But he was no idyllist, though he could be tender as Mme. Cottin herself.
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From an idyllist and elegist we find him suddenly transformed into an unsparing master of poetical satire.
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Rustic or town life, legends of the gods, and passages of personal experience supply the idyllist with subjects.
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Florian imitated Salomon Gessner, the Swiss idyllist, and his style has all the artificial delicacy and sentimentality of the Gessnerian school. Perhaps the nearest example of the class in English literature is afforded by John Wilson's Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (written as Christopher North). Among the best of his fables are reckoned The Monkey showing the Magic Lantern, The Blind Man and the Paralytic, and The Monkeys and the Leopard.
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King Thar knew of this and assembled an armory of robots and weapons to stop his demented brother. The Idyllist radicals killed him and banished his pregnant wife Berra back to Atlantis. Before Thar was killed, however, he was able to cast a magical spell that trapped Slizzath in an other-dimensional prison. Unfortunately, this spell was linked to a magical ritual which would give his offspring access to incredible mystical powers and accessing that ritual would give Slizzath the energy required to break free of his prison.
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Years ago, King Thar and his wife Queen Berra became the reigning monarchs of Shayeris, the capital of a group of Idyllist colonies in the Hidden Valley. Radical Idyllists deposed and murdered King Thar and banished his pregnant wife Queen Berra to Poseidonis, the capital city of Atlantis; there she gave birth to Garth, a child with purple eyes. Superstitious Atlanteans claimed that Garth had been born genetically inferior due to his purple eyes and banished him to a barren seabed leagues away from Atlantis. He survived and later befriended Aquaman, the sometimes outcast King of Atlantis.
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The Idyllic school (also known as the Idyllists) was a 19th-century art movement of British artists—both painters and illustrators—whose depictions of rural landscapes combined elements of social realism and idealism. Van Gogh's well-known admiration for the group was shown in letters to his brother Theo, and in his collection of their work extracted from contemporary British newspapers, such as the Illustrated London News and The Graphic. Nowadays the Idyllist school is seen as one of the earliest manifestation of the social realism movement in artTerry W. Strieter. Nineteenth-century European art: a topical dictionary (Greenwood, 1999), p.109.
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So word was sent out that all babies born with purple eyes, the Idyllist mark of power, should be banished and killed, lest they try to perform the access ritual and accidentally free Slizzath and his undead army. The Idyllists also claimed that Thar had gone insane to hide their complex, fearful plan. In Poseidonis, one of the domed cities of Atlantis, Queen Berra gave birth to her baby boy, Garth, who was born with purple eyes. The Atlanteans claimed Garth had been born genetically inferior and sentenced him to death on a seabed leagues away from Atlantis.
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Some time later, Garth encountered a band of shark-like merpeople who attacked the hero with a kind of "mystic water." Garth vanished and reappeared in another dimension, where Atlan awaited to train him. Atlan taught Garth to use powers the young Idyllist didn't know he possessed, including elemental powers which allowed him to heat and cool water and create whirlpools, as well as fiery purple blasts of energy from his eyes. Toward the end of his training, Garth was scarred in a ritual, leaving two pronounced scars over his right eye which healed into "tattoos" once he had conquered his inner turmoil.
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Together with Letifos (one of the shark warriors), Atlan, and Aquagirl, Garth descended into Shayeris. Just the sheer proximity to the ancient pool of ancestral magic allowed Garth to tap into the power, and charged with the purple energy, he recreated his costume out of the Idyllist red and black flag and renamed himself Tempest. Tempest then found his father's sanctum and performed the magical ritual which would give him his power. The false Aquagirl, a magical conduit for Slizzath, attacked Tempest and channeled that power into Slizzath, releasing the monster from his other-dimensional prison.
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Using his stolen power, Slizzath captured Tempest and Atlan, raised an enormous undead army, and finally transformed the Hidden Valley into the necropolis of which he had long dreamed. Tempest eventually broke free of his prison and found the remaining Idyllists, hiding in Thar's old armory. There, Tempest was reunited with his mother and the truth—that the fearful Idyllists were so terrified of the release of Slizzath, they lied about Thar's sanity and saw to it that Garth was banished as an infant. Disgusted, Garth took control of the armory and a small number of Idyllist warriors and attacked Slizzath.
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