BLACK TOM

 

BLACK TOM

Real Name: Thomas Samuel Eamon Cassidy

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #99, June 1976

Powers: Black Tom’s mutant ability is to bodily generate thermokinetic energy and discharge it as concussive blasts of intense heat and force. He uses non-conductive organic substances, such as wood, to channel his power. Black Tom's bio-blasts alternate between being force beams or heat beams. His assaults can cause combustion or physical impact and damage depending on how he applies them.

After being horribly beaten and wounded by Cable, Black Tom was put through a surgical procedure that grafted synthetic wood fiber into his wounds which grew to fill in the damaged and lost portions of his mass, making him a human-wood hybrid. This gave him a constant internal conduit through which to focus his power blasts, and his mutant energy was apparently amplified as it was now focused through his implants. As time passed, however, the implants seemed to take over Tom's body, converting him into a being more plant than man. After being critically injured in this form, his partner (Juggernaut) financed an operation to remove the synthetic grafts and return Black Tom to his normal human appearance.

Since that time, however, Tom underwent a secondary mutation which transformed him completely into a plant-like being. Black Tom came to exist as nothing more than a spectral consciousness inhabiting wood and vegetable matter bodies shaped in his image. Tom was capable of mentally manipulating various forms of vegetation, causing roots and vines to rip out from the ground and accelerate their growth to tremendous size and strength. By animating this plant matter he could form razor sharp wooden spears, prehensile vines to lift and move objects, and wrap such roots or vines around a person or object and constrict, crushing whatever was in their grasp. He could inhabit large amounts of wooden mass at once, expanding to gigantic sizes, and any injuries inflicted on his animate frame were negligible so long as he could relocate his consciousness to another section of vegetable mass.

After Decimation, Black Tom was restored to his human form, losing most of his secondary mutation. He retains his bio-blasting ability, and can still animate and manipulate wood and plant-life to some degree. He has even demonstrated enhanced bio-blasting, such as channeling massive amounts of power by conducting his bio-blast through multiple logs strapped on the back of a flatbed truck.

Tom Cassidy was educated at University of Oxford. He is a master of terrorist strategies and tactics, as well as a master swordsman.