DR. DRUID

 

DR. DRUID

Real Name: Anthony Ludgate (legally changed to Anthony Ludgate Druid)

First Appearance: Amazing Adventures (Vol. 1) #1, June 1961 (as Doctor Droom); Weird Wonder Tales (Vol. 1) #19, December 1976 (as Doctor Druid)

Powers: Dr. Druid has a natural gift for psychic phenomena, which was cultivated through the manipulations of the Ancient One and his own rigorous personal training. Druid is capable of self-levitation, enabling him to rise up a few stories into the air, supporting himself and up to one other person and he hovers and moves about as a very leisurely speed. He can also apply his psychokinetic talents to levitate and maneuver other pieces of matter in his vicinity. Though concentration, Druid can manipulate his autonomic physical processes, such as heart rate, breathing, and healing. By entering a meditative state he can mentally block out pain and focus on accelerating the regeneration of potentially fatal wounds, like a slit throat. He is capable of sensing thoughts to a moderate degree, and has extrasensory abilities to detect mystical phenomena and at times perceive future events. Through mesmerism, Druid can achieve a variety of effects: Rendering himself and others invisible, compelling people to reveal information to him or remain rigid where they stand, form illusions to disguise his appearance, etc. He can even plant a compulsion into a victim's mind to spread his mesmerism: For instance, he and Captain America were once attacked by a group of werewolves. Druid mesmerized one werewolf, giving him a post-hypnotic suggestion to ignore the two heroes, and a compulsion to seek out his fellow werewolves and stare them in the eyes, transferring the mesmeric effect and compulsion to them as well. The spell quickly spread until all the werewolves were conditioned to not perceive them.

The second gift Doctor Druid received from the Ancient One was ancestral memory of all the knowledge and practices of his Celtic forefathers, the Druids. For most of his career, Druid used this knowledge for relatively simple endeavors, involving special talismans or arrangements of significant icons. He could inscribe a circle of protection around himself to ward off supernatural attacks, or perform a certain ritual to allow long distance teleportation across the surface of the planet. At a particularly weak period in his life, however, Druid chose to invoke more serious powers, reawakening the full knowledge and raw power of the Druids within himself, connecting directly to the Celtic gods and their control over the elements, and the forces of life and death. His senses became exceptionally heightened and keyed in to natural phenomena. Druid could now count the maggots festering on a corpse from over a mile away. He also developed the psychic intuition for knowledge at a glance, reading the past thoughts and actions of other people merely by looking at them. Druid's power over the elements led to several new and interesting ways to kill people, such as igniting dormant phosphorous residue in the human body into order to induce spontaneous combustion, increasing pressure on the water content of the body so that people literally burst from the inside out, and inducing unprecedented growth in plant matter inside someone's stomach, causing the equivalent of a full-grown tree to violently shoot forth from their chest. He could also induce accelerated decay in material things, causing even a metal door to corrode and collapse into liquid remnants within seconds.

Anthony Druid holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard with a specialty in psychiatry. He has extensive knowledge of the occult arcs, particularly Celtic lore.