Craziest Superhero Origin

What's the most convoluted, malleable, or otherwise bizarre superhero origin you've ever heard?

Probably Donna Troy (the original Wonder Girl) when she was a Darkstar. She was Wonder Woman's younger sister until the Crisis happened and then she was part of an attempt by the Titans of Myth to keep their legacy alive on Earth and then she lost her powes and became...a Darkstar for some reason. I'm sure that's not the worst out there, but it's always one I thought was particularly goofy.

Marvel superhero the Whizzer was bitten by a snake, then his father gave him an infusion of mongoose blood, and this gave him superspeed.

The Whizzer was injected with mongoose blood. I didn't know that mongooses have super speed, but somehow an injection of their blood gave him super speed.

Wow, that was a close ninja post.

edited 14th May '15 10:01:56 PM by alliterator

Eventually it was just decided he was a mutant and that the aforementioned bizarre circumstance just kickstarted his X-Gene. Makes more sense but a lot less fun.

No lame, crazy origin can ever beat the Golden Age Black Condor's.

Didn't that character also steal a dead Senator's identity and start dating his girlfriend, who didn't know about the switch or even that her boyfriend was dead?

I'm pretty sure that's at least two felonies there, "hero."

edited 15th May '15 7:21:55 PM by HamburgerTime

Then he became Wanda's and Pietro's dad and then not again?

You can't trust condors to teach good morality to kids, unlike gorillas and wolves.

Ambush Bug's origin is crazy but he is crazy so it might not even be his true origin.

Yeah, Black Condor's origin is basically "Condors taught me how to fly!" Because, somehow, that doesn't actually involve, you know, wings or anything.

But I still have to say that the best origin ever is the origin of the Captain. Let me just quote that wiki:

The Captain was an ordinary (slightly stupid) human from Brooklyn. One night, while on a bender in the streets of Brooklyn, two aliens of unknown origin named Spa-fon and Squa-tront, came across the man who was to become the Captain. They granted him the "Messianic Sidda-Complex," the "Heartstar of the space between galaxies." He was tasked with using his newfound power and glory to "make this nightmarish land of 'Brooklyn' a better place." He then used his newly-gained superhuman powers to beat up the aliens because he "thought when you hit leprechauns on the head they turned into gold coins." Finding that this was untrue, he bent over with the intent of robbing them, and instead vomited onto his extraterrestrial benefactors.

edited 15th May '15 8:33:20 PM by alliterator

That is so Stereotype Irish it hurts.

I have no idea if the Captain is Irish. And just to be clear, that's from Nextwave, which is a complete and utter parody of everything superheroes.

There was a Bob Newhart TV show that was on briefly where he played a cartoonist (notable in that Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, and Marc Silvestri made guest appearances on it) who created a super hero named (I think) Mad Dog. His shtick was that he had the adrenal glands of a doberman pinscher, which apparently gave him super powers. Of course, it was SUPPOSED to be silly...

Yeah, I think that this discussion needs to exclude superheroes whose origins are clearly meant to be funny or tongue in cheek. (I know that puts us in the position of reading the creators' minds, but I think we're on pretty safe ground with characters like the Captain and Ambush Bug.)

Well, Deadpool's a comical character, but his backstory is probably the least Played for Laughs part of his character.

He had super-cancer, the cure for which mutated his cancer cells into fourth-wall breaking insanity and Wolverine-level regeneration.

I'd say the origin Wiccan and Speed of Young Avengers takes the cake here. Let's try to do a summary...

Scarlet Witch is a mutant superhero who falls in love with an android called Vision. They decide to have kids, but since Vision can't conceive children the normal way (presumably because he doesn't produce semen), Scarlet Witch uses her magic to get pregnant with him. She gives birth to twin boys, but later it's retconned that the magical conception didn't work the way she thought it would (even though it was confirmed by Doctor Strange, the most powerful sorcerer on Earth), and the twins can only exist because she'd unknowingly stolen two of the five missing parts of the soul of a West Coast Avengers villain called Master Pandemonium, and put those two parts into the twins. But then it's revealed that the five missing soul parts don't belong to Master Pandemonium at all (this is another retcon, btw), but to Mephisto, who has manipulated Pandemonium into thinking he's missing parts of his soul, so Pandemonium would do the dirty job of finding those soul parts for Mephisto. (I should also mention that Pandemonium had a literal star-shaped hole in his chest, and each missing soul part would fill one point of the star.) Oh, and the reason Mephisto has lost those parts of his soul to begin with is because he tried to steal the soul of Franklin Richards, the son of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman. So Mephisto absorbs the two soul pieces and twins are seemingly lost forever, and Scarlet Witch goes kinda crazy and attacks the Avengers. (And even though she eventually gets over the loss of her kids, years later it's retconned that she didn't, so she attacks the Avengers again.) Except that because of the original ritual Wanda performed to conceive the kids, Mephisto isn't actually able to absorb the soul parts, so they are reincarnated as twin boys named Billy and Tommy Kaplan, born to Jeff and Rebecca Kaplan. Apparently the soul parts also travelled in time, because Tommy and Billy are older than the actual kids of Scarlet Witch and Vision would have been. Tommy and Billy are mutants, and eventually they become the Young Avengers Wiccan and Speed, and they have the same powers as Scarlet Witch and her twin brother Quicksilver. (It remains unclear why Speed inherited Quicksilver's power and not Vision's, even though the two were conceived magically to be the kids of Vision and Scarlet Witch.) And that, in short, is their origin story.

edited 29th Jun '15 2:38:01 AM by Tuomas

And during all of this, Vision becomes a souless husk, which only makes things even more confusing. (And insulting.)

edited 29th Jun '15 6:16:41 AM by kkhohoho

...you lost me right about here.

So, if we want to cross into Supervillain Origins, (though a Superhero is still heavily involved,) I was reading through some old Adam Warlock comics last night, and I think I found a winner: The Magus.

Now, as I said, the hero is still a major part of the Origin Story(TM) here, so let's give a bit of background first. Adam was, for all intents and purposes, an incredibly powerful humanoid lifeform created by three scientists who wanted to play God, as well as Take Over the World. However, the Fantastic Four intervened, stopping the scientists while letting the new lifeform go on its' merry way into the cosmos. After having a tussle with Thor, it got itself a fancy Soul Gem handed to it by the High Evolutionary in exchange for promising to stop the Man Beast, a New Man (animal-human hybrid,) gone rouge, from taking over Counter Earth, which was a 'copy' of Earth designed to be Earth but without the darker excess of humanity, though the Man Beast made sure that darker excess was still there anyway. After a whole bunch of Christian allegories&allusions and general hullabaloo, Adam came back from the dead for one last Jesus comparision, vanquished the Man Beast, and departed for greener pastures outerspace.

This is where the Magus comes in. After wandering through the cosmos for a while, Adam happens upon the Church of Universal Truth, a bunch of space fundamentalists fascistic religious group who enslave or slaughter anyone who isn't even remotely humanoid, and who still hold a tyrannical reign over those who are. And it's leader just so happens to be the Magus who Adam — after being captured, enduring a Kangaroo Court, mentally tortured, encountering a demented Bozo The Clown Expy while being mentally tortured, and finally breaking free — learns is... himself. Sort of.

It turns out that the Magus is an evil future version of Adam, but compared to the oh so many evil future versions of characters to come, this one has a much more direct connection with his younger counterpart. Now bear with me here, because this is where it really get nuts. The Magus, as Adam Warlock, was blasted by the Magus with a beam of energy which called forth the In-betweener, an omniscient God-like being who lives 'in between' realities, and at least one of his duties is making sure there is a cosmic balance. In this case, said balance involves making sure there is a force for life to counteract the force for death which is Thanos. (Who shows up in this story, just so you know.) You'd think Adam Warlock as is he now would be good enough, but the Inbetweener thinks otherwise, so he sent Magus!Adam into an interdimensional void for untold centuries, where Adam not only went completely mad, but developed a God complex in the process. It was only when this occurred that the Inbetweener declared Magus!Adam to be a true force for life, (for some reason,) and released him from the void. Upon his release, he now sported purple skin and a snazzy white afro, and rechristened himself... THE MAGUS!!!

For whatever reason though, the Inbetweener dumped Magus 5000 years in the past on the planet Homeworld, (yes, really; 'Homeworld',) but this didn't phase Magus any, as he promptly took to cowing a group of barbarians into submission, and slowly but surely built up the Church of Universal Truth, because every God or Messiah needs a Church. He also recruited a prostitute to handle the day-to-day operations despite knowing she would betray him, because every God or Messiah also needs a Judas. After that, he waited until it was finally time for him to meet his past self and blast him with the energy trace that wold draw in the Inbetweener, and complete the cycle. Only this time, Thanos intervened. Long story short, Adam literally cut off the path that would cause him to become the Magus, and then killed a future version of himself to ensure he could never become him. (Not that it stopped Magus from coming back later. Because he did.)

Comics are weird.

Not a superhero either, but Vandal Savage probably has one of the best origins in the DC Universe. He's a caveman who got knocked out by the radiation from a meteor, and woke up immortal.

How can you not love that?

Bob Chipman recently made a video about Comboman, a superhero made to sell snacks. His origin is that one day, he was just minding his own business, holding a stachel full of comics and CombosTM, when a bunch of AIM goons shot him with some sort of comic ray. The ray reacted with the delicious, versatile snacks and the comics he was carrying, causing him to gain the powers and parts of the costume of 12 superheroes plus 3 supervillains.

Just look at him◊. See if you can guess which parts of which characters his costume comes from. ^{Can't guess?} Hulk's scalp, Cyclops' visor, Iron Man's chin, Magneto's shoulders, Punisher's nipples, Captain America's solar plexus, Sabertooth's six-pack, Carnage's elbows, Daredevil's forearms, Spider-Man's hands, Century's groin, Human Torch's knees, Silver Surfer's shins, Gambit's boots.

> Punisher's nipples.

> Century's groin.

Oi vey!

There once was a boy named Nathaniel Richards. After himself from the future saves him from bullies he becomes a superhero, kills his future self, then goes back in time to become his future self. And then becomes evil because a girl he knew for ten minutes died.

The Ninety Nine probably has the most convoluted origin I've ever seen outside of the Big Two. Basically, way back in the old days, there was a great library. When vandals came to burn it, the librarians created a magic solution that absorbed all the information contained in all the books. Then they dipped 99 magical stones into this solution, causing those stones to become imbued with the collective wisdom. Then they put all those stones into the ceiling of a new library in Spain, but one of the librarians, Rughal, turned evil and launched a scheme to try and absorb all the power in the stones for himself. It backfired, and the whole damned building exploded and Rughal became some sort of Dr. Manhattan-meets-Vandal Savage. To prevent something like that from happening again, the surviving librarians divided up the stones and sent one-third of them to the Americas, one-third to Europe, and one-third to Asia, and then eventually, the stones sought out kids to use them to change the world, and these kids, having realized that the power was too much for them to handle on their own, started coming together. And thus was born the Ninety-Nine.