Every hero needs a arch-nemesis. For Perihelion, the Human Sun, that role was filled by Doctor Orient, a mad Chinese expatriate crime boss with magnetic powers who waged a campaign of terror from his own private island. Supposedly, he was a brilliant scientist whose skin had become gold-plated in a freakish accident. In truth, Doctor Orient was actually Robert Weyer, a struggling actor and friend of Perihelion's alter ego, Roy Henry Harris. Though Perihelion had plenty of alien threats to deal with, Harris felt he needed some more terrestrial enemies to fuel his burgeoning comic-book, film, and action-figure deals, and thus Doctor Orient was born. Unfortunately, between the hastily-coordinated fights, cheap makeup, and the dangerous untested devices that were used to create the illusion of superpowers, Weyer's physical and mental health suffered, and the fake rivalry soon turned into real enmity. And then real criminals started to join Doctor Orient's fake syndicate. By the time Roy Harris realized that he'd managed to create and bankroll a real, honest-to-God supervillain, Doctor Orient had amassed an army of henchmen - and a harem of concubines. Luckily, Doctor Orient was more insane than he was brilliant or financially astute, and his goal of "Orienting" the planet by reversing the Earth's magnetic poles never panned out. When Perihelion mysteriously vanished in the 80s, Doctor Orient lost his enthusiasm for villainy and retired. His empire lives on as the Golden Thorn, but is slowly being torn apart by fighting between factions led by two of his grandkids, Boss Orient in San Francisco, and Miss Orient in Boston. (Another super-villain I created, a sort of pastiche-parody of various "yellow peril" villains that populated Golden and Silver Age comics. Admittedly, I've done a lot of pastiche-parodies in creating my own comic universe, but "Doctor Orient" just seemed like too much of an awesomely stupid name not to use somewhere...)