MULTIPLE MAN

James Arthur Madrox was born near the Los Alamos research facility in New Mexico, and his mutant power did not wait for adolescence — it arrived in the delivery room. When the doctor gave the newborn his first slap, the kinetic impact split him on the spot into two identical babies. Most mutants discover their gifts as teenagers; Jamie Madrox had already duplicated himself before his first breath was properly out. The moment is told in Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4 (1975), by Len Wein, Chris Claremont and John Buscema, where the Fantastic Four meet a young man who has been multiplying ever since.

His parents, scientists Daniel and Joan Madrox, turned to family friend Professor Charles Xavier, who advised them to leave Los Alamos and raise Jamie in privacy on an isolated farm in Kansas. Daniel built his son a special suit designed to absorb kinetic energy — the very trigger of his duplication — so that every bump, trip and playground knock would not spawn another Jamie. The suit worked, and the boy grew up quietly, until a tornado killed both his parents when he was fifteen, a storm later revealed to have been conjured by the time-travelling Damian Tryp.

Jamie ran the farm alone, with only his duplicates for company, until the suit's control elements burned out when he was twenty-one and his powers surged out of control, draining power across Manhattan. Professor X and Reed Richards repaired the suit and calmed him down, and Jamie declined an invitation to join the X-Men, choosing instead to work as a laboratory assistant to Moira MacTaggert on Muir Island. Years later he would trade the lab coat for a trench coat and run X-Factor Investigations, a detective agency staffed entirely by himself.