Professor Ivo

Professor Ivo is a fictional mad scientist in the DC universe. He is the creator of the androids Amazo, Kid Amazo and Tomorrow Woman. Most of his battles were with the Justice League. Professor Ivo grew up with a crippling fear of death. The thought of his life ending was so great that he even avoided his own mother's funeral. For Ivo, avoiding death became his life's obsession. Ivo took to studying cybernetics and soon became an employee of the criminal organization Locus, where he gained new insights through the dissection of one of the Appellaxians. He used this knowledge to build Amazo and attack the JLA in the hope of using their powers to imbue himself with immortality. Years later, Ivo discovered an immortality potion and drank it, but found that the immortality brought with it horrible disfigurement that made his skin scaly. He blamed this on the JLA and drifted further into insanity as he attacked the League on numerous occasions. Ivo built duplicates of himself to keep him company. These duplicates were repulsed by the insanity of their creator and locked him away, then carried out his dreams of revenge by attacking the new Justice Leaguers (Vibe, Gypsy, Steel and Vixen) and killing Vibe and Steel. A year later, Ivo built a private island populated by robots. There, Ivo created "Men In Black" nicknamed Amazoids who had similar powers to Amazo. The Amazoids could steal one superpower each; they succeeded in robbing the powers of Red Star, Rebis, Valor, Power Girl, Starman and Geo-Force. However, this time Ivo's goal was not revenge, but suicide. Ivo realized that the disfigurement was not the side effect; it was the immortality. His body was becoming more and more infected, more and more immobile, until he would be nothing but a pain-filled living statue. Fearing this even more than death, he ordered the Amazoids to turn their full power on him. It didn't work. The JLA'er Ice, sympathizing with him, unknowingly invoked the power of Guy Gardner's Green Lantern ring to cure him. Professor Ivo's disfiguring experience was not enough to keep him from the temptation of the immortality serum and he once again brought about his own deformity by drinking it. As both Ice and the Green Lantern rings were gone, Ivo apparently consigned himself to his own horrible fate and was later imprisoned. Most recently, Professor Ivo has returned in Brad Meltzer's Justice League of America sans disfigurement. However, in a fight with Black Canary, Arsenal and Green Lantern, he claims to still retain his immortality. In Justice League of America #4, it is revealed that he is not the mastermind of the events, but rather working for an intelligent Solomon Grundy. It appears Grundy is using Ivo to build him an Amazo body to live forever.

In other media

Professor Ivo (listed on the computer screen at one point as Arthur Ivo) appeared in the Justice League episode "Tabula Rasa" as AMAZO's creator. Ivo worked for Lexcorp but was fired when Mercy Graves took over the company. When Lex Luthor went to see Ivo, he was already dead (contrary to the comics, where he was immortal) but Luthor found AMAZO instead.