Mr. Hyde

Mr. Hyde

(pop culture)Taking his cue from a classic fictional character, Marvel Comics' Mr. Hyde first appeared in Journey into Mystery #99 (1964), in a story scripted by Stan Lee and illustrated by Don Heck. Dr. Calvin Zabo is a medical researcher obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 tale Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In an effort to duplicate the experiment in Stevenson's book and unleash the essence of humankind's beastlike nature, Zabo creates a formula that allows him to turn into a superstrong creature called Mr. Hyde. The transformation warps Hyde's facial skin, making Zabo unrecognizable. In his Hyde form, Zabo possesses superhuman strength—a quality he has used to battle longtime adversaries Thor and Daredevil. For a while he held a grudge against Thor because the Thunder God, in his alter ego of Dr. Don Blake, had refused him employment with a company Zabo was attempting to rob. Subsequently Hyde had a long-running partnership with another Thor foe, the Cobra. Mr. Hyde has also battled Captain America, the Falcon, Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, and, as a member of the supergroup the Masters of Evil, the Avengers. Mr. Hyde has committed numerous cruel crimes, including an attempt to blow up New York City in order to kill his old partner the Cobra. He has been known to commit brutal, prolonged acts of torture, such as those against Avengers butler Edwin Jarvis. In his modern rendering Mr. Hyde looks like a murderous maniac, and has often been compared to the Incredible Hulk in his embodiment of pure rage—not surprising, since the Hulk's co-creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby envisioned the character as the superhero counterpart to Jekyll and Hyde. Indeed, Stevenson's tale of personality duplicity also inspired DC Comics' Two-Face. Stevenson's Mr. Hyde served as a member of the title team of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in its first two volumes (1999–2000, 2002–2003), as well as the 2003 movie adaptation. In the tradition of Kirby, O'Neill drew Hyde as a giant, Hulk-like figure. Marvel's Mr. Hyde has rarely ventured outside of comics' pages, having only appeared in “Thor” episodes of the animated TV series The Marvel Super-Heroes (1966).