ANNEX

 

ANNEX

Real Name: Alexander Ellis

First Appearance: The Amazing Spider-Man Annual (Vol. 1) #27, May 1993

Powers: Annex the Augmented Man is a US Army soldier originally named Alexander Ellis. He lost his lower leg during combat and later volunteered for an experimental prosthetic program. Dr. Hillman Barto had created a form of biological matter which could be transmitted and configured by technology. An amputee would don a special armored suit called the Annexing Unit and use cybernetic commands to access the configurable matter from the Bio-Regenerative Energy Well (BREW). Summoning bio-matter from the BREW over ultra-high frequency radio waves, the Annexing Unit would then mold the adaptive material into a replacement limb. However, there were several glitches:

Adarco Corporation, the A.I.M. front company that sponsored Dr. Barto, was also a weapons manufacturing plant, and blueprint files from its inventory were also available for "creation" by the Unit. While wearing the armor, Annex could use the activation phrase, "Schema Mode -- Initiate!" to generate a facsimile leg for himself and download technologies directly into his suit or hands. This downloading process was potentially dangerous, however, because he would exchange portions of his own memory and personality each time he initiated a download, robbing him of his humanity. Alex soon learned how to consciously block this psychic downloading when utilizing the suit. Annex could mentally amplify his own strength and speed by downloading exoskeletal enhancements into the armor, visually scan information into his memory banks via an optical beam, add radio equipment and bio-scanners to his helmet, summon a thrust unit onto his back for flight, generate a magnetic attractor field from the armor, reconfigure the entire suit into an immobile construct for additional protection or to use himself as a barricade, redesign the armor as firefighting equipment to protect him from smoke and flame, and access any number of items including lasers, shields, stun pistols, flame ejectors, anti-riot rubber bullets, two-way video communicators, automatic pistols, laser-guided bazookas, plasma blasters, energy-absorbing rifles, armor-piercing guns, sonic blasters, anti-aircraft missile launchers, magnetic repulsors, CO2 guns, skeleton keys, alarm nullifiers, infrared goggles, etc.

While he originally needed to store the Annexing Unit armor and manually don it, Alex later had an implant surgically placed in his body so that he could summon and displace BREW matter at will. This not only provided him with instant access to his armor whenever he needed it, it also enabled him to generate and maintain his prosthetic leg at all times as well, or materialize individual items without summoning the entire armor to do so.

Alex Ellis is a war veteran with US Army training in hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, and weaponry.