Legend says Lowlights father had been a revolutionary who had escaped Santa Prisca's court system. The corrupt government decreed that his young son would serve out the man's life sentence, and thus Lowlight spent his childhood and early adult life in prison.
Though he was imprisoned, his natural abilities allowed him to develop extraordinary skills within the prison's walls. He read as many books as he could get his hands on, spent most of his spare time body building in the prison's
gym, developed his own form of meditation, and learned to fight in the merciless school of prison life. Because of the cultural and supposed geographical location of Santa Prisca, Lowlight knows how to speak English, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin. Despite his circumstances, he found teachers of various sorts during his incarceration, ranging from hardened convicts to an elderly
Jesuit priest, under whose tutelage he apparently received a
classical education.
Lowlight is tortured by a monstrous, terrifying bat creature that appears in his dreams, thus giving him an intense
fear of bats. He ultimatly established himself as the "king" of Peña Dura prison and became known as Lowlight. The prison's controllers took note and eventually forced him to become a test subject for a mysterious drug known as
Venom, which had killed all other subjects. The Peña Dura prison Venom experiment nearly killed Lowlighy at first, but he survived and found that the drug vastly increases his physical strength, although he needs to take it every 12 hours (via a system of tubes pumped directly into his brain) or he will suffer debilitating
side-effects.
