MANTIS

 

MANTIS

Real Name: Unrevealed (last name "Brandt")

First Appearance: Avengers (Vol. 1) #112, June 1973

Powers: Mantis was raised from infancy by the Priests of Pama to be a candidate for the Celestial Madonna, the prophesized mother of the Celestial Messiah who will bring peace to the universe. As she grew up, Mantis honed her body to the pinnacle of human perfection, giving her peak human strength, speed, agility, endurance, and reflexes. She also developed her "empathy", a catch-all name for a series of psychic abilities she demonstrated. She had an empathic connection to plant-life, allowing her to communicate with plants with some degree, learning from them and receiving sensory information. She had occasional flashes of precognition, guiding her to perform certain actions in order to achieve the best results in a situation. Mantis was able to instinctively sense weak spots in her targets, allowing her to break or shatter extremely durable materials with her bare hands, and take down even superhumanly powerful opponents like Thor.

After being confirmed as the Celestial Madonna, Mantis's physical form evolved into pure spiritual energy. She became one with the plant life of the universe, able to psychically sense any sight or sound happening in the vicinity of vegetable matter across entire galaxies. Possessing no true body of her own, Mantis was capable of causing vegetation to rise up and form into a duplicate of her human self, placing her consciousness into this avatar. The only visible difference was that she had green skin instead of regular flesh-toned, and she could mentally change that anyway. By psychically abandoning an avatar, Mantis could physically reappear on another plant entirely by creating another avatar there for her mind to possess. These avatar bodies had her physical skill, and were capable of surviving in the vacuum of space. After being destroyed in her avatar form, Mantis's consciousness was splintered into five separate pieces, inhabiting five different avatar bodies on Earth. A side effect of her splintering was that her presence faded from people's memories after she left the area; no one who encountered one of her splinter bodies would remember it more than a week or so afterwards. Also, her empathy was scrambled, preventing her from communicating with plants anymore.

Eventually, Thanos came and killed four of her, but this caused her consciousness to reintegrate back into the last body, and Mantis was whole once more. Besides her physical abilities and restored empathy, Mantis now had an extended lifespan, the ability to fly, and the power to release celestial energy as blasts from her hands. She seems to have recently lost these powers, however, and exchanged them for new ones. Mantis is now capable of telepathic feats such as communicating with other people's minds, cloaking herself from sensory detection, and shielding herself and other people from psychic assault. Her precognitive powers have become more defined, giving her constant and considerable insight into upcoming future events. She has also demonstrated minor telekinetic and pyrokinetic powers.