BIOGRAPHY
Franklin Hall was a Canadian scientist operating out of Research City, an isolated community dedicated to scientific pursuits and experiments. A lonely and bitter man, Frank fixated on Judy Parks after sharing a laboratory with her once. He believed he was in love with Judy, in spite of her husband Joe and her demonstrative lack of interest. During the experimental construction of a teleport beam, Frank doubled the power and got caught in the overload. His molecules were 
displaced to mix with an experimental anti-gravity element being formulated in a nearby lab. Frank’s molecules snapped back to their original location, but he now possessed the inherent power to manipulate gravity at will.
Frank tested his new abilities and found he enjoyed the power they gave him. He soon took over Research City, using his power to lord over his fellow scientists. Some citizens willingly served Frank’s wishes for a chance at power. A woman named Raquel never gave Frank a second look 
before, but she was eager to please him now. Still, Frank was only interested in impressing Judy. When her husband Joe broke ranks and tried calling the Avengers, Frank punished him and then used his powers to lift the entire area surrounding Research City up into the sky. Despite the disobedience, Frank found the idea of battling the Avengers amusing, and he had a costume designed to his specifications, declaring himself “Graviton.”
As Graviton tried again to impress Judy, the Avengers responded to the distress call. Raquel remained loyal and warned her new master of the incoming threat. Graviton demonstrated his limitless power, blasting the Avengers around with force, formulating hyper-dense projectiles of matter and even affecting the Vision while in his intangible state. With little more than a few 
gestures, Graviton soon defeated eight of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. When Frank turned to Judy for validation, though, he found Raquel had knocked her unconscious trying to escape. Graviton didn’t care for Raquel’s fawning and, when Joe Parks rallied the scientists against him, Frank expelled them all from his paradise. Only Judy and the Avengers remained, as Graviton sent the rest of Research City’s people drifting slowly to the ground.
Flush with power, Graviton flew Research City from Canada to New York City, daring anyone else to attempt to stop him. He dressed up Judy as his queen and held the Avengers gravitized to a slab as trophies, still trying to impress her. Thor, God of Thunder, arrived from the Avengers’ reserves to pit his might against Graviton. Thor held Graviton’s attention long enough for Iron Man to free himself, and the Black Panther rescued the rest of the Avengers. Still, they were no more prepared for him than before, and were quickly contained again in a sphere of gravitic energy. Once again, Franklin Hall turned to see Judy’s reaction, only to find her missing. A trail of jewels 
led to the edge of the city, and Graviton realized Judy leapt to her death rather than remain at his side. Graviton lost all sense of reason after that, and all control over his powers. All of “Sky Island” began to gravitate towards him as millions of tons of earth and metal compressed into his space like a living black hole. Nothing seemed left of Graviton or Research City as the Avengers displaced the hyper-dense sphere that remained into the harbor. [Avengers (1st series) #158-159]
Judy Parks was miraculously saved by Edwin Jarvis, the Avengers’ butler, who flew out on a Sky-sled at that moment to see if he could help. However, Graviton also survived. The experimental anti-gravity element in his system shunted the mass of Research City into a pocket universe, but the unstable element struggled to properly identify how much mass Graviton’s body was meant to have. His human frame sputtered between massive and intangible as it remained linked to the extra-dimensional mass. Graviton rose from the harbor, but the ordeal damaged his mind, leaving him an amnesic derelict for a time. Only after seeing Judy on the street did his memory start to return.
Graviton grabbed Judy into an alley, the only familiar face he knew. The Thing and Black Bolt of the Inhumans were nearby, and Jarvis sent them after the villain. As Judy explained her history 
with Franklin Hall to Ben Grimm, her story also restored Graviton’s own memories. Hall’s mind returned, just as his body underwent the strangest changes yet. His expression of mass grew to over fifteen feet tall, crackling with energy as a sentient, pocket universe, who warped space itself around himself. Truly inhuman now, a frightened and contrite Graviton petitioned Black Bolt for sanctuary in Attilan, but the Inhuman king rejected him as too big of a risk. Instantly spiteful again, Graviton fired a beam of gravity at the sun itself, triggering a solar flare that would bring the heat of the star itself directly down upon Attilan.
Black Bolt was forced to flee and intercept the solar flare in space with his electron-manipulating power, leaving an ever-growing Graviton to rampage through Manhattan towards the United Nations. Once he returned, Black Bolt and local physics professor Charles Herkowitz came up with a scientific solution for Graviton’s power. They believed it was possible to send Graviton wholly into the pocket universe his powers sustained. As large as Graviton seemed, he was still only expressing in this universe a portion of the mass that existed in the four-square miles of Research City, compacted into his pocket. A suitable mass of anti-matter could annihilate his matter in this universe, causing the rest of Graviton to “snap back” to the majority of his mass in 
the other universe. Elementary, really. Black Bolt’s electron power converted a two-ton slab of rubble into anti-matter, while sustaining it in a magnetic bottle to prevent annihilation until the proper moment. And the Thing threw it at ‘im. At the last moment, Black Bolt noticed Graviton seemed to be inviting death and diverted their anti-matter slab. Still, Graviton recognized that he had gone too far in his pursuit of power and willingly released his hold on this universe, sending his essence away from Earth entirely. [Marvel Two-In-One Annual #4]
Graviton eventually escaped the extra-gravitic dimension and returned to Earth, apparently shedding the excess tons of mass he gained from Research City in the process. He immediately sought out Judy Parks again, but this time she stood her ground. She and Joe were expecting a child now, and she simply had never loved Frank in the first place. Although he stroked his own ego while leaving, Graviton finally listened after Judy’s speech and left the Parks in peace. He decided to find another woman to be his queen and traveled to Bloomingdale’s on 5th Ave. Using his gravimetric force, Graviton lifted the entire department store hundreds of feet into the air, ensuring a captive audience while he selected from among the women in attendance.
The Mighty Thor noticed the commotion but, after his first contact with Graviton, he feared what would happen to the floating store even if he knocked the villain unconscious. Falling back on Doctor Don Blake’s medical knowledge, Thor visited a drug store to acquire a syringe of sodium 
pentothal. With Mjolnir as a distraction, Thor injected Graviton with a dose strong enough to knock him out in a matter of minutes. Dizzy and afraid, Graviton remained conscious long enough to lower the department store to the ground out of fear for his own life. Once he was unconscious, Thor used the spatial vortexes of Mjolnir to deposit Graviton into the featureless void of interstellar space, far from any matter to exert his gravity power upon. [Thor (1st series) #324]
Without food, air or water, Graviton fell into a state of suspended animation until the Beyonder moved his massive ring construct through the same void. [Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars #1] This provided a surge of energy, which allowed Graviton to reach out and connect with Earth once again. He somehow linked to the charging device of a thief called the Blank, who was drawing upon remote energy to power his stolen force field belt. Once the Blank used the charging device at a high enough level, it created a wormhole drawing Graviton back to Earth. [West Coast Avengers (1st series) #2]
Finding himself in California, Graviton decided to build a criminal empire on the West Coast with the Blank as his emissary. The Blank was a coward at heart, but he fulfilled Graviton’s orders to get word out in the underworld of a new boss consolidating power. The newly formed West Coast Avengers had already encountered the Blank and tracked him to this underworld meeting without being aware of Graviton’s involvement. Graviton delighted in the opportunity to show off his power 
against Wonder Man, trapping the ionic immortal at the bottom of his pool with the literal weight of the world on his shoulders. He also used a gravitic wave to toss Tigra and the Avengers’ ally the Shroud far out into the Pacific Ocean. Tired of his whimpering and lack of grace under pressure, Graviton sent the Blank on his way in the same manner. [West Coast Avengers (1st series) #3]
Tigra met with the other West Coast Avengers and they formulated a plan to beat Graviton, now that they knew their opponent. Graviton remained focused on showing off how powerful he was and looking desirable to women. Tigra used her human form to pose as the Maggia boss Madame Masque, interested in Graviton’s consolidation efforts. Mockingbird also infiltrated Graviton’s Santa Monica party as a bartender, spiking his champagne with drugs to limit his concentration and control over his powers. Once they located Wonder Man, the Avengers revealed themselves and began an attack on Graviton. He slowly realized the sluggish effects of the drugs in his drink, 
and lost control of the gravity well holding Wonder Man in the pool. The Avengers also lured Graviton to a nearby power grid substation, where Iron Man could channel the entire electrical feed for southwestern California through his armor. The combination of the drugs and distractions, raw power from the Armored Avenger and a coordinated team effort by the West Coast Avengers brought Graviton to his knees and eventually knocked him out entirely. [West Coast Avengers (1st series) #4]
Graviton escaped the federal marshals easily enough once he regained his senses but found new goals to motivate him rather than becoming a crime boss. He raised a new flying island to carry his personal citadel and a small army of loyal mercenaries. Back in a laboratory, he focused on 
the unified field theory, the idea of combining the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetic force, strong and weak nuclear forces), into a single equation for everything. With he already representing gravity, Graviton crafted a signal and sent it out into the cosmos to find other powerful beings who represented the other forces and could work with him towards their goals. As he waited for responses, Graviton also developed an obsession with the West Coast Avengers’ Tigra and studied her from afar in the hopes of making her his lover.
Graviton’s allies began to gather, including the aliens Quantum and Half-Life representing the nuclear forces, plus the electrostatic entity known as Zzzax. After observing them against the West Coast Avengers, Graviton arrived triumphantly to quickly overpower his foes and take them prisoner. Aboard Sky Island, Graviton kept Tigra on a leash, thinking he could break her, and imprisoned the other Avengers while conspiring with his allies on future “projects of evil.” Tigra outmaneuvered Graviton and his guards by employing her little-used ability to revert to human form, then stealing one of the mercenary’s suits and neutralizer boxes to move freely through Sky 
Island’s gravity traps. As Greer Nelson, Tigra convinced Half-Life and Quantum to turn on each other, forcing Graviton to step in and distracting him while the other Avengers were rescued. The Avengers needn’t have worried, for the build-up of forces as Graviton and his two allies confronted each other proved cataclysmic. Quantum and Half-Life were expelled from Sky Island, while Graviton lost control and his base began shooting into space. The West Coast Avengers rescued the mercenaries they could and abandoned the island, leaving Graviton to the mercies of the void. [West Coast Avengers (2nd series) #12-13]