Mr Ten Per Cent

Gallery

Real Name

Howard Quartz

Current Alias

Mr Ten Per Cent

Affiliation

Ro-Busters

Relatives

Dick Quartz (brother)

Universe

2000AD

Characteristics

Hair

Blonde

Unusual Features

Only Quartz's brain is human, the rest of him is robotic

Status

Occupation

Billionaire industrialist

Origin

Creators

Pat Mills, Kevin O'Neill

First appearance

Star-Lord #1

HistoryEdit

Howard Quartz was the CEO of Quartz Industries, who amongst their many other activities designed robots for the US military through its subsidiary Ro-Busters Inc. Quartz designed the original Mark I War Droids, forerunners to the ABC Warriors, and later took a personal interest in the activities of his Ro-Busters Disaster Squad, composed of second hand robots he'd bought cheap (including Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein, with whom Quartz had an antagonistic relationship). When Ro-Busters became unprofitable, Quartz decided to destroy the robots as part of an insurance scam, but a dozen of them, forewarned by Quartz's secretary and P.A Miss Marilyn, escaped to the free robot world of Mekka, led by Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein.

NotesEdit

Quartz was originally a normal human, the brother of US Vice President Dick Quartz, but an attack by a rogue robot apparently left his body so badly damaged that his brain had to be deposited in a robotic form to survive. He was thereafter referred to as 'Mr Ten Per Cent', because only 10% of him was human.

• Quartz's citizenship is unclear. He was originally depicted as British and habitually carried an umbrella everywhere, but his brother is plainly an American citizen. Possibly Howard's parents emigrated to the States before Dick was born. Quartz's personal timeline is similarly problematic, as he has been seen to have been (in his original human form) a contemporary of Bill Savage in 2009, but at least one Ro-Busters story makes reference to Mega City One from the Judge Dredd series, which did not exist until the mid 21st Century. These incidents can probably be reconciled, but an ABC Warriors story from the 1990s describes the Volgan War (for which the Warriors were designed) as occurring in 2083, more than a decade after the Atomic Wars of Dredd's timeline!
  

TriviaEdit

Pat Mills has said that the human version of Howard Quartz was based on Richard Branson.

LinksEdit

• Appearances of Howard Quartz
• Character Gallery: Howard Quartz
• Images that feature Howard Quartz
• Fan-Art Gallery: Howard Quartz
• Howard Quartz quotations

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