Ambrose Chase is one of the characters from
Warren Ellis and
John Cassaday's comic book series,
Planetary.
Ambrose Chase was one of the men that made up Planetary's main group of
conspiracy "
archaeologists." He was originally just an operative of
Planetary until he was brought before
The Fourth Man in 1994. That's when he became the new third man, and gave in his karate clothes in for a nice
white suit. At the time,
Jakita Wagner was already part of the main team(Chapter Nine,
Planet Fiction).
Ambrose Chase is black male with his dark black hair cut very short. He normally wears a long white coat, a white button-up shirt, white trousers, and white boots. He has the ability to produce a
reality distortion field. He was brought into
Planetary when he was very young, and showed his ability to someone there(presumably
The Fourth Man). In previous encounters with such a power, normally weaker, it was called a
selective physics distortion field. From Planetary's files, it was also discovered that Chase's father was one of the few survivors of
City Zero, a highly experimental government science facility(Chapter Nine,
Planet Fiction).
Stopping time was within the capabilities of his distortion field. One of the common tricks that he used was pulling guns out of his distortion field(Chapter Nine,
Planet Fiction).
Ambrose Chase is known to have a daughter, but who this daughter is or its mother is unknown(Chapter Nine,
Planet Fiction).
In 1995, Ambrose Chase was on the mission where
Elijah Snow was caught by
The Four. Ambrose was actually able to apprehend
Kim Süskind, who was acting as a scout. However,
The Four were able to capture them anyway(Chapter Fourteen,
Zero Point).
Ambrose Chase died in 1997, on a mission, killed by one of
Randall Dowling's men. The mission failed with the object of concern escaping and with no knowledge of what the object was or where it went(Chapter Nine,
Planet Fiction).
His death was partially
The Drummer's fault, for Chase restrained from using his
reality distortion field in order to not interrupt
The Drummer's feed from information lines(Chapter Nine,
Planet Fiction).
Chase's death was strange in it's own way, at his death his
reality distortion field seemed to come up and make his corpse disappear. Now there could be many theories on what
Warren Ellis was trying to do with this. I'll list two of my own:
- Could Ambrose Chase be a time traveler? With his abilities, he could have twisted time to his own means to bring him to this time. This concurs with his body disappearing, which in this case would be back to his original time.
- Could Ambrose Chase be from another dimension? A reasonable idea, he wasn't actually meant to exsist in this world so when his reality distortion field didn't exsist anymore, he disappeared.
- Isn't Ambrose Chase a creation of Warren Ellis? This one is my favorite though least likely. Chase is a creation in a fictional story, so since he isn't distorting reality when he dies, he disappears as the figment of someone's imagination that he is. Considering the plot behind the story that he appears in, this is a very reasonable theory.
(Chapter Nine,
Planet Fiction)
"I swear, you're all the damn same. Bet you joined the army so's you could have someone to remember your first name for you, huh?"
-Ambrose Chase in Chapter Nine, Planet Fiction