Maddie Warner - Personality

Personality

Warner is determined to mold Dynamo 5 not only into a team, but into a family as well, and functions as their mentor and “unofficial sixth member”. Although she must deal with the fact that they are constant reminders of her late husband’s infidelity, she is insistent that they act not only as a team, but as a family as well. Visionary has described her as "a hard one to warm up", "no nonsense, all business", and "more of a drill instructor than a den mother."

Warner has also been depicted as a long-term tactician willing to resort to creative solutions to problems, including those that might be considered ethically questionable. Two weeks after Warner began training Dynamo 5 to act as a team, the team began to chafe under her strict demands, and insisted that they were ready for their first mission. In response she sent them to Tower City, where they were soundly beaten by a quintet of villains who, unbeknownst to Dynamo 5, were really Warner's allies, the Noble Family, in disguise, whom Warner enlisted to prove her point to the team that they were not yet ready.

Warner's use of radical, even dangerous ideas, extends to life-threatening situations. Following the defeat of the reptilian monster known as Whiptail, she absconded with several vials of the serum that transforms humans into the creature. She saved these vials for a "rainy day", and later injected herself with a vial of the serum when she was about to murdered by the villainesses Chrysalis and Synergy, even though being transformed into Whiptail renders a person completely feral, and lacking in their human intelligence or judgment. Although Dynamo 5 had been captured by F.L.A.G. at this point, and Warner had no way to plan the scenario beyond using the serum to escape her would-be murderers, their battle took them from Chrysalis' mountain hideout to Tower City, where the escaped Dynamo 5 eventually intervened. After Warner was rendered unconscious by Scrap, she reverted back to her human form.

Despite her matronly role and demeanor with the team, Warner can be ruthless with enemies that she perceives to be threats, and will not hesitate to kill them, as she did with The Superior, the leader of an organization called The Veil, that had kidnapped Visionary, even though Visionary had been returned, and the Superior had been captured. Remarking on the fact that the team is unaware that she is a former agent of F.LA.G., she commented ominously in Dynamo 5 #1, “Kind of makes you wonder what else I never told them, doesn’t it?” Warner's uncompromising willingness to achieve her goals have also brought her into conflict with members of the team and their loved ones. Gage's difficulty in finding time for both his high school career and his superheroics, has led to sleeplessness, and tension between him and Warner. Jennifer Chang, the mother of Hector Chang (aka Visionary), after discovering his son's life as a superhero, was angered at learning that Warner exposed her son to a heavy dose of radiation to unlock his powers, and after having Hector introduce them, she threatened to report Warner to the authorities for what she regarded as child endangerment and possibly kidnapping. Warner insisted that because his children shared Captain Dynamo's DNA, the radiation posed no risk to them, and speculated that Jennifer's ire was motivated more from feeling abandoned by the man who seduced her, but Jennifer was not amused by this statement.

When probing her memories during his attempt to bring her out of her coma, Scatterbrain observed that Warner tends to accept a disproportionate amount of responsibility for various unfortunate events in her life, and harbors guilt over those incidents. It was in convincing Warner of her need to move beyond her guilt that Scatterbrain was able to bring her out of the coma.