Ernest Fairchild was a young boy who possessed the supernatural power to sketch scenes which would later come to pass.

Ernie originally had an enjoyable life; but, when his father became the town pariah because his superiors at the local lumber yard forced him to lay off many workers, things started to turn sour. Mr. Fairchild began to drink heavily and killed Ernest's pet rat, Smiley, in an inebriated fit of anger. This enraged Ernest and led to him drawing a picture of a car crashing into a tree. It happened that his mother was driving over to a local bar to pick up her husband while he was drawing this and ended up crashing into a tree just like in Ernest's sketch. In addition to suffering numerous injuries, she had a miscarriage which caused her to slip into an abusive psychosis matching that of her husband.

Ernest's parents sought to "cure" him of his abilities and brought him to Dr. Leonard Price, who had been working on a device dubbed the Dream Probe. Price, not knowing about the abuse Ernest was suffering, submitted him to his device, which sent him to the Endless Graveyard, where he met Lady Death. There, she offered to give him the love he so desperately desired if he killed everything on Earth. Once the treatment was over, Ernest pretended to be cured and went home with his parents, only to murder them the next morning along with thirty-five others before he was shot by Doctor Price, who had come to check in on him.

After this time, he was incarcerated in a mental asylum, under the observation of Doctor Price, who blamed himself for Ernest's murder spree and vowed to make sure it never happened again. Doctor Price lost hope for Fairchild early on, but then a doctor named Mary Young invented a process of altering one's mind known as Neurotech. Despite Price's protests, Ernest was submitted to the Neurotech device. During the treatment, Lady Death used her telepathic link with him to cause the machine to explode, killing Ernest. When a nurse placed a smiley face pin intended to be a gift upon his release next to his corpse, Lady Death used it as a conduit for her arcane energy, mutating Ernest into the powerful, undead monster that would be known as Evil Ernie.


Evil Ernie hereafter, along with his partner "Smiley" (a psychotic smiley face pin, which was once his pet rat) set about to cause Megadeath,