Attuma

Attuma is a barbaric Atlantean warlord from the "murky depths." He is a brutal, dishonorable warrior interested only in violent victory. Despite his violent reputation, Attuma is quite cowardly and will quickly submit or flee when faced with a significant challenge.

Biography

In late 1964, Attuma led a large and heavily armed legion of followers into Atlantis in in an attempt to overthrow the city's ruler, Namor the Sub-Mariner. Namor's love-scorned ally Dorma rashly allowed for Attuma and his forces to breach the city walls, and Attuma's superior army ran roughshod through Atlantis, but the noble Namor and his forces fought valiantly. Dorma regretted her emotional betrayal, and enlisted the help of Namor's rivals the Fantastic Four to turn the tide in the battle. The Four did exactly that, destroying a number of Attuma's weapons of war to allow Namor to battle Attuma head-on. The Four's Invisible Girl got close and, unnoticed by Namor himself, made Namor invisible, throwing Attuma off-guard and giving the Sub-Mariner the upper hand. Namor defeated Attuma in combat, forcing him to surrender, and banished him and his followers from Atlantis. Not long after, in a bold attempt to reclaim his honor, Attuma set his sights on the surface world, of which he and his people knew nothing. From his undersea base, his scientists used a strange machine to hijack a passing airplane with bubbles, causing it to land peacefully on a nearby island. Attuma and others took a large treaded vehicle onto the island and insisted that one of the passengers, who happened to be Janet van Dyne, come with them and no one would be harmed. Attuma wished to study a human for the sake of preparing for an attack on the surface. The pilots resisted his request, and were attacked by one of Attuma's followers. Janet cooperated, but secretly sent out a distress signal to her ally, Giant-Man, who soon arrived and teamed up with Janet, the Wasp, to defeat Attuma and the other Atlanteans. So shocked was Attuma by the humans' bizarre powers that he claimed to be scared off of ever attempting to attack the surface world again.

Naturally, Attuma didn't actually call off his ambitions for conquest. Over the next few months, his army amassed a supply of the rare ocean metal nautilium and used it to create a huge, powerful cannon. This weapon would fire a rocket into the atmosphere, where the rocket would detonate and alter the density of the air so as to stifle human breathing, allowing Attuma to conquer the surface and force the humans into enslavement by conditionally granting them helmets of pure air. By pure chance, Iron Man arrived at Attuma's undersea base near New York and attacked, crashing a one-man submarine into the cannon and destroying all of Attuma's work. Some time later, Attuma was coerced by Doctor Doom's emotion machine into attacking the Baxter Building on the day of the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, and he took an army of Atlanteans to the surface in New York. At that moment, Daredevil, who had hijacked a runaway truck carrying a vortex bomb from agents of Hydra, steered that truck into the bay, causing the vortex bomb to explode and send Attuma's army back beneath the waves.