Visible Man

Real Name: Frank Hart

Identity/Class: Human mutate

Occupation: Astronaut, former guinea pig, thrill-seeker, soldier

Affiliations: Marie, the Visible Woman

Enemies: Dr. Burnard

Known Relatives: None

Aliases: Freaky Frankie, Space Oddity

Base of Operations: None

First Appearance: 2000 A.D. Prog 47 (IPC, 14th January 1978)

Powers/Abilities: Good fighter. His transparent skin makes him vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation, which bypasses the surface to begin cooking his internal organs directly.

History: While racing a policeman trying to stop him for speeding, thrill-seeker Frank Hart crashed into a lorry carrying nuclear waste from Winscade Nuclear Centre and was immersed in radioactive sludge. Though he survived, his skin and surface muscular tissue was rendered transparent, transforming him into what scientist Dr. Burnard dubbed the "Visible Man." Burnard planned to use Frank as a guinea pig, but he escaped. Finding himself greeted with horror by all he encountered, and driven half mad, Frank found it impossible to re-enter society; an attempt to tan himself on a sunbed to restore pigmentation to his skin nearly killed him as the UV rays struck his unprotected internal organs, and covering himself with flesh-coloured make-up only worked for a short while, until his sweat caused the make-up to run.

He turned to his girlfriend Marie, a nurse, who elected to stand by him; however, the initial shock of seeing his new appearance caused her to scream, attracting the attention of others in her apartment building, and they attacked Frank. Escaping with a gunshot wound to his shoulder, Frank decided he could not subject Marie to his new life, and that since the world seemed to have rejected him, he no longer needed to play by society's rules, but he soon tired of being an exile from the human race. Frank called Burnard, offering to turn himself in if the doctor could find a cure for his condition, but Burnard, feeling no need to keep his word to a freak, betrayed him, tracing the call and sending the plant's security to capture him. Convincing the reluctant Frank to co-operate with another promise of curing him, Burnard shipped Frank to Cape Canaveral, where his transparent body was useful to the Space Program in seeing how bodies reacted to stress. Burnard demonstrated that he could cure Frank, using a skin pigmentation injection to return Frank's right hand to normal, then sent Frank up in an automated space shot to study how human organs reacted to space flight. However, hearing Burnard discussing the next experiment planned upon Frank's return to Earth, he realised the scientist would never run out of tests. Noting that his capsule's air recycling system and concentrated food tablets could keep him alive for a lifetime, Frank altered his trajectory to head out into deep space. "Maybe I'll meet someone or something out there who won't treat me like a freak - maybe it'll just be blackness. Either way it doesn't really matter." Ignoring the protests from ground control, Frank announced his resignation from the human race and headed off for the stars.

(Prog 1771) Frank eventually returned from the stars, having secretly made contact with an alien race, only to discover that in his absence his former bosses had deliberately repeated the accident that had transformed Frank to create another mutate, dubbed the Visible Woman.

(Prog 2013) Working together the Visible Man and Visible Woman escaped government custody and went on the run.

Comments: Created by Pat Mills and Trigo.

Frank is sent up into space in a transparent spacesuit so the scientists can see how his organs are affected by the space flight, and then asked to do a spacewalk, but we already know UV radiation causes Frank extreme pain in very short order; in space, with no atmosphere to dampen the sun's rays, and with a transparent suit, Frank should have been toast in very short order.

CLARIFICATIONS: None.

Any Additions/Corrections? Please let me know.

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