Graviton (comics)
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Graviton (Franklin Hall) is fictional character, an elemental supervillain appearing in the Marvel Comics Universe, and an enemy of The Avengers and the arch-nemesis of the Thunderbolts.
Graviton is an extremely powerful villain with the superhuman ability to control gravity in the area around him. He can levitate objects, surround himself with an impenetrable forcefield, etc. He is also completely insane. He has tried to conquer the world and has come into conflict with a large number of superheroes, who were usually able to defeat him by exploiting his weak psyche.
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[edit] Fictional character biography
Franklin Hall was born in Banff, Alberta, Canada. He was once a brilliant scientist who was experimenting with physics in a private research facility in the Canadian Rockies.
In the midst of an experiment, Hall attempted to align a set of matrices and induce teleportation, but only succeeded in overloading the power-handling capacity of his equipment, causing an explosion that intermingled his molecules with sub-nuclear graviton particles that were being generated in a nearby series of companion particle accelerators. Recovering from the accident, Hall discovered that he could mentally control gravity. At first he tried to hide his vast powers, believing he would be shunned as a freak of nature, but the urge to use them was too great to resist, and he soon used his abilities openly.
To his pleasure, people began to fear him, and he started to take whatever and whomever he desired. Eventually Hall, a man of great ambition, designed a costume, and began to call himself Graviton, taking over the research facility and forbidding all communications with the outside world. Realising the danger, one of Graviton's former colleagues, a young man named Joe, managed to send a distress signal to the Avengers in New York. Furious, Graviton used his power to lift the facility several thousands of feet into the sky before threatening to 'make an example' of Joe by increasing the weight of his body mass, thus crushing his skeleton. Joe was saved only when his wife, Judy, the unwilling object of Graviton's affections, used her influence with Graviton to make him stop the torture. During his attempts to court her, the Avengers tried to rescue the facility. Despite their best efforts, the team quickly discovered that they were no match for the master of gravity, who was full of confidence in his vast powers and wielded them with great skill.
With the Avengers as his prisoners, Graviton brought Research City to a halt over New York itself, were he engaged in a titanic battle with Iron Man and The Mighty Thor that shook the flying island to its very foundations. In the fury of battle, Graviton was tricked into thinking that Judy had committed suicide, and angrily unleashed sufficient power to cause the matter of the sky-borne laboratory to collapse inwardly around him. As a result, the island was shaped into a colossal stone sphere that was thrown into the Hudson River by the Avengers. It took some time for Hall to separate himself from the crushed facility.
Disoriented, the Graviton attempted to find a female companion by taking Bloomingdales hostage and levitating it above the skyscrapers. His request was simple: whatever woman who became his bride would receive the department store as a wedding present. This endeavour failed, and he was exiled to interstellar space by the thunder god Thor, but returned to Earth when a spatial anomaly occurred nearby. Setting up a base of operations in Los Angeles, Graviton attempted to unite all of its criminal mobs under his leadership, but was thwarted in the attempt by the West Coast Avengers. He was placed in police custody, under heavy sedation to prevent him from using his power.
Hall returned to battle the Avengers in revenge, but during the battle the Avenger Vision merged his intangible android body with Hall's, then increased his density, causing Hall to collapse in on itself. Hall was thus shunted from reality, finding himself in another dimension. The natives of the dimension, which Hall named the P'Tah, hailed his arrival as a god's, and Hall used this to his advantage, although their limited intelligence soon left him frustrated. Using his scientific genius, he constructed a beacon so that someone might find and rescue him.
After many months, Hall's signal was noticed by the villain Techno, who at the time was working with the evil Baron Zemo. At Zemo's direction, Techno reconfigured a robotic version of The Hulk, and Zemo set the robot Hulk against his former lackeys, now the hero team Thunderbolts. The battle allowed the robot to siphon and store enough energy to breach the dimensional barriers and release Hall. Not caring about the particulars of his rescue, Hall lashed out at the Thunderbolts and the Great Lakes Avengers (then, the Lightning Rods) who were on the scene. He was about to kill them all when the Thunderbolt Moonstone convinced him that his power and ambition meant nothing if he had no goals. Losing face, Hall left the scene to think about this fact.
Graviton soon returned, commanding a large mass of floating land and declaring himself ruler of a new nation, Sky Island. He recruited his subjects, dubbed Sky Raiders, and a harem in return for granting them the power to defy gravity, and they began to loot and pillage San Francisco, California. He was again opposed by the Thunderbolts with their ally, the mutant hero Archangel, and he summarily defeated them. They were freed by the Thunderbolt Jolt, who borrowed technology derived from X-51 (aka Machine Man) whose flight capabilities were powered by "cancelling out the gravity equation." Now unaffected by Hall's power, the Thunderbolts escaped and continued to battle, ultimately cancelling Hall's access to his power. When Hall regained his power, gravitational force rushed inward, collapsing inward on himself. He was shunted to another dimension once again.
There, Hall was rescued by a mysterious stranger, a representative of the P'tah known as M'Reel, and both came to Earth. M'Reel encouraged Hall to begin discovering his true calling, and Hall recruited Moonstone for help, still spurred by her accusations of thinking too small. Moonstone helped Hall to further refine his godlike power and fuelled his ego, thinking that by so doing, she would be better able to manipulate him for her own ends. Instead, Hall embarked on an ambitious plan to capture every major world city, hold the world's heroes captive, and literally reshape the planet in his own image.
Also bent on revenge, Hall confronted the headquarters of the Thunderbolts, although the team at this time had disbanded and been replaced by the Redeemers. The Redeemers opposed Hall and were killed, except for the Fixer, who joined Moonstone alongside Hall, and Citizen V, who recruited the remaining Thunderbolts to confront Hall. Through a mixture of surprise tactics and negotiation, all of the Thunderbolts managed to fight Hall to a standstill, and Hall sustained fatal injuries as a result. At this time, Fixer discovered M'Reel was surreptitiously using Hall's ambient energies, funnelling them in order to open a portal to the P'Tah's dimension. M'Reel succeeded in opening the portal, revealing this to be his motives in helping Hall. The Thunderbolts fought back the P'Tah invasion, but it took Hall's dying effort to cause the portal to implode, sending himself and the P'Tah back. At the same time, Hall attempted to save the Thunderbolts from a similar fate, using his powers to send them to the planet known as Counter-Earth.
Graviton was last seen, apparently alive and well, escaping the Raft (a metahuman prison). he fought and bested the New Avengers, but was defeated and almost killed by Iron Man after Hall severely injured Spider-Man.
[edit] Powers and abilities
Hall is able to manipulate gravitons for various uses, including the projection of concussive blasts, formation of force fields and levitation, and has also proven capable of generating gravitational fields in various objects, making them attract any nearby matter (or individuals) not heavy enough or physically strong enough to resist.
Graviton can surround any object or person including himself with gravitons and anti-gravitons (particles similar to gravitons but with opposite charge and spin), thus increasing or decreasing the Earth's pull of gravity upon it. By decreasing the pull of gravity beneath him, he can fly at any speed or height at which he can still breathe. By increasing the pull of gravity beneath his opponents, he can pin them to the ground, having made them too heavy to move, or cause sufficient gravitational stress to impair the normal functioning of the human cardiovascular system. He can also cause an inanimate object (such as a 1-foot diameter rock) to radiate enough gravitons to give it its own gravitational field, able to attract nearby matter and energy.
By rapidly projecting gravitons in a cohesive beam, he can generate a force blast with a maximum concussive force equivalent to the primary shockwave of an explosion of 20,000 pounds of TNT. He can also create a gravitational force field around him capable of protecting him from any concussive force up to and including a small nuclear weapon.
Graviton can exert his gravitational control over a maximum distance of 2.36 miles from his body. Thus, the maximum volume of matter he could influence at once is 6.88 cubic miles. He once exercised this control by lifting into the air an inverted conic frustum-shaped land mass whose uppermost area was 4 miles across, and causing it to fly as though it were a dirigible. He can also erect a gravitational force-field of similar proportions. Graviton can perform as many as four separate tasks simultaneously—he has not only lifted a 4 mile wide land mass as high as cloud level, but he has also surrounded himself with a force-field, gravitically held most of the Avengers against a slab of rock, and projected force-bolts at Thor all at the same time. Graviton can use his power at maximum capacity for up to eight hours before mental fatigue significantly impairs his performance, and considerably longer (up to eighteen hours) if he conserves his energy during that time.
Hall's single most ambitious display of power was when he held almost every Marvel hero in stasis and began using his powers to try reshaping the Earth in his image.
Aside from his powers to manipulate gravity, Hall has a PhD in Physics and is intellectually brilliant. Graviton is potentially one of the most powerful Marvel characters. His greatest limitation is that he is emotionally and mentally very disturbed.
[edit] Bibliography
- Avengers (vol. 1) #158-159, 1977
- West Coast Avengers (vol. 1) #02-04, 1984
- Secret Wars II (vol. 1) #07, 1986
- West Coast Avengers (vol. 2) #12-13, 1986
- Fantastic Four (vol. 1) #322, 1989
- Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 1) #326, 1989
- Web of Spider-Man (vol. 1) #64-65, 1990
- Avengers Unplugged (vol. 1) #2, 1995
- Thunderbolts (vol. 1) #17, 1998
- Thunderbolts (vol. 1) #27-30, 1999
- Thunderbolts: Life Sentences 2001
- Thunderbolts (vol. 1) #53-58, 2001
[edit] Appearances in other media
- Graviton was a boss character in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a Game Boy game. He challenges Spider-Man by lobbing rocks at him. His defeat is accomplished by simply beating him into submission.
