Evil Ernie
Evil Ernie, an undead psychotic killer, is a supervillain created by writer Brian Pulido and artist Steven Hughes in 1991 and originally published by Eternity Comics. The imprint shifted hands in 1993 to Chaos! Comics and then Devil's Due Publishing in 2005. Evil Ernie is currently published by Dynamite Entertainment, which purchased the Chaos! Comics imprint.
Ernest Fairchild
Ernest Fairchild is the root or core of Evil Ernie. Ernest Fairchild was a young boy who possessed the supernatural power to sketch scenes which would later come to pass, for instance he drew himself and his family together with a little brother and several months later his mom became pregnant with their second son. Ernie originally had an enjoyable life, but when his father became the town pariah because his superiors at the local lumber yard forced him to lay off many workers, things started to turn sour. Mr. Fairchild began to drink heavily and killed Ernest's pet rat, Smiley, in an inebriated fit of anger. This enraged Ernest and led to him drawing a picture of a car crashing into a tree. It happened that his mother was driving over to a local bar to pick up her husband while he was drawing this and ended up crashing into a tree just like in Ernest's sketch. In addition to suffering numerous injuries, she had a miscarriage which caused her to slip into an abusive psychosis matching that of her husband.As his parents abused him, Ernest's powers developed further to where he could hear the thoughts of those around him and he discovered that many of his neighbors knew that he was being battered by his parents, but did nothing to help him. Either they had lost their jobs at the lumber yard and were too bitter to care or they still had their jobs, but were too afraid of losing them if they confronted his father.
Ernest's parents sought to "cure" him of his abilities and brought him to Dr. Leonard Price, who had been working on a device dubbed the Dream Probe. Price, not knowing about the abuse Ernest was suffering, submitted him to his device, which sent him to the Endless Graveyard, where he met Lady Death. There, she offered to give him the love he so desperately desired if he killed everything on Earth. Once the treatment was over, Ernest pretended to be cured and went home with his parents, only to murder them the next morning along with thirty-five others before he was shot by Doctor Price, who had come to check in on him.
After this time he was incarcerated in a mental asylum, under the observation of Doctor Price, who blamed himself for Ernest's murder spree and vowed to make sure it never happened again. Doctor Price lost hope for Fairchild early on, but then a doctor named Mary Young invented a process of altering one's mind known as Neurotech. Despite Price's protests, Ernest was submitted to the Neurotech device. During the treatment, Lady Death used her telepathic link with him to cause the machine to explode, killing Ernest. When a nurse placed a smiley face pin intended to be a gift upon his release next to his corpse, Lady Death used it as a conduit for her arcane energy, mutating Ernest into the powerful, undead monster that would be known as Evil Ernie.
"Evil" Ernie Fairchild
Evil Ernie hereafter, along with his partner "Smiley" set about to cause "Megadeath", which involved launching all of the USA's nuclear weapons against the rest of the world, so that every other country would launch their own nuclear warheads. Ernie starts to accomplish this by creating an army of zombies known as "Dead Onez". Various adventures ensue, including a trip back to his past to confront his parents about their ill treatment of him, and a trip to hell to rebuke Pagan for having Lady Death cast out into the void by Satan.The culmination of Ernie's efforts amount to him causing Megadeath by causing the rest of the world to fire on itself with nuclear warheads from various countries. Evil Ernie ends his life in a duel with Dr. Price, and in the last moment before the missiles hit, Ernie overpowers Price and mutates him into a Dead One, exclaiming: "Do you see it now?", to which Price replies "I see it, it's beau-". The final scene is one of a mushroom cloud behind the survivors, in the form of Ernie's face and maniacal grin.
Hack/Slash and Santa Fe
After his death in his own world, Ernie would be reborn in the universe of Tim Seeley's Hack/Slash. Discovering that Lady Death does not exist in this world, a depressed Ernie takes up residence in the Fairchild Sawmill in New Jersey and begins killing strippers and mutating them into Dead Onez. Ernie would eventually encounter slasher-slayer Cassie Hack and her partner Vlad, in the ensuing battle read Cassie's mind and fell in love with her, believing them to be two sides of the same coin. After Cassie is saved from him by Vlad, Ernie, wanting to impress Cassie, decides to purge the world of killers and breaks into the Clearview Mental Institution, planning to start his mission there. During his killing spree, Ernie is confronted by Cassie and Vlad and, while fighting the latter, is attacked by a recently arrived police officer. Killing the officer, Ernie discovers Cassie had accidentally been shot and, after she dies, Ernie sacrifices himself to revive her, causing him to die and be reborn elsewhere.After the Hack/Slash crossover, the renewed license gained new life in the 4-issue mini-series Evil Ernie in Santa Fe. Written by Alan Grant and penciled by Tommy Castillo, it featured Ernie in Santa Fe contemplating matters of fate after killing Norman Lowell, a lawyer who led Ernie against a demonic cult performing rituals with connections to FastWay, a fast food franchise, while planning to sacrifice a child to demon Zabudel who granted wealth to their leader. All the while Ernie is chased by Dr. Price's daughter Layna who wants revenge partnered with detective Rig Dannon who's willing to catch Ernie for the million-dollar reward.
Smiley
Throughout the series, Ernie's companion is Smiley, a wise-cracking smiley face button usually attached to the lapel of his jacket. Smiley serves as the conduit for the arcane energy that gives Ernie his powers, as well as the comic relief of the series. Smiley claims to be Ernie's super-ego and is sometimes at odds with his friend's decisions, such as when Ernie resurrected his parents in order to confront them about their past. It is believed that Smiley is the revived form of Ernest's pet rat whom his father killed in a rage, but for the most part however, his personality is more easy-going and comical than Ernie's.Chaos! Dynamite revamp
Smiley resumes the role of Ernest Fairchild, revived as Evil Ernie's lecherously volatile companion,and now taking on a much more active role in all the mayhem caused by his better half. While still supplying and charging his host with arcane energy supplied to him, Smiley himself is a powerful possessing entity who can freely move about and physically assail anyone through his more opposable mandibles. He can even overshadow people by latching onto them and manipulate their actions like a puppeteer working his abilities both on the living and the dead. Unlike in the previous continuity however Smiley was once a struggling family restaurant owner-turned successful business tycoon named Richard Smiley, who was secretly working for the devil and representative Chaos Lord named Lucifer, who condemned his soul to be forever bound to his symbolism of power, Richard's smiley-faced buttons, when the former became a threat to the king of hell's seat of power.
Powers and abilities
As Ernest Fairchild, he had the ability to sketch drawings of the future. This was first demonstrated when he drew a picture of a brand-new washing machine being delivered shortly before one was delivered to his parents as a prize in a raffle they had not even entered. It seems that his ability could change the future since he once drew a picture of a future younger brother walking with him, when he heard his mother tell his father she was pregnant with a boy, only to prevent his younger brother from being born when he drew his mother's car crashing into a tree. Later on, he gained the ability to listen to the thoughts of others. As Evil Ernie, he was extremely strong and practically unstoppable, thanks to the arcane energy of Lady Death powering him. He could revive anyone he killed or were killed by his minions as loyal zombie followers in his army of undead. When resurrected in Washington D.C., he became even more powerful. He could now resurrect the corpses of anyone nearby, whether he had killed them or not, and could manipulate arcane energy into powerful blasts to destroy his enemies, though he rarely used this ability since he preferred to be more "hands on" when it came to killing. If Ernest were to ever die he can be resurrected through another person when his Smiley button jabs them on his pin, but only once upon the host individual's death as Evil can only control the dead not the living.He retained his telepathic abilities only to a small degree as they now worked specifically on the dead and few things related to the dead, which allowed him to speak to and see Lady Death after murdering someone or using astral projection to visit Hell or the Endless Graveyard while he slept. There is room for speculation on this however, as Purgatori once delved into his mind to find answers to a means of defeating his patron saint and lover, Lady Death. She found the nightmarish images within his psyche were not figments of his imagining but were in fact materialized ghouls which threatened to devour her implicating he had some kind of power to will whatever he wished into reality. Later still when Evil was separated from a still-living Ernest Fairchild as a Jungian archetype fission effect after having discovered the truth from the reanimated remains of his parents while returning home, Ernie regained his ability to read the minds of the living when resuscitated from the painful separation of his better half, openly peering into the minds of three living youths who resurrected him in order to learn their life stories. The source of Evil Ernie's power comes from the arcane energy channeled into him by Lady Death through his button, Smiley. If Ernie is separated from Smiley for too long, he begins to lose his power becoming much weaker and over time he will, eventually, revert to a corpse and die again leaving Smiley an inanimate badge as well.
In the revamp of the Evil mythos, Ernest's powers remain much the same but a tad more refined. Still boasting the strength, toughness, recuperation, necromancy and arcane energy manipulation abilities retained as previous issues only using them to a much more mystical effect than just as blunt instruments; if he wishes Ernie can resume his initial living form before he was executed and can physically substitute removed limbs to replace any extremities he may have lost. He is much more liberal in the destructive/concussive effects of his energies using it for hand blasts, releasing it in AoE explosions, etc. On the physical side he can withhold it to increase his physical melee as energy enhanced strikes and can also remotely control any parts of his body to act on his behalf, he also has the innate psychic ability to peer into a person's moral alignment just as soon as he would look at them. In his eyes people appear to Ernie as differently as individual snowflakes; the corrupt appearing hellish and demonic with the particular sins they committed tattooed to their face or forehead, while the innocent retain a human appearance brandishing a smiley button like he does with a ray of light looming over them. It is also suggested that he is, on top of being human, a being of both angelic and demonic descent by another chaos lord: Mistress Hel.