JACK OF HEARTS: Page 4 of 4

BIOGRAPHY - Page 4

Unfortunately, Jack of Hearts began suffering issues with his health and powers once more. Doctors Pym and Stark speculated that Jack’s return to Earth and living inside an atmosphere upset his Zero Power, causing the fissionable breakdown of his cells again. His armor and the neutro-mist could no longer do what they were designed for. Instead, Jack was forced to isolate himself for ten hours a day in the Zero Room, a specially designed cell in Avengers Mansion which siphoned his excess energy and radiation, or else he risked detonating in an atomic explosion. The process of leeching energy from his cells was painful, and the discharge would destroy any books or other materials he might bring inside the Zero Room to pass the time. Thus, a man with no need for sleep or rest was trapped in complete isolation for nearly half of every day.

Jack’s recent self-assuredness and affable nature began to crumble under these conditions, and he began to revert back to the bitter and short-tempered man he was during his previous health crises. The Avengers roster went through changes when Scorpio of Zodiac stole many capitals and major cities from around the globe, transporting them into the Ankh Dimension. The United Nations and collapsing governments promoted the Avengers to lead the world in this crisis, with several members like She-Hulk and Black Panther coming out of the reserves to serve. However, Jack of Hearts fixated on the presence of Ant-Man II, Scott Lang, who wasn’t even an Avenger but responded to an emergency transmission on Hank Pym’s old cybernetic helmet signals. Jack’s insecurities made him jealous of how casually the Avengers accepted a non-member like Scott in their ranks, feeling like Ant-Man was trading on his famous hand-me-down codename rather than putting in the work to prove himself like Jack did. Jack of Hearts was only acting out because of his difficulty with the Zero Room, but it led to some bitter exchanges between him and Ant-Man. [Avengers (3rd series) #57-61]

The Zero Room wasn’t much help in resolving Jack’s problems, either. In fact, Iron Man and Yellowjacket soon decided they needed to up Jack’s time in the Zero Room from ten hours a day to fourteen, just to be on the safe side. Jack was already fuming from this turn of events when Doctor Pym dropped another bomb on him. Yellowjacket had been exploring Phillip Hart’s research notes and papers about the Zero Fluid to better understand Jack’s original mutation. What he discovered was evidence that Phillip knew about Marie and her Contraxian heritage all along. Phillip’s research indicated early on that Jack’s alien-human hybrid genes would become unstable, and he worked on a way to address his son’s condition. The “super-fuel” aspect of Zero Fluid was a side-effect of its true purpose – to address and regulate the energies in Jack’s body. Essentially, exposure to Zero Fluid didn’t give Jack his powers; it awakened a power that was already there and prevented the instability from breaking down Jack’s physiology earlier. Learning his entire life had been a lie (again), didn’t help Jack’s disposition any further. [Avengers (3rd series) #62]

[Note: Multiple retcons over the years have created a “chicken or the egg” paradox with Jack and the Zero Fluid. The Contraxian scout Marie Hart supposed interacted with Phillip because of his energy research that led to the Zero Fluid. Conversely, Phillip only created Zero Fluid to address the hybrid physiology of his son with Marie. On top of that, an obscure OHOTMU Alien Races entry suggests that Jack was only born because Marie used genetic manipulation to make a human and Contraxian mating pair possible.]

The Avengers were called out to South Dakota where a bioweapon had been unleashed, producing a cloud of flesh-eating bacteria. The team had to enter the cloud to locate its point of origin, and the others donned heavy hazmat suits while Jack’s post-human physiology made him immune to the Red Zone’s effects. They found a secret military installation attacked by A.I.M. to release the bioweapon. Jack of Hearts was assigned guard duty by Captain America, watching over Ant-Man as he searched the installation’s computer system for a possible cure. The entire affair made Jack sick, and he began considering leaving Earth behind and wandering space again. Scott pointed out that each of the Avengers had their own reason to keep fighting for a better world. For Scott, it was his daughter, Cassie. An uncomfortable silence fell when Jack and Scott both realized Jack couldn’t think of a reason for himself.

A troop of A.I.M. agents were found locked away in quarantine, and they started a firefight once they were released. She-Hulk’s hazmat suit was torn open, exposing her to the Red Zone. Her gamma-powered body was fighting the effects for the moment, but Cap ordered Jack of Hearts to fly Jennifer free of the cloud and get her medical treatment. Little did Jack and Jen realize that their bodies had been reacting to one another for weeks ever since she rejoined the team. Jack’s Zero Power absorbed radiation, and She-Hulk’s gamma rays were one of the elements that had been causing his destabilization. On the other side, Jack of Hearts was disturbing the balance of gamma radiation in She-Hulk’s system with his Zero radiation. By being in direct contact as he flew her away, they reached a tipping point. Jen was depowered, then suddenly repowered to become a larger, more savage version of She-Hulk. She knocked Jack of Hearts unconscious and then fled into the wilderness. [Avengers (3rd series) #65-68]

After the Red Zone was dealt with, the Avengers organized a search party for She-Hulk. While the others were away, Ant-Man was given "Jack duty", making sure Jack of Hearts got into the Zero Room on schedule. Scott tried to empathize with Jack over being cut off from the people he cared about (having recently lost custody of his daughter, Cassie), but Jack rejected the comparison and self-pityingly went on about how much worse things were for him. Scott had had enough and laid into Jack. He shamed Jack for thinking about himself when Jennifer was out there alone because of what he did to her. He said Jack’s relationship with the other Avengers was so bad, some were asking themselves whether Jack did this to She-Hulk on purpose. Finally, he pointed out that Stark’s new time lock on the Zero Room showed a lack of trust over whether Jack would willingly remain isolated like he was supposed to. How much of this was true is uncertain, but it left Jack of Hearts with a lot to dwell on over the next fourteen hours. [Avengers (3rd series) #73]

Actually, Jack ended up being released a lot sooner. The Avengers found Jennifer in Bone, Idaho, but the savage She-Hulk proved uncontrollable, and the arrival of the incredible Hulk only escalated the situation. Iron Man called Ant-Man to take the risk of releasing Jack of Hearts early from the Zero Room. Jack of Hearts flew out to Idaho as Stark coached him on how to release a controlled explosion of his Zero Energy then reabsorb the radiation in the area. Intervening on the Hulk v. She-Hulk fight, Jack impacted with enough force to knock out the gamma goliaths and blow a crater in the side of the mountain, then absorbed the energy back into his cells. He soaked up all the ambient radiation, reverted the Hulks to human form and prevented any radioactive fallout for Idaho. Before passing out from the exertion, Jack delivered a pulse of gamma radiation back into Jennifer, restoring her system’s equilibrium and undoing what he had done to her. [Avengers (3rd series) #75]

Unfortunately, Jack of Hearts and She-Hulk were now a risk to one another. It was considered too dangerous to keep them both on the Avengers’ roster, given how their powers interacted. Jennifer’s friends and several senior Avengers pushed to have her stay and remove Jack from the team. For her part, Jen didn’t want to take that decision out of Jack’s hands. Jack was ready to accept the hand he was dealt and step down from the active roster while the team’s scientists worked towards fixing his powers in the meantime. Ant-Man had spoken up against Jack during the meeting, so Captain America sent him to give Jack a second chance and make amends. While Scott and Jack were talking, however, Ant-Man got news his daughter had been abducted, and immediately flew off. With less than a half-hour before he was due in the Zero Room, Jack of Hearts nevertheless followed.

Jack found the police at an abandoned warehouse where Scott’s daughter Cassie was being held by a criminal named Charles Cooley. The man had recently murdered his own daughter and was preparing to do the same to Cassie. Ant-Man went in with his ants and violently confronted the kidnapper. Jack blew a hole in the wall and disarmed the man, stopping Scott before he killed someone in front of his own daughter. Cooley kept trying to fight back despite the radiation burns Jack gave him and, impulsively, Jack decided they both had had enough. No more Zero Room, no more slowly dying while waiting for a cure. As his timer ticked down, Jack of Hearts grabbed Charles Cooley and flew them both out into space. Cooley’s daughter was avenged, and Jack’s Zero Energy released in a massive explosion, outside the atmosphere where it could do no harm. Jack’s lifeless body was left adrift in space, slowly dissolving as his unstable physiology finally caught up with him. [Avengers (3rd series) #76]

Tragically, Jack of Hearts was not left to rest easily. Weeks later, the Scarlet Witch suffered a nervous breakdown and began attacking the Avengers indirectly. Her power to alter reality weaponized chaos itself and unleashed a series of improbable attacks on the team. One of the worst was Jack of Hearts’ body, restored and guided back to Earth to the steps of Avengers Mansion. Ant-Man ran out to greet the man who saved his daughter, only for Jack to whisper “I’m sorry” before Wanda’s influence made him explode again. Jack died, Ant-Man died and Avengers Mansion was devastated in the first strike of an event that forced the team to disband for some time. [Avengers (1st series) #500] Some small solace was found after Cassie Lang became a Young Avenger named Stature. Her team traveled back to the day Wanda attacked and pulled Scott Lang into the future, preventing his death at Jack’s hands. Still, Jack of Hearts remained dead due to Wanda’s manipulations. [Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #5]

Many years later, a dying scientist at Project: P.E.G.A.S.U.S. named Dr. Mortimer Dauoi was searching for a way to prolong life and avoid death. He used an orbital particle collector to soak up a unique form of negatively-charged energy called Zeta rays for his experiments. Dauoi had taken unstable genetic helixes copied from P.E.G.A.S.U.S.’s former residents, the Squadron Supreme, grafted them onto medical cadavers, and attempted to use Zeta rays to bring these bodies to life. Instead, he created super-powered zombies with a voracious appetite for human flesh. P.E.G.A.S.U.S. went into quarantine lockdown until a Guardsman Alpha Team led by Captain Jill Harper responded to their emergency summons.

With her team hopelessly overrun by normal and super-powered zombies in P.E.G.A.S.U.S., Jill Harper uncovered another energy source Dauoi had cultivated. His Zeta ray extraction from space had soaked up a second energy signature, which Dauoi kept in a separate containment vessel on site. Captain Harper released the mystery energy and it reformed, becoming Jack of Hearts. It seems Jack’s dispersed Zero Energy particles were also harvested by Dauoi’s collector, and now he was back in human form. Harper had read the files on Jack of Hearts and theorized that his unstable periods in the past were partly psychological, when he didn’t have a clear mission or goal driving him. Jack and Jill teamed up as she helped him stabilize and he joined her in protecting what remained of her team. They learned the Zeta rays were inherently unstable until Dauoi used Jack’s Zero Energy to make their effect last. The zombies were therefore all saturated with Zero Energy that Jack of Hearts could sense and reabsorb, causing the undead to become just dead again. Jack even saved Jill from a zombie bite, drained away its potency before she succumbed to the infection. [Marvel Zombies Supreme #1-5]