Captain Trips (Wild Cards) - Character Overview

Character Overview

Marcus Aurelius "Mark" Meadows was born into a thoroughly bourgeois military family. Meadows, a naturally gifted scientist, pursued an advanced degree in biochemistry at college. For his PhD thesis, Meadows chose the topic of illicit psychoactive drugs. However, his generally straight laced and "square" demeanor gave him problems in the sociological portion of his research as he found it difficult to insinuate himself within the radical youth culture of the late 1960s. While at a club in Berkeley California, Meadows renewed his acquaintance with Kimberly Anne Cordayne, a childhood crush of his who had joined the counterculture and now referred to herself as Sunflower. At her urging, and in order to impress her, Mark experimented with LSD for the first time in 1969. The drug triggered his latent Wild Card infection and Mark transformed into the super powered hero The Radical. As the Radical, Meadows intervened to stop a National Guard assault on an anti-war protest after which a smitten Sunflower slept with the Radical. When Meadows reverted back to his own form he became obsessed with discovering the correct chemical combination to resurrect the Radical. His other "friends" are the results of attempts to recreate that formula. His Wild Card is dependent on the chemical stimulation of psychoactive drugs to manifest itself and Meadows often keeps preparations of the specific combinations that create each "friend" ready in case they're needed. Each of these preparations is a different color, kept in glass vials in a leather pouch that Meadows carries with him. Typically, the manifestation of each "friend" only lasts about an hour. Prolonged and repeated use of the Moonchild formula during Trips' sojourn in modern day Vietnam produced insomnia, nervous strain, physical exhaustion, and a kind of psychic bleed over where his personality would become garbled with hers.

It is stated in the Wild Cards book Aces High that Dr. Meadows was once "considered the most brilliant biochemist in the world, the Einstein of his field", but at some point vanished from the public eye amid rumors of divorce (from the aforementioned childhood crush), "personality deterioration" and drug use. From Meadow's addled behavior in later years as Captain Trips, it could be assumed that the drugs he uses to "call his friends" have effects on Meadows' normal form similar to those documented in long-term psychoactive drug users.

In the more modern times depicted in the books, Meadows runs the Cosmic Pumpkin, an "organic remedy" shop, and cares for his daughter Sprout, who has an unspecified developmental disorder which keeps her intellect at the level of a preteen child. He has expressed to Dr. Tachyon a desire to use his "friends" to "fight evil" and otherwise help people. The name Captain Trips has been assumed to be taken in tribute to Jerry Garcia, who was sometimes referred to by that name.