Electro (Marvel Comics)

• 1. Introduction

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  Electro, the Marvel Comics supervillain who first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #9 in February 1964, can throw bolts of roughly 100,000 volts from his fingertips. Yet he is better known for losing than for winning. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created him as an enemy for Spider-Man, and he has lasted for decades as one of the hero's most frequent opponents. How does a man with a lightning storm in his hands end up as a punchline in his own world? Why does a villain who calls himself the "Master of Electricity" keep failing, and what does he do when he decides he has had enough? And what happens when a second person takes his name, and then takes his life? The answers run from a power line in New York to a fight over the name itself.

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• 2. Struck By Lightning

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  Maxwell Dillon was an electrical engineer working as a lineman when a freak lightning strike hit him while he repaired a power line. The accident changed his body chemistry and turned him into something like a living electrical capacitor. At first the change gave him little. His powers were weak, so he stole electrical equipment from Stark Industries to charge himself up.

  During that time, Magneto came calling. He wanted Dillon for his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and claimed that Dillon's abilities rivaled his own. Dillon said no.

  The next day, a small-time thug confronted him. Dillon had borrowed money from the man to pay for the machinery he needed, and he had not repaid it. The thug pulled a gun. Dillon answered with a blast of lightning through the man's chest, and it was the first time he ever killed anyone.

  He then took the name Electro and chose a career in professional crime. His first victim was J. Jonah Jameson, whose safe he emptied inside the Daily Bugle Building while the publisher watched. Jameson responded by accusing Spider-Man of secretly being Electro. That forced the hero to prove him wrong.

  Their first fight nearly ended Spider-Man. He touched Electro and was almost killed. He won by turning a fire hose on the villain to short-circuit him, wearing rubber gloves for protection. Next, Electro would try his luck against a different hero at the Baxter Building.

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• 3. Charge and Short Circuit

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  Doctor Octopus once shared two ideas with Electro during a stretch in prison. One was ionizing metals, and the other was sparking the petroleum in a vehicle's fuel tank to make it explode. Those tricks added a destructive edge to a power set that was already formidable.

  The basics are simple. Electro builds up a charge, and when his body holds a lot of it, he becomes superhumanly strong and fast. He can feed on a power plant to grow more powerful. He glides along power lines, using the current inside them as propulsion. Sometimes he has even been shown riding on lightning bolts. In New Avengers, he flew and handled huge amounts of electricity and machinery to free every prisoner at Ryker's Island.

  The weakness is just as clear. When he is fully charged, he is extremely sensitive to anything that can short him out, and water is the classic example. His enemies have often beaten him by outsmarting him or by exploiting that flaw.

  An experimental procedure later changed the picture. It let him store and absorb a seemingly limitless amount of electricity. He gained some control over magnetism, moving objects in a way that recalls Magneto. He could use electromagnetic fields to vaporize water before it touched him, which erased his old weakness.

  He even learned to reach into brains. By stimulating the bioelectric currents in Spider-Man's head, he made the hero beg. He defeated Nate Grey by turning those same currents against his psionic powers. The next question is who he fights beside, and how often that goes wrong.

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• 4. Joining the Team

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  Electro was the first member of the original Sinister Six, led by Doctor Octopus, to fight Spider-Man. They met at a Stark plant. Spider-Man walked in believing he had lost his powers, then dodged one of Electro's bolts and realized they were back. The fight ended when Spider-Man cut off the power and Electro lost his strength.

  The Sinister Six was only one of his teams. Electro also joined the Frightful Four, where he used Spider-Man as bait to trap the Fantastic Four. He founded and led the Emissaries of Evil, assembled to take revenge on Daredevil for earlier defeats. Daredevil was the second hero he took on, after a failed attempt to break into the Baxter Building.

  At the wedding of Sue Storm and Reed Richards, Electro attacked the Fantastic Four while under the influence of Doctor Doom's mind-control machine. He remembered none of it afterward, thanks to Mister Fantastic.

  His solo work was no steadier. J. Jonah Jameson hired him to beat Spider-Man on national television. He fought the Falcon and lost, partly because he did not take the Falcon seriously. Chameleon and Hammerhead sent the Shocker to recruit him, but he preferred to take Doctor Octopus's invitation back into the Sinister Six.

  The pattern of defeats wore on him, and the next stretch of his story is about what he did to escape it.

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• 5. The Hunt for Respect

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  New York City's power supply was Electro's first big gamble for glory. He was tired of the embarrassing defeats, and he tried to take over the grid to earn respect. Spider-Man stopped him, then persuaded him to quit crime.

  Retirement held until Kaine, Spider-Man's clone, began killing the hero's enemies. Frightened, Electro briefly joined Hobgoblin's Sinister Seven, a group formed to fight Kaine. It disbanded quickly, and when Kaine vanished, Electro went back to retirement.

  Then the Rose offered to fund an experimental technique that would amplify his abilities, in exchange for his work as an enforcer. Electro saw a chance to rise above a life of failures. He paid off the debt by defeating members of the True Believers, ninja assassins who were interfering with the Rose's operations. Then he tried again to take the city's power supply. Spider-Man stopped him in an insulated suit, and Electro threw himself into the Hudson River while highly charged, apparently dying in an explosion.

  He somehow survived. He turned up in a re-formed Sinister Six assembled to kill Senator Stewart Ward and Doctor Octopus, whom the others hated for his arrogance. Venom later betrayed that team and left Electro for dead, but Electro lived again.

  Later, he worked with the Vulture and came close to beating Spider-Man, who thought they had kidnapped Aunt May. Electro used his powers more cleverly and blew up many cars, some with children inside. Spider-Man finally won by luring him to a gas refinery.

  After a stint with the Green Goblin's Sinister Twelve, a Skrull posing as Elektra hired him to free Karl Lykos from the Raft. Electro tried to flee with his waitress girlfriend, but the New Avengers caught him. He fainted when Luke Cage prepared to beat him up. During "Secret Invasion," Wolverine left Dillon beaten and unconscious in an alley. His worst years were still ahead.

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• 6. The Gauntlet

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  Issue 612 of The Amazing Spider-Man began "The Gauntlet" and brought a changed Electro, with a face scarred by lightning bolts and a trench coat. Writer Mark Waid said artist Paul Azaceta had tweaked the design and added burn scars. According to Waid, Electro's body chemistry was shifting into middle age, and his powers were growing more erratic and harder to control.

  The damage was worse than the scars. Electro had lost control of his powers, and his touch was now 100 percent lethal. Angry and depressed, he gathered outcasts and misfits into a group called "Power To The People." Its targets were the right-wing newspaper baron Dexter Bennett and the New York Stock Exchange, in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis.

  The group won positive media coverage, which made it harder for Spider-Man to convince Electro's followers of his true nature. Waid described the character as one of the smart criminals who had been saving what he stole from banks and savings and loans. He also called Electro the "anti-bailout guy."

  But Electro betrayed his own followers and sided with Bennett in return for help restoring his powers to a controllable level. The Mad Thinker devised a cure. Spider-Man interfered, and the process turned Electro into an artificial electrical thunderbolt. Furious, he double-crossed Bennett and wrecked the Daily Bugle building, crippling Bennett in the process. The effort drained him so badly that Spider-Man could neutralize him with webbing.

  In his new form he could travel through electrical appliances, entering a light bulb and leaving through any other device on the same circuit. He could even transmit himself along Spider-Man's web line. After that, he escaped and was soon breaking the fourth Vulture out of prison, under orders from the Kravinoffs.

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• 7. Francine Frye

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  Francine Frye first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 3 #2 in July 2014, created by Dan Slott, Humberto Ramos, and R.B. Silva. She was a fan of supervillains who had befriended Electro. Dillon visited her while he was losing control of his abilities and kept his distance. She leaned in to kiss him anyway and died from electrocution.

  Ben Reilly, who is also the Jackal, revived her in a clone body with her soul intact. The clone lacked her piercings and tattoos. Reilly summoned her to persuade Dillon to undergo a procedure meant to repower him. Dillon's saliva had mixed with Frye's DNA, so when she kissed him repeatedly, she killed him and took his powers. She became the second Electro.

  She did not actually carry the name until The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 4 #17 in October 2016. From 2016 to 2021, she served as a solo Electro in a green-and-yellow costume. She also chased Prowler, whose apparent death she accidentally caused, leading the Jackal to make a clone of him.

  She joined a Sinister Six led by Aaron Davis, alongside Hobgoblin, Bombshell, Spot, and Sandman, to steal a decommissioned S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. Mayor Wilson Fisk's operatives then recruited her into an all-female Sinister Syndicate. During "Devil's Reign," Fisk put her in the Thunderbolts to help the NYPD crack down on vigilantes. After Luke Cage replaced Fisk as mayor, she joined Julia Gao's Cape-Killers for a lighter sentence.

  Dillon, meanwhile, came back. Doctor Octopus resurrected him with his powers intact, so two people held the name. In The Spectacular Spider-Man, they fought over it, fell in love, and vowed to marry.

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• 8. Many Shocks, Many Screens

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  In the Marvel 2099 setting, Electro is an android who gained sentience when his employers accidentally removed the chips that controlled him. In Marvel Noir, he has no innate powers and relies on a lightning rod, with Tesla coils strapped to his back. In the Ultimate Marvel universe, experiments by Justin Hammer gave him his powers, and he is bald, wears black leather, and bears burn scars.

  On television, Tom Harvey voiced him in the 1967 Spider-Man series. In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, an original version named Rheinholt Schmidt was a German Nazi and the son of the Red Skull. In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Crispin Freeman voiced a Max Dillon who was transformed by genetically altered electric rays and eels. In the 2017 Spider-Man series, Daisy Lightfoot voiced a teenage Francine Frye who uses an exoskeleton that she must constantly recharge.

  The film history is stranger. James Cameron's aborted 1994 script featured an original Electro named Carlton Strand, with Lance Henriksen considered for the role. Strand would have died in a battle over the World Trade Center.

  Jamie Foxx played Dillon in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014. That version was a nobody at Oscorp who idolized Spider-Man, and Foxx said the classic yellow and green suit was dropped for a more grounded look. Foxx returned in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, in a design closer to the comics. The Green Goblin persuaded Dillon and his fellow prisoners to resist being cured.

  In video games, Marvel's Spider-Man shows him bald with star-shaped facial scars, and he joins Otto Octavius's Sinister Six. In Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro, he becomes "Hyper-Electro."

  Critics have been mixed. In 2009, IGN ranked him the 87th Greatest Comic Book Villain of All Time. A Comics Bulletin reviewer called him a bank robber with electrical powers, not a wanton psychopath. In 2022, Screen Rant placed him 6th on a list of the most powerful Silk villains. Spider-Noir is set to feature him next, with Joe Massingill in the role.

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