Mole Man

The Mole Man, birth name unknown, is a villain who lives underground and has devoted his life to conquering the surface, cooking up a number of ambitious schemes to do so. He commands a loyal legion of subterranean Moloids to do his bidding.

Biography

Origin

The Mole Man originally was essentially a normal man, excepting his short stature and unattractive facial features. Scorned by society, he decided to go underground and become king of "the legendary land at the center of the Earth." In his search for this land, he arrived on Monster Isle, slipping into a deep cave and plummeting to the rock floor—surviving, but severely damaging his sight, inspiring his moniker. Over time, he developed his ability to sense things in the dark, including batlike echolocation. These powers make him more skilled in combat than his diminutive frame would suggest, especially defensively.

Conflicts with the Fantastic Four

Mole Man became the leader of Monster Isle's eponymous creatures, enlisting their assistance to create a massive, worldwide, underground network of caves and tunnels. This network was the key element to Mole Man's plan to take over the world. He began using a particularly huge monster to destroy the world's atomic plants and sink them into the ground, planning on making his attack on the surface world when the world's critical sources of power had been exhausted. The Fantastic Four learned of the dramatic destruction of various plants, and found their way to Monster Isle, the exact center in between the plants. While Mole Man and his monsters did force the inexperienced heroes to flee the island, Human Torch caused a huge cave-in during his escape, apparently sealing Mole Man and his creatures underneath Monster Isle.

Mole Man managed to escape the explosion through his network of underground tunnels, and next directed his terrestrial sinking schemes to major cities across the world, particularly New York and Moscow. His plan was to lower the cities deep underground, essentially wiping them off the map, and ostensibly causing the United States and Soviet Union to blame each other, causing a catastrophic war. Mole Man would then arrive on the surface and claim conquest over the world's remains. After setting up the necessary equipment for this venture, Mole Man baited the Fantastic Four to coming to his new base just off the coast of New Jersey. He invited them with an anonymous letter under the pretense of selling the island to them. With his subservient Moloids, Mole Man trapped the Four and sent them through a series of trials, but they were able to escape nonetheless. Mr. Fantastic hijacked Mole Man's equipment such that when he went to lower the two cities, he instead destroyed his own base from the inside.

Mole Man continued to aim for world domination, and on his next attempt he began by sinking city blocks in New York City deep underground with a special machine. In the process, he took the Fantastic Four's Invisible Girl hostage. When her allies came running, Mole Man threatened her and told them to keep themselves and anyone else out of his way while he enacted his plan. He kept Invisible Girl in a crystal prison with the fatal flaw of lacking a roof. The Human Torch burned his way through the ground above and into the enclosure, rescuing Invisible Girl and allowing the other two heroes to enter as well. The combined Fantastic Four restored the blocks to their places on the surface, fought off Mole Man's army, and set off a chain reaction that exploded the surrounding area underground, setting Mole Man's plans back yet again.

Conflicts with the Avengers

Mole Man spent several months regrouping before coming up with his most dangerous plan yet. He and his Moloid minions created a safe haven near the center of the Earth, and he created a device that would slowly increase the speed of the planet's rotation, devastating the surface but leaving him and his people unharmed. The initially slow increase sent the ants of the world into a panic, which caused the hero Giant-Man to investigate, only for Mole Man and the Moloids to subdue him with some difficulty. Later, a projected image of the Wasp, Giant-Man's ally in the Avengers, appeared, causing Mole Man to realize that he was in danger. He sent the Moloids to the surface to attack the Avengers—Wasp, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor—but their battle was interrupted by an unexpected third party. The Red Ghost, a villain capable of making himself and others incorporeal, had whisked the Moloids back to Mole Man's lair to demonstrate what a potent ally he would make. Red Ghost wished to team with Mole Man and focus their collective world-conquering efforts, and Mole Man agreed. The rest of the Avengers arrived soon after, and though Red Ghost proved to be a potent force, able to make himself and Mole Man effectively impervious to the heroes' attacks, Giant-Man managed to shrink to ant size upon being freed and destroy Mole Man's rotation device from the inside. The Avengers went on to destroy all of the technology in Mole Man's base for good measure, while he and Ghost escaped incorporeally.

Mole Man stayed away from the Avengers until the team had a massive lineup change, in which everyone but Captain America was replaced by new members: Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch. Mole Man, like many others, saw this change as one which compromised the overall strength level of the team, owing to the loss of powerhouses like Thor and Giant-Man. As such, Mole Man believed that he could more easily defeat these new Avengers. Having learned that the Avengers were looking for the Hulk, he sent a large robot to their base in New York that would attempt to defeat them and, failing that, lure them to Mole Man's base. They did in fact defeat the robot, which told them to come to the desert to find the Hulk. As planned, the Avengers wound up atop Mole Man's hidden mesa base (oddly, less than a mile away from the Leader's similar base, where Hulk actually was), and Mole Man dropped them through a trap door into a large underground cave. There, he released a minotaur (how he acquired this creature is unclear) that attacked the team. In the end, though the Avengers couldn't defeat the minotaur directly, they managed to get its horns trapped in the thick shale nearby, and went on to confront Mole Man. Realizing he had underestimated the heroes, Mole Man ejected them from his base.

One day, Mole Man 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. He drilled straight into the floor of the Baxter Building with a small army of Moloids, but they were held back by the Thing and the X-Men, and Iceman sealed up their hole with his ice powers. Following Mole Man's defeat, a veritable legion of villains fought a similarly powerful force of heroes defending the Baxter Building. In the end, Reed Richards used a device provided by Uatu to transport all of the villains back slightly in time and wipe their memories of these events. Reed and Sue Storm were thus successfully and peacefully married.