MOLE MAN

 

MOLE MAN

Real Name: Harvey Rupert Elder

First Appearance: Fantastic Four (Vol. 1) #1, November 1961

Powers: Although severely myopic to the point of near-blindness, the Mole Man has, through unidentified means, developed a compensatory radar sense: His brain generates a 360° electromagnetic signal via whose deflection he receives sensory signals from his general vicinity, providing a close analogue of human sight. His radar sense, combined with heightened senses of hearing, smell, and touch, grants him an awareness of his surroundings somewhat greater than that of an average human, enabling him to detect objects around him in total darkness.

Lacking formal instruction, he is a self-trained genius in many scientific fields, capable of mastering and improving advanced technology created millennia ago by non-human cultures. Though born in the late 1910s, he possesses the appearance of a man roughly half his age and the vitality of one even younger, although his radical behavior shifts suggest a possibly untreated bipolar disorder. He wears an earlier version of nuclear test-range flash goggles to reduce incoming light to tolerable levels. He is a formidable combatant and customarily carries a staff, usually made of aluminum or wood, which he developed to capitalize on his enhanced senses and low height. The staffs are constructed with patterns of ridges and bumps around the handgrip areas, conveying information to him by touch, and keyed to his unique skin conductivity in order to induce galvanic shock in anyone else who attempts to use them.

He possesses several such staffs, equipped with low-energy radar, flame-throwers, high-energy ultrasonic beams, electrical bolts up to 60,000 volts, gravity control, holographic projection, laser fire to carve through several feet of granite per minute, and other functions. He has access to literally caverns full of technology based upon that of the millennia-old Deviant civilization and is invariably accompanied wherever he goes by dozens or hundreds of his Moloid servants, also commanding gigantic super-powered Mutates in battle. When active on the surface, he sometimes rides a flying Mutate called a Skreeal.