Puppet Master (Marvel Comics)

Publication history

The Puppet Master's first appearance was in Fantastic Four volume 1 #8 (November 1962), and he was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. His origin was told in Marvel Team-Up volume 1 #6 (January 1973).

Fictional character biography

Phillip Masters, the man who becomes the Puppet Master, was born in Dragorin, a town in the small fictional Balkan nation of Transia. He moved to the United States at the age of eight. Growing up he was socially maladjusted and had no friends. (According to Spider-Man Family #4, his mother died when he was young and he was often picked on, which caused him to turn to his puppets "friendship".)

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. The two of them break into a fight which results in an explosion that kills Reiss and blinds his daughter Alicia, who was also caught in the blast.

Phillip plays the explosion off as an accident, and then starts a relationship Reiss' wife, Marcia. He marries Marcia and adopts Alicia. Later, Marcia dies and it is more than he can bear and he loses his sanity. It is at this time that he begins experimenting with the radioactive clay puppets that he is able to use to psionically control specific individuals' bodies. Intending to exploit this talent to the fullest, he plots to take over the world. He doesn't get very far with the plan before the Fantastic Four stop him. He succeeds in capturing the Invisible Girl, and masterminds a mass jailbreak using the warden's trustee. He then falls from a window after tripping over Alicia's hand, and is thought to have died.

But the Puppet Master survives, and months later is released from hospital. He then controls Namor, and uses him to battle the Fantastic Four. He also manages to pit the Human Torch and the Thing against each other. He also teams up with the Mad Thinker, and uses the original X-Men to battle the Fantastic Four. Teaming up again with the Thinker, who would become his frequent ally, he battls the Thing and the Torch again, using animated life-size mannequins to battle the pair.

The Puppet Master is later seen among a group of criminals assembled by Doctor Doom. He then controls Namor again. He opposes the original X-Men through the mind-controlled Mimic. He also sparks a battle between the Hulk and Namor by controlling the Hulk.

The Puppet Master next allies with the Mad Thinker and Egghead in their attempt to blackmail the U.S. He forces Iron Man to battle Captain Marvel. He again teams with the Thinker, and attacks the Fantastic Four using androids of their past foes. He controls Ballox the Monstroid, and battles Spider-Man and the Vision. With the Thinker, he battles Spider-Man and the Thing. He then forces Thor to battle the Fantastic Four. He then controls the Wrecker and Power Man. Eventually, the Puppet Master returns to his homeland, where he encounters Modred the Mystic.

With Doctor Doom, the Puppet Master traps the Fantastic Four within the miniature artificial city of "Liddleville", their minds trapped inside tiny cybernetic, part-organic copies of their original bodies. However, Doom perverts what had been intended by the Puppet Master as a chance to give Alicia and Ben a normal life into a trap, and he eventually helps the Fantastic Four learn the truth and escape Liddleville while trapping Doom in the android body he had used to monitor the Fantastic Four. He is defeated by Doom in Liddleville and seemed to have been destroyed, but his mind is then resurrected in a body of living radioactive clay. He battles the Thing on the mental plane, and his physical clay body is destroyed. He is eventually resurrected in his original body by the Sphinx.

He was once thought to have been killed when he fell out of the window of a fairly tall building, but miraculously survived. The Puppet Master has exhibited an uncanny ability to cheat death, dodging mortal threats that have included bomb blasts, drownings, and even a giant squid attack. Liddleville would later be used against the Micronauts and X-Force.

The jealous Puppet Master often uses his clay to manipulate the lives of the Fantastic Four, especially where his stepdaughter was concerned. He is particularly concerned with guarding his precious Alicia from marrying the likes of the Thing. But he is later just as outraged when she is engaged to Johnny Storm, also a member of the Fantastic Four.

With the Thinker and the Wizard, Masters attempts to disrupt the wedding of the Human Torch and Alicia. The plan was to launch an attack on the church after the wedding ceremony, but when he sees how happy Alicia is to marry Johnny, Masters is overcome with remorse and turns on his associates, launching the Dragon Man against them: his wedding gift to Alicia and Johnny.

Later, Masters is reformed, remarried, and has a stepson; the toys he crafts for his son inadvertently caused a battle between Power Pack and the alien Ciegramites. He reveals to the Thing that he had discovered that the Alicia Johnny had married was actually a Skrull.

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. Satori employs Masters to construct a "perfect man" from his clay, which would then receive life and the power cosmic from the Silver Surfer and absorb Satori's mind, so 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 S.H.I.E.L.D.-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, but the Fantastic Four were prevented from taking any measure of revenge upon Masters, given his S.H.I.E.L.D. affiliation.

The Puppet Master returned to criminal life and affiliated himself with the Mad Thinker. Utilizing a device constructed by Mad 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 superhero Civil War.

In that same issue he reveals that he always planned to kill the person he was working with in past team-ups and that he has anger management problems. Mad Thinker gives him the number of a good therapist. This exchange seems to contradict previous interactions between the two.

The Puppet Master is then in the business of selling slaves (primarily females). Some of those under his control are superhuman females captured by members of the Chilean Army, and among those held captive are Dusk, Tigra, Silverclaw, Stature, and Araña. The Puppet Master also has random male slaves fight to the death. Once again the Puppet Master is presumed dead when he detonates explosives hidden beneath the house he used as a base, in a battle against Ms. Marvel.

During the Fear Itself storyline, Puppet Master is seen in a comatose state in the Raft's infirmary. It is revealed that Purple Man was the one who had Puppet Master manipulate Misty Knight's Heroes for Hire organization to establish a criminal organization for him while he was in jail. Before he could kill Puppet Master, Elektra and Shroud arrive and prevented Purple Man from killing Puppet Master. Purple Man spared Puppet Master and took control of some inmates to attack Elektra and Shroud before escaping from the Raft.

Puppet Master later appears by Misty Knight's side where he uses the villains on Misty Knight's side as payback on Purple Man.

Later, the Puppet Master has been murdered, with all evidence pointing to the Thing as the person responsible. The crime took place in a sealed room that even Mister Fantastic could barely enter with Alicia as the only witness, and even she cannot decipher what has happened. Although the Thing claims innocence, he allows himself to be locked up. As it turns out, the dead Puppet Master was a decoy and the real Puppet Master had been hidden away by the Quiet Man, the mastermind behind Thing's framing and other misfortunes the Fantastic Four had suffered. Mister Fantastic later finds the real Puppet Master captive in the Quiet Man's building.

Powers and abilities

The Puppet Master has no revealed superhuman abilities, but he possesses a genius-level intellect and was once a brilliant biologist with a doctorate in biology. He is an extremely talented craftsman and very gifted in experimental science. His greatest strength was his ability to create extremely lifelike marionette puppets with extreme speed that he modeled after real people. Through intense concentration, he is able to control the physical actions of anyone after whom he models one of his puppets. 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, slightly radioactive, and came from a remote area near Wundagore Mountain, Transia, site of the prison of the elder god Chthon. The Puppet Master may have some type of psionic ability which complemented this process, enabling him to control his victims, although the process may be entirely the result of the magical properties of the clay. He cannot control the actions of essentially mindless creatures, and his control can be broken by beings with supremely strong will-power. His control is limited to one person at a time, and the degree of control decreases with the distance from the person controlled.

Television

Film

Video game

Reception

In August 2009, TIME listed the Puppet Master as one of the "Top 10 Oddest Marvel Characters".