Scientists in Comic Books Suck at Their Jobs

Having read comics for more than twenty years and been a fan of science fiction for even longer I have come to a very simple conclusion. Scientists in comic books suck at their jobs. It seems the majority of scientists in comics completely screw up whatever they are working on and end up creating something completely the opposite of their original intentions.

Ben Grimm really did get the short end of the stick.

Our first offender is Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. Now most people who read the comics might question my saying Reed Richards sucks as a scientist. He is after all considered the most brilliant mind in the Marvel Universe. But we need to only go back and look at the origins of the Fantastic Four to see Reed Richards's failure. He, his fiancé Sue Storm, her brother Jonny, and Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm take off in an experimental rocket ship and are exposed to cosmic rays which alters each of them and grants them amazing abilities. Reed neglected to properly shield his rocket from radiation exposure. Warren Ellis's brilliant Ruins series portrayed the Fantastic Four's flight going much different and the four friends rather than gaining amazing abilities, died horrible and painful deaths. Reed Richards's desire for scientific discovery caused him to overlook basic safety features. And that is why he fails as a scientist.

Since the Amazing Spider-Man is out in theaters right now, my next culprit is Doctor Curt Connors. If you haven’t seen the movie (which I suggest you do because it is good, See my opinion of the film here) be warned, the following paragraph contains spoilers. Curt Connors is a geneticist who lost his right arm in a tragic accident in his youth. Because of that accident he has struggled to find a way to regenerate his missing arm. He studies the regenerative abilities of lizards who have been known to grow back entire limbs once they have been lost. Splicing his own DNA with those same lizards, he does succeed in regrowing his lost arm. But the lizard DNA soon takes over his entire body and he mutates into a lizard himself. The Lizard. So in the end, he failed as a scientist by becoming a monster.

Staying close to the Spider-Man universe, where there seems to be no end of bad scientists, I also want to talk about Otto Octavius, aka Doctor Octopus. Now there have been a couple of different versions of Doc Ock’s origins but the basics are that Otto Octavius developed these mechanical  arms to help him handle hazardous materials in the lab. During a violent lab accident, the arms are fused to Otto’s spine and he gains telepathic control of them, able to control the arms even when they are removed from his body. Now I’m not sure what the goal of that initial experiment was in the comics but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to fuse mechanical arms to his body. Failure.

Just so it doesn’t seem like I’m picking on Marvel scientists I am going to mention Lex Luthor. While usually portrayed as an evil business man, Lex Luthor also has a keen scientific mind. A mind that he sadly wastes almost solely on schemes to destroy Superman. Schemes that usually involve Kryptonite. Now most people believe that Kryptonite is only harmful to Superman. Not true. Kryptonite is a radioactive mineral. Granted, its particular type of radiation affects Superman more rapidly than it does others, it is still radioactive. And radiation is harmful to everyone if exposed to it long enough. That is why in the mid nineties Lex Luthor ended up losing a hand, and his life, to cancer from years of radiation poisoning. He was able to clone himself and be resurrected later (posing as his own son), but still, I think dying should definitely be considered a scientific fail.

Back to Marvel. Since we’re talking about radiation I cannot ignore the most notorious victim of radiation poisoning in comics, Bruce Banner aka The Incredible Hulk. Now I am going to reference the Ultimate version of the Hulk since that is closely tied in to the Avengers film that came out and more people probably are familiar with that version than the normal comics.  In the regular comics, he gets caught in an explosion from a Gamma bomb and then turns into the Hulk. Not very interesting. But in the Ultimate version and in the Avengers film, Bruce Banner turns himself into the Hulk because he is trying to duplicate the formula that created Captain America. Now if you look at Captain America and you look at the Hulk, there doesn’t seem to be any similarity so once again, scientific failure.

There are more examples, of course, of scientific misadventures performed by comic book characters. Mr. Freeze, Michael Morbius (The Living Vampire), The Flash (Barry Allen), just to name a few,  all three scientists who ended up altered forever by freak lab accidents while they were trying to accomplish some other goal. Apparently receiving a doctorate in the world of comics is not that difficult because everyone who does sucks at it. If they are not the victim of their own experiment they are a victim of some horrible lab accident that was caused due to their own negligence.