Numb Skull

Can YOU

Name This Marvel Villain??

Our old-school, hard-headed villain, Hammerhead, was a creation of the disgraced surgeon Jonas Harrow, who one day happened upon a nameless man who had been beaten in an alley and left to die. Harrow, in an effort to salvage his reputation, operated on the near-dead man--replacing the shattered bone of his head with steel alloy. That took care of the outside of his head; but the patient had unfortunately lost all memory of his life before he'd been found by Harrow.  Yet in his daze, he'd become fixated on the last thing he saw before Harrow removed him from the alley--an old Al Capone movie poster.

Afterward, the newly minted "Hammerhead" went about establishing himself as a crime boss, his motif in the style of the gangsters of the Capone era. But though his weapons of choice were tommy guns, his adherence to Chicago gangs and methodology only made headway in controlling the New York crime scene up to a point. He found that there was another who was seeking control, a deadly foe of Spider-Man by the name of Doctor Octopus. And a gang war erupted between the two, with Hammerhead and his men ill-prepared for the level of technology that Doc Ock and his men could bring to bear against them:

Oddly enough, Hammerhead did much better against Spider-Man himself--which, after their first encounter, wasn't exactly surprising. How many superheroes do you know who stupidly belt someone named "Hammerhead" by throwing a punch at, you guessed it, their head?

No, apparently Spidey still doesn't realize why this man is called Hammerhead. Because if he did, wouldn't you think that a guy who excels in agility and has a spider-sense would be able to evade that head in a rematch?

Still, the whole thing wasn't a total loss. Spider-Man ends up beating the living crap out of Octopus because of the way the good doctor was manipulating his Aunt May (yeah, the Parkers tend to be a little slow on the uptake, don't they)--Octopus is taken into custody--and the gang war fizzles out with its two main players out of action. Hammerhead takes off and decides to lie low for awhile until Ock gets out of prison, so that he can confront him with something he found in his control room. Somehow I doubt that it's a new and improved tommy gun.