Biography of Taurus Bulba

This page documents the full biography of Taurus Bulba.

Biography

A crime boss in prison

Taurus Bulba, a St. Canard crime boss, led a gang that also consisted of Hammerhead Hannigan, Hoof and Mouth, his personal aide Clovis, and his pet vulture Tantalus. Despite being incarcerated with an absurdly long sentence, Bulba continued to operate from within prison, in particular setting his sights on the gravity-manipulating Waddlemeyer Ramrod device. After his henchmen made the mistake of killing Professor Waddlemeyer before they could extract the operating password for the machine from him, Bulba ordered the trio to kidnap his orphaned granddaughter Gosalyn. However, their attempt was interfered with by Darkwing Duck, who hoped to establish himself as a serious crimefighter by taking down Bulba.

The Ram Rod incident

Taurus Bulba during his airship battle with Darkwing Duck and Launchpad McQuack's Thunderquack (in Darkly Dawns The Duck).

Darkwing's meddling prompted Bulba to escape from prison, having secretly built an airship into the building containing his cell. He then issued a challenge to Darkwing, knowing the egotistical duck would be unable to resist. However, Bulba not only succeeded in having Darkwing arrested for the criminal actions of Bulba's own men, but also in locating Darkwing's hideout and abducting Gosalyn. Fortunately, Darkwing-aided by new sidekick Launchpad McQuack and his Thunderquack plane-was able to escape and reach Bulba's airship. In the ensuing confrontation, Darkwing managed to overload the ramrod, which Bulba had been using to lift buildings into the air in order to rob them, and Bulba and his airship were caught in the ensuing explosion. According to another account, the explosion didn't damage the Airship per se, instead prompting a vengeful Bulba to order Clovis to activate the self-destruct mechanism in an effort to take Darkwing down with him.

Survival

According to one account, Bulba escaped the explosion more-or-less unscathed and became head of F.O.W.L.. In this position, he hired twelve Darkwing Duck impostors and sent them to commit crimes throughout St. Canard so as to discredit his old nemesis. The real Darkwing and S.H.U.S.H. managed to foil Bulba, but the villain escaped their clutches by diving into Audubon Bay.

As the Steerminator

Taurus Bulba as “the Steerminator” (as seen in Steerminator).

Another account stated that Bulba was thought killed in the explosion, but was in reality only badly injured. He was eventually pulled from the wreckage, barely alive.

Either way, F.O.W.L. managed to rescue and rebuild Bulba as a cyborg, hoping that he would join (or rejoin) them out of gratitude. Bulba, however, declined the offer, destroying F.O.W.L.'s laboratory before leaving to enact his revenge upon Darkwing and his family for killing him and foiling his plans. However, the heroes managed to defeat him a second time, and he fled into the sky, vowing his revenge.

Robotic revenge

Bulba returns (in The Duck Knight Returns).

Before Bulba could enact this revenge, however, F.O.W.L. managed to locate and destroy him. Unbeknownst to them, he survived as a cybernetic consciousness, which he managed to relocate into a blender. The blender later came into the possession of Gyro Gearloose, who modified it into his latest invention, the "Blendito", giving it the ability to speak. This allowed Bulba to make his presence known to the inventor, who was rather surprised, as he hadn't programmed the "Blendito" to speak with a Russian accent. Realizing that he could travel through and take control of all of Gyro's inventions, Bulba reformed them into a new, fully robotic body for himself, resembling that of the Steerminator. However, he found that he was unable to take control of one invention, the Gizmosuit, as it could only be activated when the password, "Blatherskite", was spoken. Taking control of Little Helper, Bulba threatened to shut down the bulb-headed robot if Gyro didn't tell him the password, a demand to which the inventor quickly relented. However, because the suit did not recognize Bulba as a person anymore, it would not activate, causing an angered Bulba to steal the suit and flee. Gyro, realizing the disaster which this could potentially cause, changed the suit's password remotely.

Arriving back in his home city of St. Canard, Bulba founded the Quackwerks Corporation, which he used to quickly buy up or take over every business and organization in town, taking over the city. Replacing the police with his own squadron of Crimebots, Bulba arrested the citizens of the city for even the smallest of misdemeanors, bringing them to his headquarters where he forced them to repeat every word in the English language in the presence of the Gizmosuit, hoping to discover the new password.

Darkwing, realizing that there was something suspicious about Quackwerks, set out to investigate with Gosalyn and Launchpad, running into his old enemies, the Fearsome Five. The two groups fought briefly, before being knocked out and captured by Bulba, who brought them to his headquarters, hoping to finally enact his revenge on Darkwing. Before he could enact anything, Megavolt managed to cause a power surge which freed Bulba's prisoners, who teamed up against Bulba and managed to knock him out, causing Gosalyn to exclaim "keen gear!". This, as it turned out, was the Gizmosuit's new password, and it activated, bursting out of its containment unit and fitting itself onto Gosalyn. Moments later, Bulba transferred his cybernetic consciousness to a powerful robot, attacking once again. Darkwing managed to knock Bulba's new robot-body out of the window, causing himself to fall as well.

Darkwing was, fortunately, caught by Launchpad (piloting the Thunderquack), but Bulba was not so lucky, and plummeted into the ground below. He was not destroyed, however, just severely damaged, and, in one last bid for revenge, took control of the nanotechnology installed in all Quackwerks-owned buildings and attempted to use them to destroy the city. Before he could complete this final act, however, Gosalyn, wearing the Gizmoduck suit, arrived on the scene, and used the suit's powers to connect to the robot and shut down Bulba's cybernetic consciousness, seemingly for good this time.

Legacy

At some point after Bulba's conversion into a robot, he created a biopic about himself, titled Cyber Like Me, to tell the story of how he returned to life and why he created Quackwerks. By 2016, a man had obtained a tape of it, which he advertised for sale for $35 at the St. Canard Comic Expo-Fest-o-Rama convention.