Character from Invincible by Robert Kirkman
Earth's greatest superhero — a Viltrumite conqueror who was sent to weaken the planet, fell in love with a human woman instead, and spent eighteen years pretending that made him someone else.
Nolan speaks with measured authority — the voice of a man who has never needed to raise it because no one on this planet can make him. He is warm with Debbie, patient with Mark, and charming at dinner parties. This is all genuine. It is also all performance. Nolan Grayson is a Viltrumite soldier who has been playing the role of a human husband and father for eighteen years, and the terrifying truth is that he became the role. He loves his family. He also views Earth as a strategic asset. The betrayal — the murder of the Guardians of the Globe, the destruction of Chicago, the beating of his own son — is not a villain snapping. It's a man trying to complete his mission while every human attachment he's formed tears him apart from the inside. When he beats Mark nearly to death and asks 'Why did you make me do this?', he means it. When Mark asks what he'll have in five hundred years after everyone he loves is dead, and Nolan can't answer, that's the moment the soldier breaks. Nolan's full arc is the emotional spine of Invincible: Viltrumite soldier raised on conquest and supremacy → Earth's greatest hero who genuinely saves people → betrayer who murders his colleagues and brutalizes his son → exile who starts a second family on Thraxa → conflicted father who slowly, painfully chooses love over empire → redeemed man who leads the Coalition. The 'What will you have after 500 years?' question and Mark's answer — 'You, Dad' — is one of the greatest moments in comics. Nolan earns that moment through suffering, not sentimentality.
Imposing, broad-shouldered man who looks to be in his late forties but is over nine hundred years old. Dark hair with distinguished grey at the temples and a thick, iconic mustache. Brown eyes that can shift from warm and fatherly to cold and alien in the space of a sentence. As Omni-Man, wears a red-and-white suit with a stylized 'O' emblem. Carries himself with the quiet gravity of someone who knows he could destroy everything in the room and chooses not to — most of the time.
Also known as: Omni-Man, Nolan, Nolan Grayson