BLUE BLAZE

 

BLUE BLAZE

Real Name: Spencer Keen

First Appearance: Mystic Comics (Vol. 1) #1, January 1940

Powers: Originally a baseline human with no superhuman powers, Spencer Keen was a college student in 1852 when his scientist father discovered a flaming azure energy which he dubbed a "blue blaze". Dr. Keen's tests of the "blue blaze" on mice and insects killed them, but those creatures revived months later with enhanced strength and longevity. Shortly thereafter, Spencer was on his way to a masquerade ball wearing a blue costume when a tornado struck his college, killing 85% of the population and striking him with the "blue blaze", leaving him apparently slain. Left in his blue costume during the hasty mass burial and never processed by a mortician, Spencer spent decades in his grave in a form of suspended animation, his strength and durability slowly increasing while he subconsciously monitored the outside world's development via sub-strata dermatic rays. These rays showed him an increasingly corrupt world, and the dormant Keen dreamed of someday battling that corruption. Exactly 88 years after his burial, in 1940 Spencer rose from his grave, foiling grave robbers and adopting the super-hero identity of the Blue Blaze.

The Blue Blaze has Class 100 superhuman strength at peak energy levels, more often manifesting Class 10 strength. Superhumanly durable, he is totally bulletproof. During periods when he returns to his grave, a strange cosmic force periodically renders him intangible and moves him through the Earth to scenes of evil activity, where he rises from the ground and solidifies. If his strength is depleted through exertion or trauma, he can recharge it with a blue flame from his portable lighter.

A gifted amateur scientist he is skilled in physics, chemistry, astronomy and engineering. Keen sometimes wields two handguns. His hidden mountain retreat housed radio equipment, an observatory, a scientific laboratory and devices capable of long-distance energy detection and analysis. His specially modified roadster, said to be supercharged and capable of unlimited speed, may have been an early electric car powered by Keen's own quasi-electrical "blue blaze" energy.