BIOGRAPHY - Page 2
Graviton managed to place himself in suspended animation for a time while floating through space, until his powers stabilized back down to a manageable level. Once he recovered, Hall crafted a stable pressurized atmosphere for his flying island and returned to Earth. He perceived a gravitational anomaly in New York and arrived in the midst of the Goblin Queen’s invasion from Limbo. Graviton sensed the demon dimension trying to impose itself on our own and realized he 
could reverse the effects. Amused with his own “godhood,” Graviton played with the idea of whether he wanted to save the people of Manhattan or not. He was spotted by the Fantastic Four and toyed with them during a struggle until the Human Torch’s magically increasing flame overwhelmed his nerve. Graviton was knocked unconscious and never got around to deciding if he would have helped others for purely selfless reasons. [Fantastic Four (1st series) #322]
During the Acts of Vengeance affair, villains traded opponents to catch the heroes off-guard fighting unfamiliar foes. The Kingpin of Crime reached out to Graviton and offered to eliminate the Avengers if he swatted a pesky spider for him. Graviton pulled his old trick of making the Daily Bugle building float away from Manhattan to draw Spider-Man’s attention. The web-slinger was at an extreme disadvantage fighting Graviton in the city room. The cramped spaces limited his mobility, and he faced the same problem many heroes did fighting Graviton in a massive floating structure that would drop if Hall fell unconscious. Hesitant to strike and over-powered, Spider-Man was beaten when Graviton left him buried in rubble. Graviton was over-confident enough to believe Spider-Man was dead and lowered the Daily Bugle back to its foundations before floating away. [Amazing Spider-Man (1st series) #326]
Spider-Man not only survived but he soon received the immense cosmic power of Captain Universe for the duration of the Acts of Vengeance affair. Graviton heard of his survival and confidently prepared to finish the job during Spider-Man’s battle with the Tri-Sentinel. Captain Spidey was so powerful at this point, a single blast of Uni-Power propelled Graviton blocks away with immense force, and Graviton decided to run rather than anger the cosmic web-spinner further. [Amazing Spider-Man (1st series) #329] Some weeks later, the Chameleon hired a 
group of recent villains to kill Spider-Man, now that he lost his enhanced powers. Graviton joined Titania, Goliath, Trapster and the Brothers Grimm in seeking revenge on Spider-Man. Graviton was overconfident once more, reversing Spider-Man’s personal gravity to send him flying out into space without killing him directly. Spidey managed to snag a passing jet near JFK airport until the anti-gravity effect wore off. He hunted down the villains after that, disabling Graviton first by blinding him with webbing and then a clean shot to the jaw. [Web of Spider-Man (1st series) #64-65]
After his attempt at a unified field theory team failed, Graviton decided to return to his roots as a physicist and discover his own version of supergravity to combine the fundamental forces within his own body. At his lab in the Arizona desert, Graviton’s experiment instead created a gravitational storm with his body at the center, drawing objects into constant orbit around him. Graviton’s out of control powers caught the attention of the Avengers, and Giant-Man attempted to use Pym Particles to reduce Graviton’s mass, and with it his gravitational field. Instead, Graviton added Pym Particles to his assortment of subatomic particles, using them to condense himself into hyper-dense, white dwarf matter and gain even greater power. To stop the villain, the Vision synchronized his own density-shifting abilities with Graviton’s body, combined with another dose of Pym Particles, to compress Graviton down into an infinite point, a living black hole which cast itself into another universe. [Avengers Unplugged #2]
Graviton emerged into another plane of reality, populated by a simple race known as the P’Tah. They worshipped the stranger, allowing him to establish himself as a god to these people, but Graviton still desired to return home. Even with the equipment provided by the P’Tah and his knowledge of physics, Hall was unable to achieve dimensional travel on his own. Instead, he crafted an inter-dimensional beacon, hoping to draw attention from someone on Earth. Baron Zemo and Techno detected Graviton’s beacon, and incorporated it into a revenge scheme against 
their former teammates, the Thunderbolts. Formerly known as the Masters of Evil, Zemo and the Thunderbolts recently came within a hair’s-breadth of conquering the Earth. However, the Thunderbolts betrayed Zemo and helped the Avengers foil his plans. They were now trying to prove their heel turn was legitimate to the public.
Techno crafted a Hulk robot linked to Graviton’s beacon and lined with induction coils to absorb all manner of energies. When the Thunderbolts found the Hulk on a rampage, they attacked it and inadvertently fed their power into the robot’s dimensional transfer, calling Graviton back to Earth. The Thunderbolts and the Great Lakes Avengers suddenly found themselves facing the master of the fundamental force. Graviton easily overpowered his new foes and announced his plans to seek revenge on the Avengers, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and anyone who ever stood in the way of his goals in the past. However, this prompted the Thunderbolts’ criminal psychologist 
Moonstone to challenge Graviton over what his goals actually WERE. She blasted him as a man of incredible power but limited vision who constantly lost to weaker opponents because he lacked any sort of long-term plans to commit his focus to. Graviton’s ego was stung, but he recognized the truth in her words. Seeing the deaths of the Thunderbolts and GLA as a pointless exercise, Graviton departed to plot and plan for the future. [Thunderbolts (1st series) #15-17]
In time, Graviton put together his master plan. He raised another Sky Island with his powers and intended for it to serve as a sovereign nation, ruled by him as Lord Graviton the First. He recruited “citizens” for Sky Island with promises of power and glory, and showed his ability to deliver. Graviton could choose to imbue anyone with a portion of his power, giving people the ability to fly, 
protective gravity shields, etc. His debut of Sky Island to the people of the world came while floating over San Francisco, sending down his Sky Raiders as scavengers, able to steal what they want with impunity and return to safety under his protection. Graviton made a public broadcast, offering citizenship to anyone willing to serve him without reservation in exchange for the power he offered.
The Thunderbolts were now led by Graviton’s old opponent, Hawkeye of the Avengers, and they flew out to meet him. The Sky Raiders proved to be the cannon fodder Graviton expected, but he held his own against the assembled heroes. They nearly managed to break his concentration enough to win, but ultimately Graviton felled all his foes with a single gravitic shockwave and stood triumphant. He announced his intention to formally execute the Thunderbolts live on 
television the next morning for defying the boundaries of his nation. In private, however, Graviton showed his real motivation when he ordered a private audience with the captive Moonstone. Karla Sofen was a beautiful woman who challenged him, and Franklin Hall was now focused on earned her validation. He tried to get her to admit she was impressed with his achievements, even willing to serve him, but Moonstone just laughed. She saw a fragile ego backed by a collection of clichés and lack of imagination, a retort which infuriated Graviton further.
The next morning, Graviton prepared to carry out the executions when the Thunderbolts’ missing members Jolt and Charcoal arrived. They prepared for Graviton by first seeking out Machine Man, whose knowledge of the “gravity equation” let him whip together armbands that made the Thunderbolts immune to Graviton’s influence. Once the rest of the team was free and banded, 
they advanced on Graviton and his minions. An angry Graviton began to lose control, erupting with more gravitic power than ever before. The Thunderbolts decided to reverse their strategy and sent their ally Archangel to attach the anti-gravity bands to Graviton himself. They succeeded in neutralizing his power momentarily, but the sudden gravitic feedback caused Hall’s power to begin imploding. Graviton and all of Sky Island soon collapsed back into the pocket dimension of his personal gravimetric wormhole once again. [Thunderbolts (1st series) #27-30]
Time passed and the Thunderbolts disbanded. The team finally received pardons for their past criminal acts, but only if they refrained from using their powers in the future. Graviton returned from beyond with his P’Tah advisor, M’Reel, and they sought out the directionless Karla Sofen. [Thunderbolts (1st series) #51] Graviton approached Moonstone with respect rather than force this time and offered Dr. Sofen the opportunity to advise him on his shortcomings. Deprived of better influences like Hawkeye or Jolt, 
Moonstone lacked confidence in her own moral compass. In the past, she had always enjoyed being “the power behind the power” for different egomaniacs. She agreed to assist Graviton, although whether from a heroic desire to keep him from becoming a threat or a selfish need to dominate the vulnerable, even she didn’t know for sure. Graviton, for his part, was quite attracted to Moonstone and eager to prove himself a dutiful student for her lessons. [Thunderbolts: Life Sentences]
Graviton took Moonstone’s lectures on scale and perspective to heart. He practiced shaping mountains on the moon, but also got in tune with the gravimetric field of the entire Earth. With a thought, he lifted a stone in China and deposited it in Australia. Franklin Hall was still a malicious narcissist at heart, though. The stone was used to kill a childhood acquaintance of Moonstone’s just to show that he could, and his new dreams involved reshaping the tectonic plates of the Earth itself into literally his own image. Graviton’s newfound self-confidence surpassed Moonstone’s ability to keep up, and he soon declared himself ready to face the world before she came up with a credible reason to keep him under her thumb for any longer. [Thunderbolts (1st series) #53-55]
Graviton declared his rise at Mount Charteris over Burton Canyon, Colorado, the former base of the Thunderbolts. Their ersatz replacements, the Redeemers, became his first targets. In a matter of seconds, Graviton essentially killed three of their members, Scream, Charcoal and Jolt. In the minutes that followed, he cast Meteorite up to suffocate in orbit, gravity jumped to the sun to burn away Smuggler’s shadow form and crushed Beetle to death in her own collapsing armor. Moonstone arrived after Graviton quickly enough to convince her former teammate the Fixer to switch sides and offer his engineering skill to Graviton, saving his life. With this display over, Graviton began his plan to reshape the topography of the entire planet. [Thunderbolts (1st series) #56]
Graviton first lifted all the cities he found worthwhile high into the air, suspending them safely above the ground before he started terraforming the earth itself. He also suspended hundreds of super-heroes in stasis, selectively targeting all those he considered threats and removing them from the equation. As Citizen V of the Redeemers gathered and rearmed the Thunderbolts M.A.C.H.-3, Songbird and Atlas, Fixer’s equipment detected an energy aura surrounding M’Reel. He and Karla determined M’Reel was connected to Graviton, channeling energy from his gravity manipulations to somewhere else. When the reunited Thunderbolts arrived and distracted 
Graviton, the Fixer took a chance and shot M’Reel in the head. The Thunderbolts’ shock tactics managed to give them the upper hand, but they soon faced the same problem so many of Graviton’s foes faced – the likely massacre of dozens of cities when they crashed to Earth after he was beaten. The Thunderbolts were forced to turn to Moonstone for help convincing Graviton to save the cities first.
As Karla started trying to coerce Frank into complying, M’Reel’s corpse still finished the work at had begun, opening a spatial rift which allowed the P’Tah armies through. It seemed the P’Tah had been manipulating Graviton all along, hiding their true nature and hoping to use his power to escape their dimensional exile. Graviton’s energies sustained the breach and he was forced into a position of saving the world by stopping the use of his powers. By returning the Earth to normal, restoring the cities and releasing the heroes, his active energies depleted from the breach and sent the P’Tah back into exile. Franklin Hall didn’t even have time to enjoy his “heroism” as a 
P’Tah warrior struck him in the back with an energy spear. The Thunderbolts fought to stabilize the dying Graviton as his power controlled the breach’s decay so it dissipated instead of imploding into a new black hole. In the final flare up of his powers, the Thunderbolts wound up on Counter-Earth on the opposite side of the sun’s orbit, and there was no sign of Graviton. [Thunderbolts (1st series) #57-58]