GUARDIAN

 

GUARDIAN

Real Name: James MacDonald Hudson

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #109, June 1977

Powers: Dr. James "Mac" MacDonald Hudson was an engineer working for AmCan PetroChemical Company, a corporate merging of American and Canadian interests, when he designed a cybernetic control helmet and an accompanying exoskeletal suit that would enable the wearer to bore through the earth in exploring for oil or other geological resources.

Originally, the exoskeleton was a massive hydraulic suit of armor that enhanced the wearer's strength and shielded them from injury. It included sonic amplifiers which could be used to pick up on distant sounds, originally designed for mapping out underground caves as a form of sonar. Boot jets enabled the suit to fly and concussion blasters that were designed for tunneling purposes could be used as offensive weapons. The cybernetic helmet converted the wearer's thoughts into command code for the suit, allowing them to control it mentally.

As Weapon Alpha, Hudson had refined the exoskeletal suit considerably, slimming it down and converting it into nothing more than a skintight weave of micro-circuitry worn under his costume. The suit was now comprised of steel-mesh containing an array of 1,200 miniature electromagnetic projectors that generated a stress pattern within the local area of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Through these means, Guardian’s battlesuit could tap into high order energies that the suit could utilize for other purposes. The suit served as an exoskeleton for Guardian that amplified his natural strength. The suit utilized a fast, large capacity computer to channel energy through the exoskeleton in lines of force that precisely paralleled Guardian’s musculature, thereby magnifying his strength. By directing dispersed beams of force towards the ground, Guardian could fly at a maximum speed of up to Mach 1 (the speed of sound, about 770 miles per hour).

He could also use the battlesuit to form a protective force field at a distance of about three inches from his armor. The force field dampened inertia but did not cancel it; Guardian could be staggered by a sufficient impact. The maximum impact that the field could diffuse was 1,750 foot-pounds per second; above that level residual inertial effects became excessive. The field could also absorb and shunt the energies of most incoming radiations in the electromagnetic spectrum. The force field was controlled by a cybernetic link and was left on during flight to protect against high-speed winds and mid-air collisions. Guardian could shoot beams of concussive force from his gauntlets with a force equivalent to 250 pounds of TNT. James Hudson originally intended for the suits blasting capability to serve as a digging tool. Using the battlesuit’s blasts, Guardian could move through bedrock at a maximum speed of 15 mile per hour. Guardian’s battlesuit computer used a high resolution, solid state, laser-interferometry navigation system that could compute every component of Guardian’s movement relative to the Earth. Guardian could trigger the computer to fire a beam of graviton (the subatomic particles that carry the force of gravity) in the exact direction that would cancel the Earth’s rotation relative to himself. This caused a nearly instantaneous acceleration, which, at the equator, where Guardian would reach his maximum speed, meant that Guardian would reach about 1,000 mile per hour. To the unaided human eye Guardian would have seemed to have instantaneously teleported himself from one location to another, Guardian’s force field automatically activated during this rapid acceleration for safety’s sake. The maximum distance that he could "jump" by this means is not yet known.

Employing the suit as Weapon Alpha, Vindicator, and later Guardian, Hudson was apparently killed when his suit was damaged and exploded, leaving nothing but ash. He was eventually discovered to be alive, though -- moments before his suit exploded, Hudson had triggered the "jump" effect at maximum capacity, somehow transporting him back in time to Jupiter's moon of Io where he was found by colonists known as the Q`wrrlln. Being inhuman in appearance, the Q`wrrlln were unfamiliar with human physiology and so when they treated Mac's injuries, they didn't differentiate between flesh and metal. Guardian was rebuilt as a cyborg, with his suit's capabilities incorporated into his own body. He was placed in stasis and eventually returned to Earth in the proper era, rejoining Alpha Flight as Vindicator while his wife, Heather, became Guardian.

As a cyborg, Mac had certain additional abilities like electromagnetic sensitivity, allowing him to scan wavelengths and frequencies to pick up on and track different energy signatures, and computer enhancements to his brain that vastly increased his ability to calculate mathematical principles and probabilities. After Alpha Flight disbanded, Hudson attempted to use the Lazarus Protocols to return himself to normal. Lazarus was a Department H project theorized as a healing tool, reversing an injured person's physical time frame by a few hours or days, removing all traces of their wounds. Hudson planned to reverse his cybernetics in order to return to a regular human being whose emotional responses weren't inhibited by machinery. Though he was apparently successful, Department H had become a more malevolent organization at that time -- Hudson was removed and, when Heather was recruited to Dept. H for a new Alpha team and to find her weeks-absent husband, she found a 19-year-old bio-synthetic duplicate of James MacDonald Hudson, whom Dept. H claimed was the real Mac having overdosed on the Lazarus Protocols. The teenage Hudson didn't know any different himself, and was poised to lead the new Alpha Flight as Guardian. Heather was given a new body suit and joined the team as Vindicator. Since that time, the real James MacDonald Hudson has returned.

James MacDonald Hudson holds a Ph.D. in engineering. He is a brilliant inventor, engineer and an above average athlete with extensive training in hand-to-hand combat. He is also a good strategist and leader.