TASKMASTER

The Avengers were not the first to notice something odd about the criminals they kept arresting in 1980: the thugs fought too well, in styles that looked borrowed. The trail led to the Solomon Institute for the Criminally Insane, a respectable-looking facility that was, in fact, a front. Behind its doors, the skull-masked Taskmaster was running a training academy for aspiring henchmen — and the school's existence only surfaced because its administrator, Pernell Solomon, had used its resources to clone himself after learning he needed an organ donor with his own rare blood type, and the clone called the Avengers for help.

The academy was no side hustle; it was the whole point. After a string of early robberies showed him how dangerous fieldwork was, Masters put his stolen capital into training centers scattered across the United States instead. His ambition was wholesale, not retail: to become the supplier of polished, professional muscle to criminal organizations everywhere. The curriculum came straight from the evening news — he studied archival broadcasts of costumed heroes and villains in action, then drilled his students in the moves he had absorbed.

When the Avengers raided the Institute, Taskmaster briefly captured Yellowjacket, the Wasp and Ant-Man before the rest of the team exposed the operation, and he still slipped away. Shutting down one campus barely dented the franchise: he soon opened another academy in Manhattan and later ran a traveling carnival as a mobile school. Earth-616's most wanted man was, by trade, a headmaster.