Dynamo 5

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Dynamo 5
Cover of Dynamo 5 #1, showing the team with their father, the late Captain Dynamo in the upper right. Art by Mahmud A. Asrar and Ron Riley.
Publisher	Image Comics
Schedule	Monthly
Format	Ongoing
Publication date	March 2007
Main character(s)	Visionary Slingshot Myriad Scrap Scatterbrain Maddie Warner
Creative team
Creator(s)	Jay Faerber Mahmud A. Asrar

Dynamo 5 is a fictional comic book superhero team appearing in their self-titled monthly series by Image Comics. Created by writer Jay Faerber and artist Mahmud A. Asrar, the team first appeared in Dynamo 5 #1 (January 2007; published March 2007).

Dynamo 5 is a spinoff of Noble Causes, a previous comic book series created by Faerber, which also explores the dynamics of a superhero family. Unlike Noble Causes, Faerber has stated that Dynamo 5 would be more action-driven.^[1] The team is composed of five young men and women, each of whom inherited one of the five superhuman abilities of their father, the late superhero Captain Dynamo, and their mentor and leader, Dynamo’s widow, Madeline “Maddie” Warner, who assembled the team following Dynamo’s death.

[edit] Production

Faerber explained that his inspiration for the series came from a conversation he had with editor Andy Helfer, in which he was asked what made the Teen Titans unique. When Faerber opined that the Titans were like a family, Helfer pointed out that all superhero teams could be described thus as well. From this Faerber decided to create a team that was a family in the literal biological sense, but did not act like it. Faerber also indicated, perhaps half-jokingly, that he was also influenced by unresolved issues stemming from his parents’ divorce.

Faerber has indicated that the series will alternate back-and-forth between the private lives of each of the five kids, who will still maintain their separate lives in their home cities across North America, including their respective supporting casts, and their adventures as Dynamo 5.^[1]

[edit] History

Dynamo 5 in action against The Veil. From Dynamo 5 #1 (January 2007). Art by Mahmud A. Asrar.

Captain Dynamo was the much-beloved protector of Tower City for forty years following his exposure to an unidentified form of radiation that granted him superhuman abilities, and husband of Maddie Warner, a former agent of a government superhero monitoring organization known as F.L.A.G., who used the cover of an award-winning investigative journalist, now retired. Dynamo was eventually found dead, naked in a hotel bed, the cause of death attributed to some type of poison on his lips, though the details of his death were not released to the public. He had been assassinated by Widowmaker, who had been hired by Hunter Blackthorne. Although Warner did not know this, she did suspect that condition and setting in which his body was found was not natural, but arranged by whoever murdered him in order to further tarnish his image. In sorting through his personal effects, Warner discovered his little black book, which was filled with detailed information on countless incidents of infidelity on his part. Although devastated by the extent of her late husband’s indiscretions, Warner was faced with the problem of Dynamo’s numerous enemies, who would now take advantage of Tower City in his absence. Although other superheroes attempted to pitch in to keep the peace, Warner decided that Tower City needed a permanent protector.

Scouring through the information she gleaned from her husband’s belongings, she located five young people she believed could be his illegitimate children: Vancouver, British Columbia high school geek Hector Chang, Washington DC law student and activist Olivia “Livvie” Lewis, aimless ne'er do well and ladies’ man Spencer Bridges, Hollywood, California theater employee and NYU Film School graduate Bridget Flynn, and Eastbridge, Texas high school football star Gage Reinhart. Gathering them together, Warner exposed the five to the same radiation that Dynamo had been exposed to forty years earlier, unlocking their own latent superhuman abilities, with each one manifesting one of the five powers that their father possessed. Donning costumes with the same color scheme and design as their late father, the five of them carry on his legacy as the superhero team the Dynamo 5, while coming to terms with learning about the father they never knew, and the four new half-siblings they each now have. Although the five are unaware that Warner is a former agent of F.LA.G., she is determined to mold them not only into a team, but into a family as well, and functions as their mentor and “unofficial sixth member”, calling the shots from the same headquarters once used by Captain Dynamo, and keeping in constant remote contact with them during their missions.

The team uses a number of highly sophisticated devices. The individual members of the team wear special watches that allow Warner to alert them when she needs to assemble them in the case of an emergency. The watches also possess a function that, when utilized, can instantly transform the civilian clothing worn by the team members into their Dynamo 5 costumes.^[2]

The team is headquartered at the Aquarium, a high-tech lair underneath an industrial pier that was formerly used by Captain Dynamo.^[3] Among the equipment housed at the Aquarium is the communications and monitoring equipment with which Warner can summon, monitor, and communicate with members of the team during an engagement, and a computer that can monitor the police radio for watch words that trigger an alert to the team of a possible emergency. The team also utilizes a teleportation device called the Jump Station, which allows them to travel instantly across the continent to meet with one another.^[4] The team can activate the Jump Station by manipulating a device on their costumes.^[5] The Jump Station can only transport persons from the station itself to another location and back, but not effect transportation directly between two other locations.^[6]

[edit] Cast

The five members of Dynamo 5 are brought together by Maddie Warner, who unlocks their powers. From Dynamo 5 #1. Art by Mahmud A. Asrar.

[edit] Team members

Visionary - Hector Chang was the first of Captain Dynamo’s children contacted by Maddie Warner. An intellectually curious Vancouver, British Columbia high school geek with a history with bullies and guidance counselors, Hector inherited his father’s vision powers, which include laser vision, x-ray vision, and telescopic vision.^[1]

Slingshot - Olivia “Livvie” Lews is the daughter of a high-priced Washington DC lawyer, and a junior at Georgetown University. A driven activist who is involved with half a dozen different volunteer organizations (one of which has her working at a clinic), Livvie inherited her father’s ability of flight. She is respectful towards elders, and always addresses Maddie as “Ma’am”, or "Mrs. Warner".

Myriad - Spencer Bridges is a promiscuous womanizer who has never held a job for more than two weeks, though he never seems to be without financial means. Not surprisingly, he only agreed to join the team because Maddie is paying him. Spencer inherited his father’s shapeshifting ability. A loner who has grown up in various foster homes, Faerber has indicated that his shapeshifting ability will tie into his lack of direction in life, saying, “He inherited Cap's shape-shifting powers, and he can now become anyone he chooses. Maybe one day he'll figure out who he wants to be.”^[1] Myriad has a cynical, distrustful view of life. He assumes that the deference and respect Slingshot pays to Warner is an attempt to "suck up".^[7] Having wondered his entire life who his father was, he is especially disappointed to learn it is Captain Dynamo, who he views as "an enormous hypocrite and a horrible husband."^[8]

Scrap - Bridget Flynn is a NYU Film School graduate and Hollywood, California theater employee. Bridget inherited her father’s superhuman strength. In Dynamo 5 #12 it is hinted that she may be gay.

Scatterbrain - Gage Reinhart is a 17-year-old Eastbridge, Texas high school football star who led his division in tackles for the entire season, and is the darling of both his female schoolmates and college scouts. Gage inherited his father’s telepathy. Faerber has described Scatterbrain as “a popular, arrogant jock who never gave a damn about what anyone thought - until he can literally hear those thoughts. And he may not like what he hears.” ^[1]

[edit] Supporting characters and allies

Maddie Warner Madeline “Maddie” Warner is the widow of Captain Dynamo and step mother to the Dynamo 5. She assembled his five children, and acts as their leader, mentor, and “unofficial sixth member”,^[9] keeping in constant radio contact with them during missions from their headquarters. Although she must deal with the fact that they are constant reminders of her late husband’s serial infidelity, she is insistent that they act not only as a team, but as a family as well. Despite her matronly role and demeanor with the team, she can be ruthless with enemies that she perceives to be threats, and will not hesitate to kill them. She is a former agent of the government superhuman-monitoring agency known as F.L.A.G., which she has not disclosed to the team, adding ominously in Dynamo 5 #1, “Kind of makes you wonder what else I never told them, doesn’t it?” She maintains the cover of a retired reporter for a newspaper called The Journal.^[10]

Augie Ford Augie Ford is an agent of F.L.A.G., having been with the organization for 30 years^[11], and Warner's ex-partner. His current partner is Nicole Nakamura. Ford has long-harbored a romantic attraction to Warner, feelings which still linger. He first appears in Dynamo 5 #2, in which he pays her a visit to ask her if she is in any way associated with this new team of youngsters using her late husband's name, but she replies in the negative. Because this visit occurs during a series of rampages by the villain Whiptail, he also tells her that F.L.A.G. is trying to reverse-engineer Whiptail's serum in order to track him by scent.

After Warner had been captured by Chrysalis and Synergy, and four members of Dynamo 5 had been captured by F.L.A.G., Augie encountered Slingshot at Warner's apartment, at which point he learned the truth of Warner's involvement with the team. Ford proposed to help Slingshot free her siblings by having her pose as a fellow F.L.A.G. agent when returning to F.L.A.G. headquarters, but when they encountered Ford's superior Sandy, Ford turned Slingshot in. In Dynamo 5 #7, He then knocked his superior, Sandy, unconscious, and helped Slingshot free her siblings, later telling Sandy that the man who attacked him must have been a disguised Myriad.

Firebirds The Firebirds are a mother and daughter superhero duo. The elder of the two was one of the superheroes who pitched in to protect Tower City following Captain Dynamo's death.^[12] The daughter is a teenager named Emily, and both have both flight and pyrokinetic powers. There is some hostile tension between the elder Firebird and Maddie Warner, stemming from unrevealed aspects of their relationship. The Firebirds appeared in a self-titled 48-page one-shot spinoff book Firebirds that, according to the ad at the end of Dynamo 5 #8, focuses on both the typical difficulties faced by a single mother raising a teenage daughter, and their superheroics.

[edit] Adversaries

[edit] The Veil

In Dynamo 5 #1, Dynamo 5 went up against The Veil, a paramilitary organization that attacked Tower City with numerous soldiers, tanks, and even powered armor suits. Although Dynamo 5 acquitted themselves well against the Veil, Visionary was captured by them and spirited away before the battle was over. He was brought to the Veil headquarters, and interrogated for information on the team by the Veil’s leader, who calls himself The Superior. Injected with a serum to compel him to answer their questions, Visionary divulged everything about the team and how they were brought together by Warner. Before Visionary could answer the Superior’s question about the nature of the radiation that gave them and their father their powers, Warner and the rest of Dynamo 5 arrived and captured The Superior and his lieutenant. Ordering Dynamo 5 back to headquarters, Warner revealed that she was a former agent of F.L.A.G. and killed both the Superior and his lieutenant with gunshots to the head.

[edit] Whiptail

Bernard Dempsey used to transform himself into a large humanoid lizard through the use of a serum he developed, and was a formidable enemy of Captain Dynamo. He was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, and was relegated to the Evergreen Nursing Home for five years, before he began resuming his criminal activity once again after Captain Dynamo's death, going on rampages in Tower City. In Dynamo 5 #2, the team became aware of Whiptail's return, and confronted Dempsey at Evergreen. Using both Scatterbrain's telepathy and Myriad's shapeshifting into the form of Dempsey's son, Bernard Jr., as well as subsequent video surveillance, they verified that Dempsey's condition was indeed legitimate, and that neither his son nor daughter were responsible for the rampages. Warner is paid a visit by her old partner, Augie Ford, who tells her that F.L.A.G. is attempting to reverse-engineer Dempsey's serum in order to track Whiptail's scent. During a stakeout one night, the team confronts this new Whiptail, and after knocking the creature unconscious, it reverts back to its human form: a female ex-F.L.A.G. agent. The team escapes before the arrival of the authorities, including Ford, who confiscates the stash of serum found on the rogue agent. He gives the stash to a female agent named Johnson, who then clandestinely meets with Warner, and shapeshifts back into Myriad before giving her one of the vials. Warner later uses the Whiptail serum at the end of Dynamo 5 #6, injecting it into herself and transforming into Whiptail in order to escape Chrysalis and Synergy, who had captured her. She later returned to human form after being rendered unconscious by Scrap.

[edit] Quake

Quake is a superhero, slightly older than the members of Dynamo 5, who used to work with Captain Dynamo, whom he idolized. He possesses "raw, telekinetic powers" that manifest in the form of shockwaves and tremors. He suffers from schizophrenia, and suffers delusions when he neglects to take his medication. In Dynamo 5 #3, Warner tells the team that Quake has been going out on patrol, but has gone off his medication. Warner has Myriad practice impersonating Captain Dynamo, hoping to confront Quake and get through to him. During the team's confrontation with the afflicted hero, Captain Dynamo indeed appears and admonishes Quake to take his medication, praising his old friend for his heroism. This seems to calm Quake down, and after Captain Dynamo flies off, another Captain Dynamo then appears, and this Captain Dynamo is apparently Myriad, leaving the rest of the team to wonder who the previous Captain Dynamo was. (It is later revealed to have been the shapeshifter Synergy, another of Dynamo's illegitimate children, posing as Dynamo in order to draw out Warner.)

[edit] Chrysalis

Chrysalis is a female supervillain who wears a suit of powered armor. She first appeared in the form of twenty-year-old stock video footage in #4. As revealed in Dynamo 5 # 5 & 6, Chrysalis, despite her enmity with Captain Dynamo, was also his lover, and mothered another illegitimate child of his, a daughter who goes by the name Synergy. Chrysalis and Synergy enacted a plan whereby Synergy would pose as the apparently resurrected Captain Dynamo to draw out Warner, even stealing Captain Dynamo's corpse from his grave to complete the appearance that he had returned from the dead. Synergy made her first appearance as Captain Dynamo at the end of #3, and encountered Warner at Dynamo's grave in issue #5, spiriting her away to Chrysalis and Synergy's mountain headquarters, where she revealed the truth to Warner.

[edit] Synergy

Synergy (real name Cynthia) like the members of Dynamo 5, is an illegitimate child of Captain Dynamo, and Dynamo's former adversary, Chrysalis. Synergy first appeared, in the guise of the late Captain Dynamo, at the end of Dynamo 5 #3, appearing before Dynamo's old colleague, the hero known as Quake, ostensibly to counsel and admonish Quake, who was suffering delusions as a result of his having neglected to take his medication for his schizophrenia. In reality, this revealed in issues #5 & 6 to have been a ploy on the part of Chrysalis and Synergy to draw out Warner to capture Warner, which Synergy did. Synergy has all five of Captain Dynamo's powers, having been exposed by her mother as a young girl to the same radiation that Captain Dynamo had been exposed to. Dynamo was present at Synergy's birth, and even had some degree of a relationship with his daughter during her youth, the two having experienced the joy of flight after she had manifested her powers. Synergy has asserted that she has killed before, and nearly killed Warner, but Warner managed to escape by injecting herself with the Whiptail serum and transforming into Whiptail. After Warner was rendered unconscious by Scrap, she reverted back to human form, and Scrap also subdued Synergy. Warner, feeling that Synergy was not evil, but had been misguided by her mother, had Scatterbrain wipe Synergy's memories to affect complete amnesia, and left her in the care of a parish orphanage.

[edit] Voltage

Voltage is a supervillain the power to project powerful bolts of electricity from his body. He can feed off the electricity of sources like power stations in order to become stronger. The team battles Voltage in Dynamo 5 #5. He is defeated by a telepathic attack from Scatterbrain. This event was inadvertently triggered when Voltage electrocuted him, and was the first time Scatterbrain discovered that his telepathy could be used as an offensive weapon.

[edit] F.L.A.G.

F.L.A.G. (Foundation for Law and Government^[13]) is a government organization that monitors superhuman activity. F.L.A.G. had a close working relationship with Captain Dynamo.^[14] The organization has multiple headquarters in numerous cities, including a Tower City branch located in one of the city's skyscrapers.^[15] After Dynamo 5 first appeared, F.L.A.G. began investigating them, refusing to condone what its director, a man currently known only as "Sandy", considers to be vigilante activity. Although Warner's former partner, Augie Ford, is more sympathetic to the fact that the young members of Dynamo 5 are valiantly risking their lives to protect Tower City from threats that no one else is confronting, Sandy stages a trap in Dynamo 5 #5 in which he captures the team (excepting Slingshot) for debriefing. Having confiscated the team's communicators, F.L.A.G. agent Phil Dunbar urges Slingshot to turn herself in. Searching for Warner (who at that point had been captured by Chrysalis and Synergy) at Warner's apartment, Slingshot encounters Augie Ford. Ford proposed to help Slingshot free her siblings by having her pose as a fellow F.L.A.G. agent when returning to F.L.A.G. headquarters, but when they encountered Ford's superior, Sandy, Ford apparently turned Slingshot in. In Dynamo 5 #6, Ford helped Slingshot free her siblings. It has been revealed that F.L.A.G. is apparently in possession of Captain Dynamo's corpse, for reasons known to Sandy, but not Ford.^[16]

[edit] Bonechill

Bonechill is Kenneth Yaeger, a skull-faced villain caught in a cryogenic accident that gave him the ability to project intense cold. With this ability, he can create shaped objects of ice and snow, such as walls and jagged ice daggers on his gauntlets, and completely cover large areas, like the roof of a building, with ice and snow to hinder his opponent's mobility. Although he had never been encountered by Captain Dynamo, Scrap and Slingshot confronted him after investigating the deaths of Yaeger's former criminal associates, whom Bonechill killed for betraying him to the authorities after they were captured following a bank robbery. Scrap and Slingshot defeated Bonechill with the help of the Firebirds, a mother and daughter superhero duo. Bonechill was imprisoned at Tartarus, a floating federal penitentiary. He was then contacted by Voltage,^[17] and after freeing him, the two of them teamed up with the villainous duo Brains and Brawn.^[18]

[edit] Brains and Brawn

Brains and Brawn are a supervillain duo. Brains is a high-level telepath, and Brawn possesses immense superhuman strength and invulnerability. They fought Captain Dynamo a few times before leaving their native Tower City. After the Noble family foiled a Crowne Pointe bank robbery by the two, wounding Brains in the process, the duo fled to Tower City, where, in Dynamo 5 #9, Brawn was confronted by Scrap and Slingshot, who traced the duo through Truman Kukoski, Brawn's younger brother. During their battle with him, Scatterbrain, who had been rendered into a coma following his mindwipe of Synergy, discovered he could project his astral self, and was attacked at his high school by Brains, who was also in the astral plane. After he bested her, both he and she regained consciousness. Brains and Brawn fled, and were later contacted by Dynamo 5's other adversaries, Voltage and Bonechill, who proposed an alliance.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Dynamo 5 Home page