PUPPET MASTER

©Roman Schwachöfer
 

  Real Name: Puppet-master
Occupation: Artist, biologist, criminal
Identity: Phillip Masters
Legal status: Naturalized citizen of the United States with a criminal record.
Place of birth: Dragorin, Transia, Europe
First appearance: Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #8 (Nov. 1962)
Height: 6 ft. 3 in.
Weight: 180 lbs.
Eyes: Braun, Hair: black

The Puppet Master uses radioactive clay to make puppets of people that he can then control, attaching them to strings and moving them as puppets, presumably he has

some sort of psionic ability that enables him to do this. He is the step-father of Alicia Masters, a blind girl who holds an attraction to Thing. He once tried to take over the world but was thwarted in this effort by the Fantastic Four.

The man who would become the Puppet-Master was born in a small Balkan nation. He moved to the United States as a young man. He was socially maladjusted and had no friends. After he finished college he went into business with Jacob Reiss. Philip was jealous of Reiss' wealth and of his family and decided to sabotage his workplace, but Reiss caught him in the act and when the two fought Reiss was accidentally killed in an explosion. Unfortunately, Reiss' daughter Alicia was caught in the explosion and blinded as a result.
 

Playing the explosion off as an accident, he started a relationship with and then married Reiss's wife, Marcia, and adopted Alicia. When his wife died it was more than he could bear and he lost his sanity. It was at this time that he first began experimenting with radioactive clay that he was somehow able to use to psionically control specific individual's bodies. He thought to exploit this talent to the fullest and drew up a plan to take over the world. He didn't get very far with the plan before the Fantastic Four stopped him.

He was once thought to have been killed when he fell out of the window of a fairly tall building, but he miraculously survived. Later on, he was transformed into living clay. Yet, he was eventually returned to normal. The Puppet Master has exhibted an uncanny ability to cheat death, dodging everything from bomb blasts, drownings, and even a giant squid attack.

   

He has frequently been an ally of the Mad Thinker and, in dramatic fashion, Doctor Doom, who once aided him in trapping the Fantastic Four within the artificial city of Liddleton, inside tiny robot bodies!

The Puppet Master has been shown on two occasions attempting to leave his (overtly) criminal life behind. In the first, he found some measure of spiritual enlightenment in the service of the billionaire philosopher/cultist Satori , who employed Masters to construct a "perfect man" from his clay that would then receive life and the power cosmic from the Silver Surfer and absorb Satori's mind, that he might survive his body's death and serve as a proper leader to his flock. Masters at some point left this cult, and entered a SHEILD-maintained witness protection program, using his abilities to aid the Government through the dulling of memories of other so-protected criminals' previous associates. Masters reached out through his powers to control Ben Grimm and Alicia, duping Ben into a "married life" with his despondent daughter, whom Ben had stopped seeing years before. Ben was freed, the FF were prevented from taking any measure of revenge upon Masters, given his SHIELD affiliation.

Most recently, in Fantastic Four #538 (August, 2006), Puppet Master was seen to have returned to criminal life and affiliated himself with the Mad Thinker. Utilizing a device constructed by The Thinker, he was able to control a large number of non super-humans, most notably members of the Yancy Street Gang to escalate a battle between the two different factions in the Super Hero Civil War.

He revealed in this issue that he always planned to kill the person he was working with in his past team-ups and that he has anger management problems. The Thinker gives him the number of a good therapist. This exchange, while humorous, seems poorly researched, as The Thinker and Puppet Master have been partners on numerous occasions, with seldom a threat of "double-cross" between the two.

Powers and abilities:

The Puppet Master has no revealed superhuman abilities but was once a brilliant biologist. He is an extremely talented craftsman and very gifted in experimental science. His greatest strength was his ability to create marionette puppets which he modeled after real people in order to physically control them. How he did this was never adequately explained other than he used some type of special radioactive mixture. The clay he used in this mixture was magical and slightly radioactive and comes from a remote area near Wundergore Mountain, Transia, site of the prison of the elder god Chthon. He may have some type of psionic ability which complimented this process, enabling him to control his victims, although the process may be entirely the result of the magical proprties of the clay. He has a Doctorate in biology.

 

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