It’s fairly common for a superhero’s origin story to involve some sort of lab accident. Bruce Banner’s gamma rays and Peter Parker’s radioactive spider being particularly famous examples. And of course, “unstable molecules” almost seemed to be Marvel’s go-to for a while during the Silver Age. And yet there aren’t a lot of stories about what would most likely happen if scientists found themselves with superpowers. So here are a few science based superhero origin stories that are just begging to be written. Ideally in concert with someone who can actually draw.
All molecules in this story are stable
The Gamma Guardian
The Gamma Guardian didn’t set out to learn about powers with the intention of becoming a super hero. All he really wanted was to control his radiation manipulation powers because he kept accidentally screwing up his spectroscopy experiments. Nothing quite like trying to analyze your data and realize it’s completely inconsistent because you keep accidentally unleashing gamma ray pulses when you’re getting hungry. Then there was the crisis with the radioactive monster and, well, someone had to make sure no one got hurt and thus a superhero career began.
Getting reliable data: The greatest of superpowers
Lady Lamarck
She was actually quite offended when she realized what her superpowers were. She initially though that her body was changing at random, but slowly she realized that it was actually changing into whatever she needed to face a new scenario. In a permanent sort of genetic level way that would have delighted Lamarck (this is still a comic book universe where genetic sequencing is much faster than current techniques after all). Too bad that theory was completely discredited over a century ago. Lady Lamarck spent a lot of her early superhero days protesting against the unscientific nature of her powers and initially adopted her codename ironically. Turns out it’s actually really hard to switch codenames once one is established, so now she’s stuck with it.
Doctor Drosophila
Really, it was only a matter of time. When your entire field of research involves bombarding fruit flies with a wide range of mutagens just to see what weird new genes it exposes, sooner or later, there was going to be an accident that gave someone superpowers. The only real question was what kind of strange mutation was going to happen. The ability to fly and climb walls was probably one of the tamer options. Honestly, he was just happy to not end up with something really out there like the Tribbles genes. There is currently an imbalance of supervillains to superheroes using the title of Doctor, so Doctor Drosophila set out to correct that.
H. E. R. O.
This is properly pronounced HERBohrModelofAtom
The Homeworld Earthly Rescue Operation is what happens when you let NMR people have superpowers. First they pick the acronym, then they figure out what it’s going to stand for. And then they realize they’re going to have to team up with a space based team in order for this team to make sense. They were lucky that the astronomy department was influenced by the same fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field that they were. The net result was the first superhero team to be fueled entirely by coffee.
The Chemical Kid
She expected to spend her summer scrubbing glassware and making ligand for a grad student. That’s the usual job for an undergrad in a research lab, after all. Except then it turned out that the grad student she was making ligand for was a member of H. E. R. O. That alone wouldn’t have qualified her for sidekick status. Every undergrad at some point finds themselves attempting to use telekinesis to keep all the bits together while assembling glassware. But when here grad student witnessed it actually work, the Chemical Kid was born. Too bad there’s no space for talking about superhero work on a grad school application.