Owl (comics)
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The Owl, real name Leland Owlsley, is a mutant and supervillain who frequently menaces Daredevil and other heroes in Marvel Comics' universe, notably Spider-Man and the Black Cat. The character first appeared in Daredevil #3 (August 1964). The Owl's appearance resembles a foppish version of Wolverine, though the Owl predates Wolverine by a decade.
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[edit] Character biography
Leland Owlsley was once a successful financial investor, nicknamed "The Owl of Wall Street" for his financial wisdom, until his criminal connections were exposed by the IRS. After this event he abandoned his profession and became a professional criminal and eventually a formidable crimelord. Though he later got a serum which gave him the ability to fly and slowly mutated him further, he was primarily a criminal mastermind and used his shrewd tactical intellect as a weapon more than his other abilities. He has used his powers in attempts to eliminate Daredevil. He has no criminal record outside of minor misdemeanors despite his once vast criminal enterprise.
Over the years the Owl has become less and less human as a result of bizarre experiments he has subjected himself to in efforts to improve his natural ability to glide and repair damage to his spine that rendered him a paraplegic. The Owl once needed to use an exoskeleton to walk but has since recovered from this injury. The Owl was revealed to be a mutant many years after his first altercations with Daredevil.
Although the Owl was Daredevil's arch-nemesis for much of his early career, he is no longer as prominent as some of Daredevil's other enemies, primarily the Kingpin and Bullseye. Recently, the Owl has started to re-establish his presence in the criminal underworld with the absence of the Kingpin. He began to enlarge his criminal empire by refining Mutant Growth Hormone from his own genetic material, though Daredevil was able to get him arrested.
More recently so, he managed to manipulate behind the scenes and get the Kingpin arrested for a past murder when it looked like Fisk was going to make a deal with the FBI. As the Kingpin sauntered into his jail cell, the Owl taunted him with "Payback's a bitch."
The deal in question involved Matt Murdock being arrested for being Daredevil. When Foggy Nelson, representing Murdock in court, visited him in jail, he was killed by the other prisoners. The Owl later taunted Murdock about this, and Murdock, who had become unhinged due to his friend's death, brutally beat the Owl.
[edit] Powers and abilities
The Owl has had a serum enhance his physiology which enables him to glide for short distances, though he has to leap from a height of at least 20 feet off of the ground to do so. He is able to perform complex mid air maneuvers while he glides which would be impossible for ordinary humans. The Owl's gliding ability is assisted by a weak psionic ability to levitate his body. Under the right conditions, such as favorable air currents, the Owl can glide for at least the length of a city block. He uses specially designed capes to allow him to do this.
His bones are hollow, and he possesses a greater proportionate muscle mass than normal. Though the Owl only exercises moderately, his strength, resistance to injury, and reflexes are enhanced as a result of his mutation (he is physically stronger than any Olympic weight lifter). His hearing and eyesight are superhumanly acute, his head can rotate 180 degrees, and his eyes can move independently of each other in their sockets and have greater visual range than an ordinary human. His finger nails are essentially talons and can tear through human tissue with relative ease. Most of his adversaries assume that he is just a normal human as he almost never engages in physical struggles; he relegates this to his underlings, like the Vulture and Electro.
Over the years the Owl has taken a number of experimental drugs and subjected himself to experimental surgical procedures to increase his ability to glide. These experiments have met with mixed results and a by-product of them is that he has been mutagenically altered in a way that has negatively affected his sanity and made him more animal like. For instance, he enjoys eating live mice with his vintage six hundred dollar wine.
The Owl wears a set of metal talons on each wrist (closely resembling Wolverine's claws) and a cape designed to resemble an owl's outstretched wings, and often uses various other bird-themed weapons and pieces of equipment (not unlike Batman's foe, the Penguin). Although the Owl is somewhat deranged, he is an extremely skilled criminal organizer and money launderer and has yet to catch a criminal charge beyond a misdemeanor.
[edit] Trivia
- The Owl was, initially, the shadowy main villain that fought the original X-Factor. However, the plans were changed and a new villain was created: Apocalypse, who is today one of the most prominent X-Men foes.
- The Owl's personality is similar to DC Comics birdman, Penguin. It is possible that he was actually the inspiration for the version of the character portrayed in Batman Returns who seems to share more similarities with The Owl than with the original Batman character.
[edit] Other Media
The Owl has appeared in one episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series, voiced by Michael Bell. His only appearance was in the second season premiere of the series, The Insidious Six, where he is portrayed to be one of the crimelords with Silvermane and against the Kingpin.
