly failed: his ball of cheese entered the rocket behind the stone, and his bacteria are on the Moon, in the crater dust. The world believes what it must of his sister Verónica; he knows she is alive.
See also
- Verónica, the Emerald Lady — his sister, rescued as a temporal anomaly; takes up the fallen guardian’s mantle
- New York of 1870 — where the twelve hand out pizza and found the Animal house
- Lethal Chamber — whose inauguration he witnesses and in whose basilica he fights
- Black Stone of Ambrosia
- The Great Blackout of 2035