LEADER

 

LEADER

Real Name: Samuel Sterns

First Appearance: Tales to Astonish (Vol. 1) #62, January 1964

Powers: Samuel Sterns was a manual laborer handling some radioactive materials one day when they exploded and bombarded him with gamma radiation. Recovering in a hospital, he began to read and retain every book and piece of information he found. A high school dropout, he found that his appetite for knowledge became more voracious when he developed superhuman intelligence and brain power due to the gamma radiation. Initially, his transformation caused his skin to turn a shade of green, and his brain and skull to stretch upwards, giving him a head that looked like an upright cylinder. Later, after temporarily losing his gamma-spawned power, the Leader arranged to siphon off gamma radiation from Rick Jones, who had temporarily been turned into a Hulk-like creature. After this process, the Leader's brain now expanded up and out, with two oversized hemispheres clearly visible, with a cleft in-between.

The Leader's superhuman intelligence has affected both his logical and intuitive mental capabilities. Like a computer, he is capable of storing large amounts of information in his brain and retrieving any of it on command. He possesses a total recall of everything he has seen or experienced while mutated. The Leader not only stores data, but can connect it in his mind as well, recognizes patterns and connections far faster and at a far more minuscule level than normal people. His intuitive faculties and ability to make leaps of logic have been increased to simplify highly complex scientific situations for his benefit, and enable it so that his guesses are far more probable to be correct than any normal person's. Following his second transformation, the Leader gained the power to mentally control anyone he touches, and maintained a psychic link with Rick Jones following the gamma process they underwent together, allowing him to read Jones' thoughts at will and experience things through Rick's senses.

The Leader's most serious weaknesses are his immaturity and impatience; several times his malevolent selfishness has caused him to lose sight of necessary precautions, or he has acted prematurely, causing the ruin of his schemes. His egotism has led him to embark on mad, impractical schemes to turn the rest of humanity into green-skinned beings like himself.