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Professor Irving Scarper was an expert geneticist and mad scientist from the Prime Universe.
Biography
In the First Horde
In the mid-20th century, Scarper was a member of the First Horde, a malevolent secret society which sought world domination via salvaged Atlantean technology. (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies) After his attempt at a chemical brainwashing fluid proved less effective than one of his colleagues's mechanical brainwashing machines, (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata) Scarper began researching mutagens capable of altering animals' biology to give them human intellects, as well as a variety of other qualities, hoping to give the Horde a cheap alternative to abducting and brainwashing people as a method to boost its numbers. (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies)
After he submitted the project, his overseers gave him a tight deadline, asking for a small-scale demonstration. He captured a dozen wild salamanders and tried to accelerate the mutations, creating humanoid Salamandyrs with a wild variety of unlikely allergies which, when triggered, would reverse the transformation and turn them back into normal-sized salamanders. Dismissing the project, he realised he couldn't complete the assignment alone, and bartered with his engineer colleague to get her to build him a robot assistant. With the robot's help, he captured two magpies, which, as “a great lover of cartoons and science-fiction novels”, he nicknamed Doctor Jeckle and Mr Heckle — and successfully mutated into the first two members of the future Mob of the Maroon Magpie.
With his project now greenlit, he spent several months working (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata) on the intelligent dromedaries who would later make up the Drove of the Database-Compiling Dromedaries, whom the First Horde used to maintain its archives, (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata, The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies) only pausing the project once, around Thanksgiving, to create the seasonally-appropriate Trio of the Talking Turkeys (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata) by mistake, having been asked by his superiors to procure turkeys for the scheduled Thanksgiving dinner on November 28th, 1959, only to forget until the final day. He attempted to clone three turkeys into existence from a feather but accidentally made them sentient, allowing them to escape from their cage, ambush him, and steal the key to the laboratory, thereafter escaping into the wilderness. (PROSE: The Trio of the Talking Turkeys)
After the Dromedaries project's completion, however, the robot, having grown weary of Scarper's lack of regard for him as a person, snuck out of his laboratory one night, also allowing the Salamandyrs to escape. Because of this blunder, (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata) Scarper was one of the people the Horde dismissed when budget cuts caused them to let go of much of their personnel, (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies, The Salamandyrs and the Automata) with their memories about the Horde itself being wiped. (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies)
Later activities
After being fired, Scarper continued his experiments on his own, creating many more sets of sentient, strangely-colored animals. Because he was still using the mutagen he'd developed with the Horde, the experiments gained the same compulsion to mimic the First Horde's modus operandi that was typical of the people the Horde had let go and faultily un-brainwashed, leading to many of the mutants creating their own Strangely-Colored Secret Societies alongside the ones formed by human ex-members of the Horde. Among the products of Scarper's experiments were the Gang of the Green Gorilla, the Mob of the Maroon Magpie, the Horde of Mad Elephants, the Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles, (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies) the Pack of the Patriotic Platypus, and even the Ennead of the Eigengrau Easter Eggs. (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies)