Dynamo 5 - Fictional History

Fictional History

The focus of the series alternates back and forth between the private lives of each of the five team members, who maintain their separate lives in their home cities across North America, including their respective supporting casts, and their adventures as costumed superheroes.

Captain Dynamo was the much-beloved protector of Tower City for forty years following his exposure to an unidentified form of radiation that granted him superhuman abilities, and husband of Maddie Warner, a former agent of a government superhuman monitoring organization known as F.L.A.G., who used the cover of an award-winning investigative journalist, now retired. Dynamo is found dead, naked in a hotel bed, murdered by poison, though the details of his death are not released to the public. He was assassinated by Widowmaker, who was hired by unknown persons. Although Warner initially does not know this, she does suspect that the condition and setting in which his body was found was not natural, but arranged by whoever murdered him in order to further tarnish his image. In sorting through his personal effects, Warner discovers detailed information on countless incidents of infidelity on his part. Although devastated by the extent of her late husband’s indiscretions, Warner is faced with the problem of Dynamo’s numerous enemies, who will now take advantage of Tower City in his absence. Although other superheroes attempt to pitch in to keep the peace, Warner decides that Tower City needed a permanent protector.

Scouring through the information she gleaned from her husband’s belongings, she locates five young people she believes could be his illegitimate children: Vancouver, British Columbia high school geek Hector Chang, Washington DC law student and activist Olivia “Livvie” Lewis, aimless ne'er do well and ladies’ man Spencer Bridges, Hollywood, California theater employee and NYU Film School graduate Bridget Flynn, and Eastbridge, Texas high school football star Gage Reinhart. Gathering them together, Warner exposes them to the same radiation that Dynamo had been exposed to forty years earlier, unlocking their own latent superhuman abilities, with each one manifesting one of the five powers that their father possessed. Donning costumes, the five of them carry on his legacy as the superhero team the Dynamo 5, while coming to terms with learning about the father they never knew, and the four new half-siblings they each now have. Although the five are unaware that Warner is a former agent of F.L.A.G., she is determined to mold them not only into a team, but into a family as well, and functions as their mentor and “unofficial sixth member”, calling the shots from the same headquarters once used by Captain Dynamo, and keeping in constant remote contact with them during their missions.

A year after Warner assembled the team, Warner and Jennifer Chang, the mother of Visionary, are taken hostage by the team's enemies, Widowmaker, Voltage, Bonechill, Brains and Brawn, at the Aquarium, the team's underwater headquarters. Widowmaker reveals to Warner that she killed Captain Dynamo. As Warner and Jennifer Chang are rescued by Dynamo 5, the Aquarium is flooded, Warner falls into a comatose state, and Myriad is revealed to be a half-extraterrestrial, with an alien physiognomy. These events led to the dissolution of the team. Although the Noble family drains and repairs the Aquarium, only Scrap decides to maintain her duties protecting Tower City, and eventually recruits other superheroes to replace her four siblings, and Augie Ford to replace Warner. Scatterbrain uses his telepathy to bring Warner out of her coma, during which he learns that she is a former F.L.A.G. agent. They assemble the rest of the team, and come to the rescue of Scrap and the replacement teammates, one of whom, Vigil, is revealed to be Myriad in disguise. The new team sustained serious injuries during their battle with Widowmaker and her team of mercenaries, but they villains were defeated by the combined forces of the heroes.

In a 2009 storyline in issues 24 and 25 of the series, the team was attacked by their other half-sibling, the supervillain Synergy, who used a weapon to erase the team's abilities and capture them. The team freed themselves, and used the weapon to restore their powers, but they manifested different abilities than the ones they previously had, and took on new code names.

In the 2010 miniseries Dynamo 5: Sins of the Father, the team faced off against the three sons of Dominex, a bellicose extraterrestrial who years earlier, had come to Earth to fight its most powerful champion, lest he destroy Earth. He left Earth after being narrowly defeated by Captain Dynamo, Supreme and Omni-Man, and his three sons now wished to regain their family's honor by similarly challenging Earth's heroes. The combined might of Dynamo 5, Invincible, Emily Reed (the younger of the mother-daughter duo, the Firebirds), Malcolm Dragon, Angel Dragon, and the Primaries, a government superhero team that included a clone of Captain Dynamo secretly controlled by F.L.A.G. director Sandy Colvin, failed to defeat the three sons. After one of the sons critically impaled Emily Reed, her boyfriend, Dynamo 5 member Hector Chang, borrowed the Strong-Suit, a uniform that magnifies a wearer's strength created by the Winterbourne Institute, thus amplifying his already superhuman strength, allowing him to kill two of the sons. However, when he killed the third son, who had impaled Emily, even after that man had surrendered, he shocked bystanders and television viewers watching the battle, and caused much consternation among his teammates. His relationship with Emily and her mother, who blamed Hector for Emily's injuries, was also threatened.

In the one-shot Dynamo 5 Holiday Special 2010, the team confronted Lumina, the daughter of escaped supervillain convict Luminex. The story also established that Gage Reinhart and the Primary member War Chest were involved in a romantic relationship, and featured four epilogues depicting the aftereffects of Sins of the Father pertaining to the Firebirds, Sandy Colvin, and the villains Synergy and Voltage.