What would you do if you could go about unseen and unfettered by life? To move about as a living ghost. It seems like one of the less savory power sets, doesn’t it? That’s what Ghost did, became a super villain and left his past behind, might as well be actually dead. How does someone become such a lonesome person, haunting the world while still living? Let’s find out!
There is no name for Ghost before he was Ghost that is left to be found. Whoever he was, he worked for Omnisapient, a tech company. He was a brilliant engineer and programmer who developed processors that could phase before they overheated, becoming intangible just in time. This “Ghost Tech” would make Omnisapient incredibly wealthy, they needed their good little worker working on more developments. He got raises and new positions with responsibilities but those were exhausting after so long and so many upgrades and breakthroughs with the Ghost Tech concept. He needed a vacation and was planning a nice, long trip away from the office but then fate would intervene, so it seemed. A coworker began chatting it up with him, she liked him, it seemed. Soon they were dating and since his trip was all planned for one and couldn’t add anyone else to it, he canceled it.
Though he was constantly busy with work, he now had a girlfriend who understood his troubles since she too, worked for the company. He was a company man once more, ready to work long hours and give them all they wanted and more for Ghost Tech. Then tragedy struck, his girlfriend died from an explosion in her apartment, a tragic accident, it seemed. Devastated, he’d take to finding new avenues with Ghost Tech by experimenting on himself, fusing the tech with his body. Finding a way to link his mind to computers, he could hack into them with ease and discover their secrets similar to how a telepath can plumb the depths of mind. Sifting through Omnisapient’s files he’d find something that would turn his already upside down world into a twist, his beloved girlfriend had been hired by Omnisapient to placate him and make him stick around and never leave. She was murdered, because she demanded more money or she would tell him the truth about how she never loved him and was just hired help. His life since he’d met her was all a lie and Omnisapient were murderers, a trend they were about to keep when they saw that he had been hacking into their files. Blowing up buildings is Omnisapient’s style so they made sure to blow up his building, killing all his neighbors at home. The thing is, his evolution of Ghost Tech meant he was able to become intangible as the explosion was about to hit him, his old life was dead, Ghost was born.
Omnisapient isn’t a company anymore, all the executives were killed mysteriously and the company’s entire records and works were wiped clean. Ghost loathes corporations, he knows they are all just as evil or worse than Omnisapient was. Now a mercenary using Ghost Tech to stealth his way around, Ghost can take down whole businesses, for a price. Even though he loathes corporations, he’ll take work from them to destroy their competition with it planned out that when the time is right, he’ll take that company down too. This work and mentality meant he’d often run into the likes of Tony Stark while working for the likes of Roxxon or Justin Hammer. His confrontations with Stark had him upgrade his Ghost Tech so that it would further his stealth, becoming more and more like an actual ghost.
His criminal activities would sometimes land him in prison, he would join the Thunderbolts program, so he could still have access to his tech working off his debt to society. Ghost would even get to make a semblance of friends with his teammates when Luke Cage took control of the team of super criminals. Finding himself at home in his suit, he’d rarely, if ever, take it off and this would prove difficult when he and his fellow prisoners would find themselves in another dimension during a planned prison break. Ghost’s hatred for corporations and those who run them can be calmed if he learns that those tied to a now defunct company, as has happened with Tony Stark on several occasions whenever one of his companies goes out of business and he must rebuild.
There you have it! Ghost was a part of my favorite iteration of the Thunderbolts and will be appearing in the Ant-Man and Wasp movie, with a woman in the role. Will she have a similar story as the comics one? Her powers are more tied to Pym-Particles tech than to its own Ghost Tech but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Until then, see you next time!
Suggested Reading
Iron Man #219
Thunderbolts
Dr. Bustos
drbustos@comicattack.net
