Post by Alphaman on Mar 23, 2016 16:01:32 GMT -5
Name:
Alphaman, the Hero the World Forgot
Secret Identity:
Mace Adams
Age:
27 (107)
Affiliation:
The Forces of Good.
Base of Operations:
New York City as a civilian, anywhere he can be as Alphaman.
Appearance:
6'4"
230 Pounds.
Wears a Dark purple suit with light blue trim, a light blue cape, with his black sigil emblazoned across his chest: i.imgur.com/GqFHvdX.png
Powers:
Super Strength
Flying
Lightning Creation
Invulnerability (To scale)
Telekinesis
Weakness to Concentrated UVC Rays, Enhanced by UVR (UVA+UVB)
Personality: Aside from a brief period in the eighties, Mace has always been an incredibly kind and jovial man. Easygoing and quiet for the most part, people have usually believed Mace to be incredibly agreeable in any type of relationship, from friendship to romance to business.
Mace is patient, and has always had to be for his great strength and power. Even as a child he avoided confrontation for the most part, but was willing to get physical whenever he needed to. Sometimes his patience can cause him to miss an opportunity, as it takes a great deal to happen for Mace to not act cautiously. An avid reader, Mace loves books of all genres though his favorite have always been contemporary literature and science fiction. He's also been deeply enamored with cooking since a young age, and could likely attain a place in any chef's kitchen.
Due to Mace's family being quite poor in his early life, Mace is very closed off in certain aspects, especially in regards to money. One of the only easy ways to make the big man grow angry with you is to show him pity, he cannot stand to feel like he is being patronized or looked down on.
Origin Story:
(Golden Age)
Mace Addams was born the sixth child and only son of George Addams, a shipping manager, and Margaret Addams a housewife in 1909 in the south side of Chicago. His family was incredibly poor, and Mace got his first job fetching pins at a bowling alley when he was only nine. As his family struggled through hardships, Mace was given praise by his teachers and employer. His teachers were shocked at the young man's mind for science, and his manager at the bowling alley believed him to be one of the hardest working young men in the city.
When Mace turned eighteen, he was the first person in his family to graduate high school, and later that year, to go to college. College was difficult for Mace, he was in a small town, working two jobs, using the money from one to support himself and pay for school, and the money for the other he sent home. Still, he was a good student, and would have graduated with a physics degree on time. If, it hadn't been for the great depression. His father lost his job, his mother had to start cleaning houses. His older sister Daisy, the youngest Addams kid other than Mace himself, got a job as a waitress. Depsite Mace's mothers protests, The young man came back to Chicago two years before he was supposed to graduate, and picked up one job at the Long Lanes Bowling Alley he'd worked at before leaving town, and another taking shifts as a construction worker.
Mace had never been a strong man, and the construction was hard. He was the youngest man on the site, and the weakest. The other men laughed at him, but Mace persevered, and after a few months his sister was able to quit her job. His father took over Mace's construction job, and the young man was able to pick up more hours at the bowling alley. As the manager had to lay off more and more employees, he kept Mace around, who was willing to do the work of ten men. Eventually, a few weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday, Mace was promoted to assistant manager. No pay raise.
On the night Mace turned twenty-seven, he was the one closing the alley at night. While he was cleaning the concession stand, he heard what he thought was a thump on the roof. Deciding his job meant he had to investigate anything that could be wrong in the alley, Mace climbed up to the roof to get a look at what could possibly have made the noise. When he got up top, he noticed nothing the matter, and was just about to head back down when something caught his eye, the moon.
Looking up at it, Mace was suddenly reminded of how he had been robbed. How his life should have been on a track to him being a scientist, so that he could work on planes that soared through the galaxy like the ones in the books he had read as a child. He'd wanted to stand on the moon, and now he was here, standing on the roof of a bowling alley he'd probably work at for the rest of his life, looking up at it. The young man who was slow to anger grew furious, and let out a great roar that carried to any within a close distance who may have been listening.
If fate had taken his chance at a better life away with one hand, at that moment, it was given back to him with the other. A meteor the size of a grape hit him hard on the head, and Mace was knocked unconscious. When he awoke, he was not on the roof of the Long Lane Bowling Alley, but on a cloud. He didn't look at a drab skyline, but instead at twelve giant beings all in their own thrones. One of them, the largest, a man with a golden beard spoke, "Mace Addams."
Terrified, the young man replied, "Y-yes?" The being spoke again. "You have been chosen." Mace was shaking, "I don't understand, chosen for what?" As he spoke, a pair of snakes wrapped themselves around his legs and wound up his body, and then both of them sunk their venomous teeth into his neck.
With a brief flash of pain, Mace woke up, back on the roof of the bowling alley, but he felt strangely different. He looked over at the meteor, and saw that it was still hot. Worried that it could set the roof on fire, Mace began to scramble to get up to move it off. However, as he picked it up, it burned his hands, and he cried out, and threw it away. It headed straight toward a car parked on the street outside the Bowling Alley, and Mace wished with every part of himself that he could stop it. To his shock, the thing stopped dead in the air. He willed it back to the roof, and it floated up. Shocked, Mace set it down, then looked down at his hands. Shocked again, he wore an odd ring and his forearms were covered with a white fabric that stuck to his skin, and looking at the rest of his body and to his shock, he wore the same fabric a whole body suit, boots, and a cape that reached just above the ground.
Getting an idea in his head, he tried to lift himself, and to his shock, he floated in the air. He laughed, and began to soar around, flying at an extreme speed above the bowling alley in loops through the air. Eventually however, he lost concentration, and Mace flew into the sign for the bowling alley, hitting the purple and light blue logo. As his clothes hit the logo, the colors suddenly flowed through his costume. Stopping himself from hitting the ground, he flew himself back up to the roof, and used his powers to lift the meteor, and returned to the inside of the bowing alley.
While the meteor cooled, Mace tried to take his suit off, but it did not work. He ran to the bathroom, and tried to rip the suit off, but it didn't work. Looking in the mirror, he noticed for the first time the odd black symbol on his chest. It looked like an A inside one of those odd Greek letters, but for the moment Mace was uninterested in it, he only wished to get his new suit off. Trying to see if any bit of the clothes could come off, he grabbed the ring and tried to slide it off, and as he touched it, there was a flash of light from the ring, and when Mace looked up in the mirror again, he was back in his work uniform.
Using his mind to fly and carry the meteor, Mace headed home, and slept through the night. Two weeks later, when a pair of mobsters robbed a bank while Mace was depositing his money, he made his debut, being declared by the news as Alphaman in 1936. When he had touched the ring and his costume erupted onto his body, he was surprised to find that there was an empty quiver on his hip. Eventually he reached into it on one misadventure, and when he brought his hand out he held a yellow lightning bolt.
After about two years of heroics, Alphaman fought a mad scientist name Doctor Mortell, and the man had an odd pair of gloves that gave him godly strength. Upon his victory, Alphaman took the gloves from the man, and donned them, adding strength to his list of abilities. Mace Addams continued his career as a costumed hero until the year 1961, when he fought his greatest fight, against Doctor Mortell.
The Mad Doctor had created a portal to another dimension, a dimension where the version of Mace Addams that had received powers was called Omega, and was a Supervillain. The Doctor convinced Omega to fight with Alphaman, who was shocked that another version of him would commit evil. The two fought a raging battle across the Earth, with Omega willing to do far more damage than Alphaman had ever done in his fights before. Though Alphaman tried with all his might to protect them, hundreds of thousands of people died in the fight. After two days of the two men fighting, Alphaman committed a sin he thought he'd never do, and killed a man. With the dead body of Omega in his hands, he flew to the Moon.
Upon reaching the Moon, the first man to walk on its surface, Mace let out a great roar that could be heard on Earth. Once more, the twelve answered him, and he was instantly in front of them. He demanded they intervene, and bring everyone killed in his fight with another man they created back. The leader agreed on one condition, Mace would be written out of history. The aged hero agreed, and was sent back to the moon, being given a few brief seconds to look at the Earth from the surface of a place no man had gone before.
Unbeknownst to him, Mace Addams was not the only person written out of the Earth's history. Everyone in his life that he was close to was similarly removed and replaced with a new soul.
However, the twelve were not content, and they believed that the world would need an Alphaman, and so a large number of the new souls that sprung into being were ones that had walked the Earth before.
(Silver Age)
Mace Adams was born the son of a poor warehouse manager named George Adams and a secretary at an ad agency named Mary Adams in the south side of Chicago in 1934. The last of six kids and the only boy, Mace was the darling of the family. While his sisters helped around the house or actually got jobs out in the real world, Mace was meant to spend his time studying, though he would often make time to explore the city. One of his favorite places to visit was a bowling alley a few blocks away from his families apartment. Eventually his time was split between school, studying, reading, and trying to help the old manager anytime he could. So when he was fifteen, the bowling alley became the place where he had his first job.
At eighteen he graduated high school with honors, and became the first person in his family to attend college. College was difficult, though he did have a number of scholarships, Mace had to work long hours as a waiter to put himself through school, and it made his double major quite hard to keep up with. However, he persevered, and managed to graduate with a degree in Physics and Marketing. Instead of going into research or teaching as many expected him, he decided to pursue one of his greatest dreams: to walk on the moon. So, Mace Adams joined the Air Force.
Two years after joining, serving as a distinguished pilot in Vietnam, Mace was selected as the top candidate for a secret project. To be the first man into space with an experimental rocket, with the project set to complete in 1961 a few months ahead of a similar effort made by the Soviets. In the project Mace was surrounded by some of the greatest scientific minds of his time, and with the help of a young man named Mortell, Mace constructed an exoskeleton frame for a man's arms that would give him incredible strength.
Mace was eventually one of the last two men left in the process in 1960, when his father suffered a heart attack and lost his job back in Chicago. The stress from his father's health caused Mace to fail three psych evaluations in a row, and the young man was dropped from the program, which would later fail as the rocket was deemed unfit for launch, and the United States lost one of the early battles of the Space Race.
Disgraced, Mace headed home and took up a job with an ad agency to pay the bills for his struggling family, the very same agency his mother had worked as a secretary. It had been at her behest that he studied marketing in school, and with her help that he received the job now. Horribly depressed, Mace felt as if the world had abandoned him, as his father's health dwindled, and his starting salary barely managed to provide for his family. On his 27th birthday however, all that changed.
He was looking out his window through his telescope, up at the moon, through a sky filled with rain and black clouds. It had seemed so close, but now it was out of his reach forever. In a moment of weakness, he let out a loud roar, and slowly had to call to his mother that he was fine and that he didn't need any help. Out of the window then, he saw a shooting star. Training the telescope to look at it, he realized it was a meteoroid not a meteorite, which meant that though small, it would make an impact with the Earth. He guess its trajectory, and was shocked when he estimated it would land near the same Long Lanes Bowling Alley he had frequented and worked at in his youth. Grabbing the Exoskeleton Gauntlets, Mace rushed over to the bowling alley.
When he got there, he saw it, a small crater formed by a heap of space rock the size of, ironically, a bowling ball. With protective covering in place on the gauntlets, lifted the meteoroid up off the ground. The rain did a little to cool it, but Mace was still amazed at the raw heat the thing emitted. Without warning, a bolt of lightning came down from one of the clouds above, a sickly yellow bolt that struck the rock in Mace's hands. A shock went through Mace's body like a racehorse, and the exoskeleton burst, forcing Mace to drop the burning thing. After an instant, he blacked out.
He saw nothing, felt nothing, but he heard one powerful voice that he strangely perceived to be not quite alone say, "Mace Adams, you are chosen."
He woke back up, on his back in the same parking lot, feeling so vastly different from the man he had been before, but oddly he felt an extreme case of deja vu. Looking down at his body, he was in an odd white suit made of a strange material, that covered nearly his whole body save for his head and hands, and there rested a white cape behind him.He picked himself up and noticed something else. His physique had changed dramatically, he looked like a bulldozer. He was huge, and he felt it, felt a great deal of power coursing through his body. He had an odd idea, and that idea led to something even stranger. Thinking of his strange new power lifting him through the air, and suddenly, he floated a few inches above the ground.
Elated and laughing like a young man, Mace tried to soar high into the sky, and with no idea how to control himself, he flew straight into the giant logo of the bowling alley, and his strange garb took on the color of the logo, dark purple with light blue. As he recovered himself, realizing he'd felt no pain from the contact, another idea came over him. There was a ring on his hand, that felt oddly familiar. Mace reached down, and tapped the top of the ring, and suddenly, he was back in the very clothes he had worn back in his own room looking at the moon through his telescope.
He retrieved the hunk of rock. Palming it, Mace felt as if he were lifting a safety pin, the thing he'd barely been able to lift moments ago was practically weightless. For a few weeks he explored his powers, and soon realized that his body could create white hot electricity, and that he was able to move things with his mind just as he had flown.
About a month and a half, Alphaman made his debut fighting a villain named Circus Freak in downtown Chicago in 1961. For the next thirteen years, Alphaman would fight many villains, go on many adventures, accomplish many astounding feats. Many of his exploits would be considered quite odd, it was not uncommon for Alphaman to turn into a worm or other strange animal for a time while fighting against a villain. On one occasion he was hit with a ray of radiation that made him sing everything he said until he managed to find a scientist able to recreate the exact wavelength of radiation. It was a light era for Alphaman, and through this time he was a shining beacon for the people of Earth, constantly discovering new abilities in himself, and helping others.
In 1974, that all changed. The greatest threat Alphaman ever came to face was that of a Doctor only a few years older than him, Doctor Claudius Mortell. The doctor hated Alphaman to his very core, seeing the man as a walking bicep with little to no reason to be seen in the light he was viewed by so many. So deep was his hatred that one day he created a time machine that unbeknownst to him, created a crack in reality each time it was used. As Mortell continually went through Alphaman's past adventures and attempted to best his adversary, the world grew stranger and far more different, so that eventually even the people of Earth began to change shape, size, or disposition.
The state of reality became so odd and broken, that eventually many planets of the multiverse declared war on Mace Adams' universe. With the people of Earth in disarray, Alphaman was its sole champion, and the man was made to fight a vast war against invaders from alternate dimensions, until eventually Mortell had seen the error of his ways. He created a device that did not allow one to travel through time, only to travel to the exact time you were living in a different dimension.
Using the device at random, Alphaman jumped through each other reality, until finally, he came to a dimension that simply was reality. It was like a massive wall, a tapestry of existence, that showed in front of Alphaman. He flew about, seeing that there were cracks and pieces that were almost broken everywhere but one spot. There was a piece of reality that was surrounded by cracks, but not broken itself, his piece. Realizing what had to be done, Mace pulled his piece which was separated from the rest of the wall by the cracks. He then broke the dimension shifting device, and returned to his own universe, where he stood on Earth for a moment. Feeling nostalgic, he quickly flew around it, and landed on the moon, something he'd been so wrapped up in hero work, he'd never had time to actually do. He wasn't the first man to do it, but he finally did it. No psyche evaluation could take it from him. Then, he and all the people whose place in reality had rested on his piece suddenly stopped being, and new pieces took their place, with reality fixing all the cracks.
Still, reality would need Alphaman again, and fate, the twelve, the world would create him once more.
(Bronze Age)
Mace Adams was born in 1952 as the youngest child and only son of poor parents, George Adams a union manager, and Maria Adams a typewriter at an ad agency, in the south side of Chicago. As a young man he bullied in school, with children constantly belittling him over his family's financial situation. Because of this constant ridicule and abuse, Mace grew up tough, and was considered a problem child in the classroom. According to his teachers, "Mace picks fights with some of the more affluent boys." However, when his father asked him whether that was the case or not and Mace denied it, George Adams believed his son. They took Mace out of his school, and both parents did all they could to get him enrolled in private school and once they did, the boy excelled.
His best classes were English and the sciences, and the two came together in his deep love of science fiction. Though he would never admit it, for fear of being labeled a nerd, Mace wished more than anything to be a science fiction writer. More openly he wished to be an astronaut, and the final years of the sixties saw the young boy glued to the television to see whether man would truly make it to the moon, and after man did, Mace told everyone who would listen about the entire lives of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.
When the young Mace turned fourteen, he realized that his parents wouldn't be able to afford to send him to college/ So he decided to go out and get a job himself, and found one at the bowling alley very near his home. So the young man spent his high school days studying, exercising, and working at the alley. He was quickly given a number of promotions, and with them a bit more money for his work. At the end of his high school days, Mace had made just enough money to afford to put himself through college, but didn't have to pay the whole way. He had earned a small rugby scholarship as well as a few scholarships within the physics program at a small college in Montana. And so he attended, and got fantastic grades, working a job as an assistant at a small ad agency to save money. At school he studied physics as a major, but also earned a minor in marketing. When he had earned his degree, he signed up for the air force, and spent a few years training and working his way into NASA. It wasn't long before he was first in line to be the first man on mars in an experimental flight planned for 1979.
Everything worked out, and the man was selected as the sole member of space project Dionysus 7. He piloted the shuttle into orbit on the night of his twenty-seventh birthday, the craft powered by an experimental fuel of nuclear radiation. However, there was something completely unforeseen that came to pass. A meteor made contact with the ship, and blew it right out of the sky. However, as he fell, he did not die, instead he blacked out. He felt an odd presence, and suddenly woke up, unscathed, in the very parking lot of the bowling alley he'd once worked in, with a hunk of space rock resting on his chest. His flight suit was gone, but in its place was an odd suit, cape, boots, weird pattern and sigil, the works. It was plain white. The meteorite flew off of his chest with a thought, and Mace stood after it, perplexed.
With thoughts he swung the meteorite across the parking lot air, and eventually decided to try lifting something else, him. It worked, and through the air he flew, laughing all the time until he hit the old sign of the alley, and took on the colors of the blue and purple sign. Still laughing, he carried the meteorite to his childhood home and stashed it there, then found the remnants of his spacesuit and returned to Nasa, claiming to have somehow survived and to have been found by fishing vessel. He was debriefed, discharged, and given a settlement that made it seem he didn't need to work ever again.
However, the young man found a job anyway, at the ad agency his mother had worked at when he was a child. When his father retired, and his mother did the same, he was able to support them alongside all of his sisters, and besides his time as a Madman at the company's New York branch he spent time busting crime as Alphaman.
His adventures were far less silly and all over the place than his last incarnation. They were more serious, about darker things. People close to Mace died directly due to some of his actions. Some due to his inaction. From the year 1986 to 1987 Mace was very dark, and even killed two of his villains as a result of his long time girlfriend Clarissa Cane being killed by his enemy Circus Freak. This Alphaman lasted the longest of them all, he lived to be sixty four. Fighting in numerous conflicts that threatened the very fabric of reality or the Earth. His final and greatest battle was against a massive monster created by Dr. Claudias Mortell called Devastation, created in something designated project Hispaniola.
The monster was far more powerful than Alphaman had ever been. However, halfway through the battle, time suddenly stopped around Alphaman, and suddenly a villain who'd troubled Mace for a long time came to him, Andronicus, an alien scientist who had troubled him for decades. Andronicus offered him a way to defeat Devastation, to call upon the Alphamen of the past. So, when time started up again, Devastation did not face one Alphaman, but three. The alien scientist had revealed to the Bronze Age Alphaman that he was the weakest Alphaman there had been or would be, and in the fight he came to realize this as the first Alphaman fared far better than he, and the second was able to go toe to toe with Devastation.
Upon the villain's defeat the other two Alphamen returned home, and Mace Adams born in the year 1952 and now in the modern year was left alone with Andronicus, who revealed that he had needed Alphaman alive, because he'd discovered that there was a precedent in the cycle of change in the universe that Alphaman would not die permanently. For this, he had created a device on Mars that would destroy the universe, that he claimed would test the theory. He'd used the distraction of the fight to position to the device. It would destroy the solar system, but it wouldn't last, and the world would be rebuilt with Alphaman and all those related to him the same, which would include Andronicus. However, those unrelated to Mace would be gone, and Andronicus could live with that.
Mace couldn't. He flew to Mars, becoming the first man to set foot on the red soil. Flying around at his top speed, he eventually found it, a strange device that wasn't human. Wrapping the device in his arms, he contained the explosion, but still lost his life. Andronicus was not surprised, his plan had worked. He had already proven his theory of Mace's recreation, and had managed to make him fall into a trap that gave him a new leg up over the hero. The device ran on UVC radiation, the only radiation not present in the ship that Mace had flown the day that he got his powers. As the world changed, and the twelve once more changed the make up and events of the people around Alphaman, Andronicus' theory would come true, and the new Mace would come back vulnerable to concentrated forms of the same radiation.
The Twelve Decided once more that the world would need Alphaman, they felt the world changing, and that the world was going to be gaining a larger number of powered individuals. He would be more vital than ever.
(Modern Age)
Mace Adams was born the youngest child and only son of poor parents, George Adams a union manager, and Maria Adams an ad writer. Mace was a naturally large child, and would often defend the smaller boys at his school from a number of older bullies, and when the teachers at his school brought this up, Mace's parents moved him to a private school. Without distraction, Mace was able to do very well in school, excelling in science and literature. Like many young men he dreamed of being a writer, and mostly wanted to venture into the field of science fiction.
At fourteen, the young man began to volunteer at a local bowling alley, where he was hired at sixteen. He worked fairly hard, and made enough money to help his parents pay for his college. He graduated with a sizable Physics scholarship, but he only managed to make it through two years before he had to head home to support his family. His father had lost his job in the recession, and Mace felt they needed him. He returned, and worked as a waiter as well as returning to the bowling alley he'd been employed at in high school. All the time, After a few years there, the family started to do better, and at twenty five, his sister got him a job with the ad agency at which she worked. It was the very same place their mother had worked.
The position was as manager of the social media campaigns for companies represented by the agency. With that position he was able to push through the hard times, and his father was able to return to work. On the night of his twenty seventh birthday, he felt forlorn, remembering his dreams of creating a vast world in the stars. He looked through some old notebooks, and found a half finished novel about Martians that he had written. He decided to take a look through his old telescope at the red planet, but as he looked for it, he saw a shooting star. Quickly he checked where it was going, and headed to the location, the bowling alley at which he had worked as a young man and a few years before.
Using his old key, he made it to the roof, but dejectedly found there was no meteorite. Looking up at the star in the sky he knew to be the red planet, the young man fell to his knees and let out a massive roar that no one could hear. Then, fate let its hand play, and a meteorite the size of a bowling ball hit his head. He was knocked completely unconscious. When he awoke, he was not on the roof of the Long Lane Bowling Alley, but on a cloud. He didn't look at a drab skyline, but instead at twelve giant beings all in their own thrones. One of them, the largest, a man with a golden beard spoke, "Mace Adams."
Terrified, the young man replied, "Yes?" The being spoke again. "You have been chosen." Mace was shaking, "I don't understand, what have you chosen me for?" As he spoke, a pair of glowing snakes wrapped themselves around his legs and wound up his body, and then both of them sunk their venomous teeth into his neck. At the same time, bolt erupted from the hand of the leader of the twelve, and struck Mace in the chest.
Upon waking up, with a supreme case of Deja Vu, Mace found himself in an odd costume. It was plain white, but as a joke, Mace imagined himself flying, and suddenly he shot into the sky, and rammed into the old fashioned bowling alley sign, and his plain white costume took on the colors of blue and purple. Then he tested his thoughts on the meteorite, and took the thing back home. Over the next week, he tested his powers, and discovered a number of others like the manipulation of blue lightning. Very soon after the incident, Mace was transferred to the New York branch of his ad agency.
Now, the new incarnation of Alphaman waits, to make his debut.
Alphaman, the Hero the World Forgot
Secret Identity:
Mace Adams
Age:
27 (107)
Affiliation:
The Forces of Good.
Base of Operations:
New York City as a civilian, anywhere he can be as Alphaman.
Appearance:
6'4"
230 Pounds.
Wears a Dark purple suit with light blue trim, a light blue cape, with his black sigil emblazoned across his chest: i.imgur.com/GqFHvdX.png
Powers:
Super Strength
Flying
Lightning Creation
Invulnerability (To scale)
Telekinesis
Weakness to Concentrated UVC Rays, Enhanced by UVR (UVA+UVB)
Personality: Aside from a brief period in the eighties, Mace has always been an incredibly kind and jovial man. Easygoing and quiet for the most part, people have usually believed Mace to be incredibly agreeable in any type of relationship, from friendship to romance to business.
Mace is patient, and has always had to be for his great strength and power. Even as a child he avoided confrontation for the most part, but was willing to get physical whenever he needed to. Sometimes his patience can cause him to miss an opportunity, as it takes a great deal to happen for Mace to not act cautiously. An avid reader, Mace loves books of all genres though his favorite have always been contemporary literature and science fiction. He's also been deeply enamored with cooking since a young age, and could likely attain a place in any chef's kitchen.
Due to Mace's family being quite poor in his early life, Mace is very closed off in certain aspects, especially in regards to money. One of the only easy ways to make the big man grow angry with you is to show him pity, he cannot stand to feel like he is being patronized or looked down on.
Origin Story:
(Golden Age)
Mace Addams was born the sixth child and only son of George Addams, a shipping manager, and Margaret Addams a housewife in 1909 in the south side of Chicago. His family was incredibly poor, and Mace got his first job fetching pins at a bowling alley when he was only nine. As his family struggled through hardships, Mace was given praise by his teachers and employer. His teachers were shocked at the young man's mind for science, and his manager at the bowling alley believed him to be one of the hardest working young men in the city.
When Mace turned eighteen, he was the first person in his family to graduate high school, and later that year, to go to college. College was difficult for Mace, he was in a small town, working two jobs, using the money from one to support himself and pay for school, and the money for the other he sent home. Still, he was a good student, and would have graduated with a physics degree on time. If, it hadn't been for the great depression. His father lost his job, his mother had to start cleaning houses. His older sister Daisy, the youngest Addams kid other than Mace himself, got a job as a waitress. Depsite Mace's mothers protests, The young man came back to Chicago two years before he was supposed to graduate, and picked up one job at the Long Lanes Bowling Alley he'd worked at before leaving town, and another taking shifts as a construction worker.
Mace had never been a strong man, and the construction was hard. He was the youngest man on the site, and the weakest. The other men laughed at him, but Mace persevered, and after a few months his sister was able to quit her job. His father took over Mace's construction job, and the young man was able to pick up more hours at the bowling alley. As the manager had to lay off more and more employees, he kept Mace around, who was willing to do the work of ten men. Eventually, a few weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday, Mace was promoted to assistant manager. No pay raise.
On the night Mace turned twenty-seven, he was the one closing the alley at night. While he was cleaning the concession stand, he heard what he thought was a thump on the roof. Deciding his job meant he had to investigate anything that could be wrong in the alley, Mace climbed up to the roof to get a look at what could possibly have made the noise. When he got up top, he noticed nothing the matter, and was just about to head back down when something caught his eye, the moon.
Looking up at it, Mace was suddenly reminded of how he had been robbed. How his life should have been on a track to him being a scientist, so that he could work on planes that soared through the galaxy like the ones in the books he had read as a child. He'd wanted to stand on the moon, and now he was here, standing on the roof of a bowling alley he'd probably work at for the rest of his life, looking up at it. The young man who was slow to anger grew furious, and let out a great roar that carried to any within a close distance who may have been listening.
If fate had taken his chance at a better life away with one hand, at that moment, it was given back to him with the other. A meteor the size of a grape hit him hard on the head, and Mace was knocked unconscious. When he awoke, he was not on the roof of the Long Lane Bowling Alley, but on a cloud. He didn't look at a drab skyline, but instead at twelve giant beings all in their own thrones. One of them, the largest, a man with a golden beard spoke, "Mace Addams."
Terrified, the young man replied, "Y-yes?" The being spoke again. "You have been chosen." Mace was shaking, "I don't understand, chosen for what?" As he spoke, a pair of snakes wrapped themselves around his legs and wound up his body, and then both of them sunk their venomous teeth into his neck.
With a brief flash of pain, Mace woke up, back on the roof of the bowling alley, but he felt strangely different. He looked over at the meteor, and saw that it was still hot. Worried that it could set the roof on fire, Mace began to scramble to get up to move it off. However, as he picked it up, it burned his hands, and he cried out, and threw it away. It headed straight toward a car parked on the street outside the Bowling Alley, and Mace wished with every part of himself that he could stop it. To his shock, the thing stopped dead in the air. He willed it back to the roof, and it floated up. Shocked, Mace set it down, then looked down at his hands. Shocked again, he wore an odd ring and his forearms were covered with a white fabric that stuck to his skin, and looking at the rest of his body and to his shock, he wore the same fabric a whole body suit, boots, and a cape that reached just above the ground.
Getting an idea in his head, he tried to lift himself, and to his shock, he floated in the air. He laughed, and began to soar around, flying at an extreme speed above the bowling alley in loops through the air. Eventually however, he lost concentration, and Mace flew into the sign for the bowling alley, hitting the purple and light blue logo. As his clothes hit the logo, the colors suddenly flowed through his costume. Stopping himself from hitting the ground, he flew himself back up to the roof, and used his powers to lift the meteor, and returned to the inside of the bowing alley.
While the meteor cooled, Mace tried to take his suit off, but it did not work. He ran to the bathroom, and tried to rip the suit off, but it didn't work. Looking in the mirror, he noticed for the first time the odd black symbol on his chest. It looked like an A inside one of those odd Greek letters, but for the moment Mace was uninterested in it, he only wished to get his new suit off. Trying to see if any bit of the clothes could come off, he grabbed the ring and tried to slide it off, and as he touched it, there was a flash of light from the ring, and when Mace looked up in the mirror again, he was back in his work uniform.
Using his mind to fly and carry the meteor, Mace headed home, and slept through the night. Two weeks later, when a pair of mobsters robbed a bank while Mace was depositing his money, he made his debut, being declared by the news as Alphaman in 1936. When he had touched the ring and his costume erupted onto his body, he was surprised to find that there was an empty quiver on his hip. Eventually he reached into it on one misadventure, and when he brought his hand out he held a yellow lightning bolt.
After about two years of heroics, Alphaman fought a mad scientist name Doctor Mortell, and the man had an odd pair of gloves that gave him godly strength. Upon his victory, Alphaman took the gloves from the man, and donned them, adding strength to his list of abilities. Mace Addams continued his career as a costumed hero until the year 1961, when he fought his greatest fight, against Doctor Mortell.
The Mad Doctor had created a portal to another dimension, a dimension where the version of Mace Addams that had received powers was called Omega, and was a Supervillain. The Doctor convinced Omega to fight with Alphaman, who was shocked that another version of him would commit evil. The two fought a raging battle across the Earth, with Omega willing to do far more damage than Alphaman had ever done in his fights before. Though Alphaman tried with all his might to protect them, hundreds of thousands of people died in the fight. After two days of the two men fighting, Alphaman committed a sin he thought he'd never do, and killed a man. With the dead body of Omega in his hands, he flew to the Moon.
Upon reaching the Moon, the first man to walk on its surface, Mace let out a great roar that could be heard on Earth. Once more, the twelve answered him, and he was instantly in front of them. He demanded they intervene, and bring everyone killed in his fight with another man they created back. The leader agreed on one condition, Mace would be written out of history. The aged hero agreed, and was sent back to the moon, being given a few brief seconds to look at the Earth from the surface of a place no man had gone before.
Unbeknownst to him, Mace Addams was not the only person written out of the Earth's history. Everyone in his life that he was close to was similarly removed and replaced with a new soul.
However, the twelve were not content, and they believed that the world would need an Alphaman, and so a large number of the new souls that sprung into being were ones that had walked the Earth before.
(Silver Age)
Mace Adams was born the son of a poor warehouse manager named George Adams and a secretary at an ad agency named Mary Adams in the south side of Chicago in 1934. The last of six kids and the only boy, Mace was the darling of the family. While his sisters helped around the house or actually got jobs out in the real world, Mace was meant to spend his time studying, though he would often make time to explore the city. One of his favorite places to visit was a bowling alley a few blocks away from his families apartment. Eventually his time was split between school, studying, reading, and trying to help the old manager anytime he could. So when he was fifteen, the bowling alley became the place where he had his first job.
At eighteen he graduated high school with honors, and became the first person in his family to attend college. College was difficult, though he did have a number of scholarships, Mace had to work long hours as a waiter to put himself through school, and it made his double major quite hard to keep up with. However, he persevered, and managed to graduate with a degree in Physics and Marketing. Instead of going into research or teaching as many expected him, he decided to pursue one of his greatest dreams: to walk on the moon. So, Mace Adams joined the Air Force.
Two years after joining, serving as a distinguished pilot in Vietnam, Mace was selected as the top candidate for a secret project. To be the first man into space with an experimental rocket, with the project set to complete in 1961 a few months ahead of a similar effort made by the Soviets. In the project Mace was surrounded by some of the greatest scientific minds of his time, and with the help of a young man named Mortell, Mace constructed an exoskeleton frame for a man's arms that would give him incredible strength.
Mace was eventually one of the last two men left in the process in 1960, when his father suffered a heart attack and lost his job back in Chicago. The stress from his father's health caused Mace to fail three psych evaluations in a row, and the young man was dropped from the program, which would later fail as the rocket was deemed unfit for launch, and the United States lost one of the early battles of the Space Race.
Disgraced, Mace headed home and took up a job with an ad agency to pay the bills for his struggling family, the very same agency his mother had worked as a secretary. It had been at her behest that he studied marketing in school, and with her help that he received the job now. Horribly depressed, Mace felt as if the world had abandoned him, as his father's health dwindled, and his starting salary barely managed to provide for his family. On his 27th birthday however, all that changed.
He was looking out his window through his telescope, up at the moon, through a sky filled with rain and black clouds. It had seemed so close, but now it was out of his reach forever. In a moment of weakness, he let out a loud roar, and slowly had to call to his mother that he was fine and that he didn't need any help. Out of the window then, he saw a shooting star. Training the telescope to look at it, he realized it was a meteoroid not a meteorite, which meant that though small, it would make an impact with the Earth. He guess its trajectory, and was shocked when he estimated it would land near the same Long Lanes Bowling Alley he had frequented and worked at in his youth. Grabbing the Exoskeleton Gauntlets, Mace rushed over to the bowling alley.
When he got there, he saw it, a small crater formed by a heap of space rock the size of, ironically, a bowling ball. With protective covering in place on the gauntlets, lifted the meteoroid up off the ground. The rain did a little to cool it, but Mace was still amazed at the raw heat the thing emitted. Without warning, a bolt of lightning came down from one of the clouds above, a sickly yellow bolt that struck the rock in Mace's hands. A shock went through Mace's body like a racehorse, and the exoskeleton burst, forcing Mace to drop the burning thing. After an instant, he blacked out.
He saw nothing, felt nothing, but he heard one powerful voice that he strangely perceived to be not quite alone say, "Mace Adams, you are chosen."
He woke back up, on his back in the same parking lot, feeling so vastly different from the man he had been before, but oddly he felt an extreme case of deja vu. Looking down at his body, he was in an odd white suit made of a strange material, that covered nearly his whole body save for his head and hands, and there rested a white cape behind him.He picked himself up and noticed something else. His physique had changed dramatically, he looked like a bulldozer. He was huge, and he felt it, felt a great deal of power coursing through his body. He had an odd idea, and that idea led to something even stranger. Thinking of his strange new power lifting him through the air, and suddenly, he floated a few inches above the ground.
Elated and laughing like a young man, Mace tried to soar high into the sky, and with no idea how to control himself, he flew straight into the giant logo of the bowling alley, and his strange garb took on the color of the logo, dark purple with light blue. As he recovered himself, realizing he'd felt no pain from the contact, another idea came over him. There was a ring on his hand, that felt oddly familiar. Mace reached down, and tapped the top of the ring, and suddenly, he was back in the very clothes he had worn back in his own room looking at the moon through his telescope.
He retrieved the hunk of rock. Palming it, Mace felt as if he were lifting a safety pin, the thing he'd barely been able to lift moments ago was practically weightless. For a few weeks he explored his powers, and soon realized that his body could create white hot electricity, and that he was able to move things with his mind just as he had flown.
About a month and a half, Alphaman made his debut fighting a villain named Circus Freak in downtown Chicago in 1961. For the next thirteen years, Alphaman would fight many villains, go on many adventures, accomplish many astounding feats. Many of his exploits would be considered quite odd, it was not uncommon for Alphaman to turn into a worm or other strange animal for a time while fighting against a villain. On one occasion he was hit with a ray of radiation that made him sing everything he said until he managed to find a scientist able to recreate the exact wavelength of radiation. It was a light era for Alphaman, and through this time he was a shining beacon for the people of Earth, constantly discovering new abilities in himself, and helping others.
In 1974, that all changed. The greatest threat Alphaman ever came to face was that of a Doctor only a few years older than him, Doctor Claudius Mortell. The doctor hated Alphaman to his very core, seeing the man as a walking bicep with little to no reason to be seen in the light he was viewed by so many. So deep was his hatred that one day he created a time machine that unbeknownst to him, created a crack in reality each time it was used. As Mortell continually went through Alphaman's past adventures and attempted to best his adversary, the world grew stranger and far more different, so that eventually even the people of Earth began to change shape, size, or disposition.
The state of reality became so odd and broken, that eventually many planets of the multiverse declared war on Mace Adams' universe. With the people of Earth in disarray, Alphaman was its sole champion, and the man was made to fight a vast war against invaders from alternate dimensions, until eventually Mortell had seen the error of his ways. He created a device that did not allow one to travel through time, only to travel to the exact time you were living in a different dimension.
Using the device at random, Alphaman jumped through each other reality, until finally, he came to a dimension that simply was reality. It was like a massive wall, a tapestry of existence, that showed in front of Alphaman. He flew about, seeing that there were cracks and pieces that were almost broken everywhere but one spot. There was a piece of reality that was surrounded by cracks, but not broken itself, his piece. Realizing what had to be done, Mace pulled his piece which was separated from the rest of the wall by the cracks. He then broke the dimension shifting device, and returned to his own universe, where he stood on Earth for a moment. Feeling nostalgic, he quickly flew around it, and landed on the moon, something he'd been so wrapped up in hero work, he'd never had time to actually do. He wasn't the first man to do it, but he finally did it. No psyche evaluation could take it from him. Then, he and all the people whose place in reality had rested on his piece suddenly stopped being, and new pieces took their place, with reality fixing all the cracks.
Still, reality would need Alphaman again, and fate, the twelve, the world would create him once more.
(Bronze Age)
Mace Adams was born in 1952 as the youngest child and only son of poor parents, George Adams a union manager, and Maria Adams a typewriter at an ad agency, in the south side of Chicago. As a young man he bullied in school, with children constantly belittling him over his family's financial situation. Because of this constant ridicule and abuse, Mace grew up tough, and was considered a problem child in the classroom. According to his teachers, "Mace picks fights with some of the more affluent boys." However, when his father asked him whether that was the case or not and Mace denied it, George Adams believed his son. They took Mace out of his school, and both parents did all they could to get him enrolled in private school and once they did, the boy excelled.
His best classes were English and the sciences, and the two came together in his deep love of science fiction. Though he would never admit it, for fear of being labeled a nerd, Mace wished more than anything to be a science fiction writer. More openly he wished to be an astronaut, and the final years of the sixties saw the young boy glued to the television to see whether man would truly make it to the moon, and after man did, Mace told everyone who would listen about the entire lives of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.
When the young Mace turned fourteen, he realized that his parents wouldn't be able to afford to send him to college/ So he decided to go out and get a job himself, and found one at the bowling alley very near his home. So the young man spent his high school days studying, exercising, and working at the alley. He was quickly given a number of promotions, and with them a bit more money for his work. At the end of his high school days, Mace had made just enough money to afford to put himself through college, but didn't have to pay the whole way. He had earned a small rugby scholarship as well as a few scholarships within the physics program at a small college in Montana. And so he attended, and got fantastic grades, working a job as an assistant at a small ad agency to save money. At school he studied physics as a major, but also earned a minor in marketing. When he had earned his degree, he signed up for the air force, and spent a few years training and working his way into NASA. It wasn't long before he was first in line to be the first man on mars in an experimental flight planned for 1979.
Everything worked out, and the man was selected as the sole member of space project Dionysus 7. He piloted the shuttle into orbit on the night of his twenty-seventh birthday, the craft powered by an experimental fuel of nuclear radiation. However, there was something completely unforeseen that came to pass. A meteor made contact with the ship, and blew it right out of the sky. However, as he fell, he did not die, instead he blacked out. He felt an odd presence, and suddenly woke up, unscathed, in the very parking lot of the bowling alley he'd once worked in, with a hunk of space rock resting on his chest. His flight suit was gone, but in its place was an odd suit, cape, boots, weird pattern and sigil, the works. It was plain white. The meteorite flew off of his chest with a thought, and Mace stood after it, perplexed.
With thoughts he swung the meteorite across the parking lot air, and eventually decided to try lifting something else, him. It worked, and through the air he flew, laughing all the time until he hit the old sign of the alley, and took on the colors of the blue and purple sign. Still laughing, he carried the meteorite to his childhood home and stashed it there, then found the remnants of his spacesuit and returned to Nasa, claiming to have somehow survived and to have been found by fishing vessel. He was debriefed, discharged, and given a settlement that made it seem he didn't need to work ever again.
However, the young man found a job anyway, at the ad agency his mother had worked at when he was a child. When his father retired, and his mother did the same, he was able to support them alongside all of his sisters, and besides his time as a Madman at the company's New York branch he spent time busting crime as Alphaman.
His adventures were far less silly and all over the place than his last incarnation. They were more serious, about darker things. People close to Mace died directly due to some of his actions. Some due to his inaction. From the year 1986 to 1987 Mace was very dark, and even killed two of his villains as a result of his long time girlfriend Clarissa Cane being killed by his enemy Circus Freak. This Alphaman lasted the longest of them all, he lived to be sixty four. Fighting in numerous conflicts that threatened the very fabric of reality or the Earth. His final and greatest battle was against a massive monster created by Dr. Claudias Mortell called Devastation, created in something designated project Hispaniola.
The monster was far more powerful than Alphaman had ever been. However, halfway through the battle, time suddenly stopped around Alphaman, and suddenly a villain who'd troubled Mace for a long time came to him, Andronicus, an alien scientist who had troubled him for decades. Andronicus offered him a way to defeat Devastation, to call upon the Alphamen of the past. So, when time started up again, Devastation did not face one Alphaman, but three. The alien scientist had revealed to the Bronze Age Alphaman that he was the weakest Alphaman there had been or would be, and in the fight he came to realize this as the first Alphaman fared far better than he, and the second was able to go toe to toe with Devastation.
Upon the villain's defeat the other two Alphamen returned home, and Mace Adams born in the year 1952 and now in the modern year was left alone with Andronicus, who revealed that he had needed Alphaman alive, because he'd discovered that there was a precedent in the cycle of change in the universe that Alphaman would not die permanently. For this, he had created a device on Mars that would destroy the universe, that he claimed would test the theory. He'd used the distraction of the fight to position to the device. It would destroy the solar system, but it wouldn't last, and the world would be rebuilt with Alphaman and all those related to him the same, which would include Andronicus. However, those unrelated to Mace would be gone, and Andronicus could live with that.
Mace couldn't. He flew to Mars, becoming the first man to set foot on the red soil. Flying around at his top speed, he eventually found it, a strange device that wasn't human. Wrapping the device in his arms, he contained the explosion, but still lost his life. Andronicus was not surprised, his plan had worked. He had already proven his theory of Mace's recreation, and had managed to make him fall into a trap that gave him a new leg up over the hero. The device ran on UVC radiation, the only radiation not present in the ship that Mace had flown the day that he got his powers. As the world changed, and the twelve once more changed the make up and events of the people around Alphaman, Andronicus' theory would come true, and the new Mace would come back vulnerable to concentrated forms of the same radiation.
The Twelve Decided once more that the world would need Alphaman, they felt the world changing, and that the world was going to be gaining a larger number of powered individuals. He would be more vital than ever.
(Modern Age)
Mace Adams was born the youngest child and only son of poor parents, George Adams a union manager, and Maria Adams an ad writer. Mace was a naturally large child, and would often defend the smaller boys at his school from a number of older bullies, and when the teachers at his school brought this up, Mace's parents moved him to a private school. Without distraction, Mace was able to do very well in school, excelling in science and literature. Like many young men he dreamed of being a writer, and mostly wanted to venture into the field of science fiction.
At fourteen, the young man began to volunteer at a local bowling alley, where he was hired at sixteen. He worked fairly hard, and made enough money to help his parents pay for his college. He graduated with a sizable Physics scholarship, but he only managed to make it through two years before he had to head home to support his family. His father had lost his job in the recession, and Mace felt they needed him. He returned, and worked as a waiter as well as returning to the bowling alley he'd been employed at in high school. All the time, After a few years there, the family started to do better, and at twenty five, his sister got him a job with the ad agency at which she worked. It was the very same place their mother had worked.
The position was as manager of the social media campaigns for companies represented by the agency. With that position he was able to push through the hard times, and his father was able to return to work. On the night of his twenty seventh birthday, he felt forlorn, remembering his dreams of creating a vast world in the stars. He looked through some old notebooks, and found a half finished novel about Martians that he had written. He decided to take a look through his old telescope at the red planet, but as he looked for it, he saw a shooting star. Quickly he checked where it was going, and headed to the location, the bowling alley at which he had worked as a young man and a few years before.
Using his old key, he made it to the roof, but dejectedly found there was no meteorite. Looking up at the star in the sky he knew to be the red planet, the young man fell to his knees and let out a massive roar that no one could hear. Then, fate let its hand play, and a meteorite the size of a bowling ball hit his head. He was knocked completely unconscious. When he awoke, he was not on the roof of the Long Lane Bowling Alley, but on a cloud. He didn't look at a drab skyline, but instead at twelve giant beings all in their own thrones. One of them, the largest, a man with a golden beard spoke, "Mace Adams."
Terrified, the young man replied, "Yes?" The being spoke again. "You have been chosen." Mace was shaking, "I don't understand, what have you chosen me for?" As he spoke, a pair of glowing snakes wrapped themselves around his legs and wound up his body, and then both of them sunk their venomous teeth into his neck. At the same time, bolt erupted from the hand of the leader of the twelve, and struck Mace in the chest.
Upon waking up, with a supreme case of Deja Vu, Mace found himself in an odd costume. It was plain white, but as a joke, Mace imagined himself flying, and suddenly he shot into the sky, and rammed into the old fashioned bowling alley sign, and his plain white costume took on the colors of blue and purple. Then he tested his thoughts on the meteorite, and took the thing back home. Over the next week, he tested his powers, and discovered a number of others like the manipulation of blue lightning. Very soon after the incident, Mace was transferred to the New York branch of his ad agency.
Now, the new incarnation of Alphaman waits, to make his debut.