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From SCIFIPEDIA
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The Leader is the arch nemesis of the superhero the Hulk, a fictional comic book character owned by Marvel Comics. The Leader is one twisted and evil individual.
The interesting thing about the Leader is that he is the antithesis of his foe the Hulk. When the brilliant Bruce Banner is exposed to Gamma radiation, the skinny scientist is transformed into the seemingly infinitely strong green-skinned Hulk. When high school drop out Samuel Stern is exposed to that same radiation, he becomes the infinitely brilliant, giant brained green-skinned Leader.
The Leader’s look has changed over the years as he keeps mutating as he is exposed to further gamma radiation. His skin is always green, like the Hulk’s, and his cranium is always extended in size. He has enhanced intuition, pattern-solving, information storage and retrieval, and logical and philosophical structuring abilities. After a later exposure to Gamma rays and mutation, he gained the ability to control people’s minds and create mental illusions.
The Leader is an expert in most scientific fields, particularly genetics and robotics. He has used a variety of robots and synthetic beings called Humanoids to replace individuals. He once tried to replace the people of gamma base and the President and Vice-President with humanoid duplicates. He has also created battle hardware, like his heavily armed tripod walker called the “Murder Module”, which he once piloted in a battle with the Hulk. He has employed other individuals with superhuman strength to do his bidding, either to battle the Hulk or to complete some other evil errand. For example, he once forced the Hulk to invade the Watcher’s home in the Blue Area of the moon to retrieve the Globe of Ultimate Knowledge. The quest for forbidden knowledge is one of the things that motivates him. He also controlled the powerful super villain the Rhino to fight the Hulk.
The first incarnation of the Leader.
He has also sought to radiate others to make creatures like himself that he could control. He once went back in time to the days of early man to alter human evolution so that all of humanity would be made up of Gamma people. He also has tried to contaminate Manhattan’s water supply with something he called the “Green Flu” that would radiate those it did not kill. Another time, he created a town called freehold made up of radiation exposed people which he claimed he would use as a basis for creating a new society after pollution and war would wipe out the rest of humanity. Actually, he used the citizens of Freehold for experimentation, at one point creating the cyborgs known as the Headshop.
One of the things about the Leader is that his creation supports the sci-fi theory about the effects of radiation exposure on individuals. Why would the Leader and the Hulk, exposed to the same radiation, yield such different results? It is speculated that Banner’s subconscious rage transformed him into the Hulk, while Stern’s desire to be more like his educated scientist brother resulted in hyper-intelligence. This theory has also been applied to the Fantastic Four as to why the same Cosmic radiation created four different distinct effects that somehow matched their self-image and personalities.
The Leader was recently brought to trial, and defended by Mallory from the law-firm of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holiway (GLK&H), the She-Hulk’s law firm with the department specializing in metahuman law. They claimed that Sterns was not responsible for his actions due to his exposure to gamma radiation, and actually won the case. Declared “not-guilty”, it is only a matter of time before the Leader returns.
Character Origin
Sam Stern was a high school drop-out working as a laborer in a government owned chemical research facility in the Nevada dessert. He was caught in an explosion when a a cylinder of gamma irradiated waste he was moving unexpectedly blew up. When he awakened in the hospital, he found that he had an insatiable desire for knowledge and began to rapidly read books by the hundreds. A few weeks later, he underwent the physical transformation that would characterize the Leader.
2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.
