BIG BERTHA

 

BIG BERTHA

Real Name: Ashley Crawford (legally changed to Bertha Crawford)

First Appearance: West Coast Avengers (Vol. 2) #46, July 1989

Powers: Big Bertha was born with the mutant ability to mentally control her weight by manipulating her mass and gravity. By expanding and re-configuring both the adipose tissues and fat deposits in her body, she is able to adjust her figure at will. She can cause her body to inflate into a massively obese state. During the process, she gains the enhanced skeletal and muscular structures needed to adequately support the extra mass.

Big Bertha's fat and tissue are highly elastic and resilient, allowing her to absorb various forms of physical attack without puncturing, tearing, bruising, etc. Increasing the force of gravity allows her to withstand tremendous forces and impact without budging from the spot. She can also temporarily decrease gravity, allowing her to leap many times her own height up into the air, and then increase her weight again to come crashing down on top of an opponent. She can easily submerge people and objects underneath herself by increasing the gravitational force pulling her down.

In her obese form, Big Bertha has superhuman strength (lifting 50 tons), enough to tear off and lift heavy metal pillars with incredible ease. Apparently, Big Bertha cannot remove her extra fatty tissue as easily as she can manifest it. Similar to those suffering from bulimia, she has to retch up the extra fat through her stomach to revert back to normal, regurgitating hundreds of pounds of fat in the process.

In her civilian identity, Ashley Crawford is a thin-sized world-renowned supermodel and is extremely wealthy from her profession. Her power allows her to selectively manipulate individual areas of fatty tissue in her body, but she’s used that ability to enhance her modeling instead of for adventuring. She is also a skilled pilot and card player.