Graviton is a fictional character, a supervillain that appears in comic books
published by Marvel Comics. Publication history
Graviton first appears in Avengers #158 and was created by Jim Shooter and Sal
Buscema. Fictional character biography
Franklin Hall is a Canadian physicist involved in an experiment in a private
research facility in the Canadian Rockies. A mistake in Hall's
calculations causes graviton particles to merge with his own molecules, and
Hall later discovers that he can mentally control gravity. Hall at first
tries to hide his newfound ability, but becomes tempted by the potential power,
and donning a costume adopts the alias "Graviton."
When Graviton takes over the research facility and forbids all communications
with the outside world, a fellow scientist sends a distress signal to the
superhero team the Avengers. A furious Graviton then lifts the facility several
thousands of feet into the sky and threatens to kill the scientist. The
Avengers then arrive and attack, but with the exception of the Black Panther
are all defeated when trapped in a gravity field. The Panther escapes and
summons the thunder god Thor, who battles Graviton to a standstill until
Graviton is tricked into thinking a fellow scientist he cares for has
committed suicide. Graviton then panics and causes the entire facility to
collapse on him, forming a giant stone sphere that is dropped into a river by
the Avengers. Graviton later reappears, although is
suffering from amnesia and is flickering in and out of existence. Somehow guided
to the female scientist he has feelings for, Graviton attempts to abduct her but
is stopped by Fantastic Four member the Thing and the Inhuman Black Bolt. During
the battle, Graviton describes himself as becoming a "living black hole" and
morphs into a 50-foot humanoid. Graviton is then attacked until he loses
concentration, and then apparently implodes and is considered dead.
Graviton is eventually able to reform his body, and decides to seek a bride.
Elevating a Bloomingdale's store into the sky, he takes several women hostage
until tricked by Thor. Thor then maroons a defeated Graviton in an alternate
dimension. Graviton is able to return when an
anomaly opens a portal to Earth. Arriving in Los Angeles, Graviton
attempts to unite all criminal elements under his leadership, but is defeated by
the West Coast Avengers. Graviton was among the villains recruited by Mister
Bitterhorn into Mephisto's Legion Accursed. They were used in part of a
plot to kill the Beyonder with Mephisto's Beyondersbane weapon, but
were delayed by the Thing until the weapon melted down. Graviton then
recruits the supervillains Halflife, Quantum, and Zzzax as allies, but they
are once again defeated by the West Coast Avengers. Graviton then defeats
Spider-Man, and after a skirmish with the Fantastic Four, is defeated in turn
by a cosmic-powered Spider-Man. Graviton then attacks the Avengers
again, but is defeated when they overload his powers, banishing him to
yet another alternate dimension. He then sends out a distress signal, which is
noticed by the villains Techno and Baron Zemo. Graviton is eventually freed and
attacks the teams the Thunderbolts and Great Lakes Avengers, but is persuaded
by Thunderbolt Moonstone to rethink his priorities. Desiring still more power,
Graviton recruited a team of criminals and looted the city of San Francisco,
until eventually defeated by the Thunderbolts with the use of technology
from Machine Man, whose flight capabilities cancel gravity.
Banished once again to the same alternate dimension, Graviton becomes
insane from the constant defeats and exile from Earth, and returns with the
goal of total world conquest, accompanied by an adult-level P'tah
named M'reel. Seeking revenge on the Thunderbolts, Graviton storms their
headquarters to discover they have disbanded and been replaced by the group
the Redeemers. Graviton kills almost the entire team before being defeated by a
reformed Thunderbolts. Discovering that M'reel was channeling his power to
create a dimensional warp enabling the P'tah to invade Earth a furious Graviton
apparently dies stopping the alien invasion and saves the Thunderbolts.
Under unrevealed circumstances, Graviton returned to Earth once more and was
rendered powerless long enough to be imprisoned on the Raft with other
superhuman criminals. However, when Electro shorted out the Raft's defenses
to free Sauron, Graviton and dozens of other inmates escaped, only to be
confronted by the heroes who would soon organize as the latest incarnation of
the Avengers. Although recaptured, Graviton evidently sustained a head
injury that somehow greatly dampened his powers, making him much less powerful
than at his previous encounter with the Thunderbolts. He also was more
megalomaniacal than ever during his next escape, declaring himself capable of
forgiving and punishing sins. The reorganized Avengers again fought him at
Ryker's, and after wounding Captain America and Spider-Man, Graviton was
downed and almost killed by an Extremis enhanced Iron Man.
After battling Iron Man once again - having been framed for murder by an
associate of the Mandarin who possessed similar gravity-manipulating powers to
his own - he uses his powers to trigger an aneurysm in his brain, concluding
that he will never receive a fair trial and wanting to end things on his terms.
It appeared that Graviton had an evil son with the same powers as he has,
named Singularity, but he was revealed to be a normal kid unrelated to Graviton
where he was brainwashed and mutated by the evil son of the Leader called
Superior. Graviton turns up alive as part of the
new High Council of A.I.M. as the Minister of Science. When the Secret
Avengers attempted to assassinate Andrew Forson, Graviton attacked them but was
quickly stopped by an attack by sentient Iron Patriot armors led by the Hulk.
Powers and abilities Franklin Hall was a normal human until
empowered by an explosion that intermingled his molecules with
sub-nuclear graviton particles generated by a nearby particle generator, which
gave him the ability to manipulate gravitons and anti-gravitons. Graviton
could surround any person or object, including himself, with gravitons or
anti-gravitons, thereby increasing or decreasing the pull of gravity upon it.
Hall was able to manipulate gravitons for various uses, including the
projection of highly concussive blasts, formation of gravitational force fields
and levitation, and had also been proven capable of generating gravitational
fields in various objects, making them attract any nearby matter not heavy
enough or physically strong enough to resist. By decreasing the pull of
gravity beneath him, then manipulating its direction of effect, he could fly at
any speed or height at which he could still breathe. However, by using his
force field generation capabilities he could also breathe in space. By
increasing the pull of gravity beneath his opponents, he could pin them to the
ground, having made them too heavy to move, or cause sufficient gravitational
stress to impair the normal functioning of the human cardiovascular system. He
could also cause an inanimate object diameter rock) to radiate enough
gravitons to enormously increase its own gravitational field, able to attract
nearby matter and energy. By rapidly projecting gravitons in a
cohesive beam, he could generate a force blast with a maximum concussive force
equivalent to the primary shockwave of an explosion of 20,000 pounds of TNT. He
could also create a gravitational force field around him capable of protecting
him from any concussive force up to and including a small nuclear weapon.
On a large scale Graviton could exert his gravitational control over a maximum
distance of 2.36 miles from his body. Thus, the maximum volume of matter he
could influence at once is 55.1 cubic miles. He once exercised this control by
lifting into the air an inverted conic frustum-shaped land mass whose uppermost
area was 4 miles across, and causing it to fly as though it were a blimp. He
could also erect a gravitational force-field of similar proportions.
Graviton could formerly perform as many as four separate tasks simultaneously -
at one time, he not only lifted a 4-mile wide land mass as high as cloud level
above San Francisco, but at the same time also surrounded himself with a
force-field, descended on a small rock, and hurled some policemen and a
helicopter 10,000 miles into orbit. Graviton could use his power at maximum
capacity for up to eight hours before mental fatigue significantly impaired
his performance, and considerably longer if he conserved his energy during that
time. He was somehow also able to bestow the
power of self-propelled flight to at least 70 people independent from his
location, however he was also able to take this power away with a thought.
With time and training, his powers further advanced, even to the extent of
levitating an island miles above ground level, exerting his power even while
sleeping, somewhat reshaping mountains on the Moon, and demonstrating the
ability to lift a small stone in China while residing in L.A., then depositing
it in Australia through a victims head just to see if he could do so. By
separating himself from Earth's gravitational field and instead attuning
himself to the incredibly stronger gravitational field of the Sun, he was
able to cross the distance from Earth to the Sun almost instantaneously, where
his individual force field proved strong enough to withstand the forces of the
Sun itself, effectively simulating long-range teleportation. To return from
the Sun to Earth he utilized the Sun's gravitational field as a form of
slingshot device and was able to cross the distance to Earth within minutes.
Hall's single most ambitious display of power was when he held almost every
Marvel hero in stasis, including the Fantastic Four, some of the X-Men and
such physical powerhouses as Thor, Hercules, the Hulk and Namor, and began
using his powers to try reshaping the Earth in his image.
He also had the ability to detect extra-dimensional-shifts and phased or
invisible objects through his immediate awareness of gravitational fluctuation
and while he was not able to invoke dimensional portals, he was at least
able to close them. He could simulate vast superhuman strength and durability
using gravitonic fields to surround his body, but he could not actually
manipulate density or increase his physical strength.
Aside from his powers to manipulate gravity, Hall had a PhD in Physics and
was intellectually brilliant, with expertise in advanced physics, including
teleportation. His greatest limitation was that he was emotionally and mentally
very disturbed. In other media
= Television= Graviton appears in the two-part The
Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes episode "The Breakout" voiced by Fred
Tatasciore. Franklin Hall joined S.H.I.E.L.D. in a plan to recreate the
Super-Soldier Serum. Franklin Hall ended up causing the accident that gave
himself near-limitless gravitational powers. Due to him being dangerous, Hall
ended up imprisoned at The Raft by Nick Fury in an unconscious state for 10
years. When a technological problem occurred at The Raft, Graviton was freed
and planned his revenge on Nick Fury. This was interrupted by Thor, Wasp, Iron
Man, Hulk, and Ant-Man who as a team fought Graviton. Following the defeat of
Graviton, the fight with him inspired the superheroes that fought him to stay
united as "The Avengers." It was also mentioned that Graviton was still
unconscious when the mass-breakout started.
Dr. Franklin Hall appears in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "The Asset",
played by Ian Hart. He is a Canadian physicist and protected S.H.I.E.L.D.
asset who was also a teacher to Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons. Hall is abducted from
a S.H.I.E.L.D. convoy during a gravity-based attack by soldiers working
for his former partner Ian Quinn and taken to Quinn's compound in Malta.
Quinn wants Hall to finish work on a gravity manipulator powered by
gravitonium. While S.H.I.E.L.D. agents infiltrate Quinn's house during his
party there, Hall prepares to sink the device in the ocean, having decided that
the device is too powerful for either Quinn or S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinn's compound
would be destroyed in the process, killing everyone inside. Hall reveals to
Coulson that he orchestrated his own kidnapping to destroy the device and
save the world from its evil. Coulson tries to disable the device, but Hall is
pulled into it and apparently consumed. The Gravitonium and the device are later
sealed in a vault within a S.H.I.E.L.D. containment facility called the Fridge.
At the end of the episode as the Gravitonium is placed in a vault, Hall's
hand is seen briefly emerging from the gravitonium inside the device. The
Gravitonium reappears at the end of the episode "Providence" when HYDRA agents
liberate it during an attack on the Fridge and John Garrett gives it to Ian
Quinn. = Film=
Graviton appears in Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher. He
appears as a buyer for the organization Leviathan who plan to auction stolen
S.H.I.E.L.D. technology. = Video games=
Graviton appears as a boss in the Game Boy game The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
References External links
Graviton at Marvel.com Graviton at MarvelDirectory.com