Flashpoint

Creation

Flashpoint was created by Terry Kavanagh, Ron Lim and Al Milgrom in 1994 and first appeared in Nightwatch # 2.

History

Travis Slaine was a Navy SEAL with a history of maverick behavior and reckless disregard for the law. He was arrested and pending a court marshal when he was offered a pardon in exchange for running a top secret mission for the military.

Slaine accepted and was sent to retrieve a "Star-Shard," a piece of radioactive asteroid that the military wanted. It was expected to be a routine SCUBA operation, but the shard suddenly flared up, killing the rest of Slaine's team. Slaine himself was transformed into a radioactive being, able to absorb and manipulate all kinds of energy in myriad ways. His body, however, needed him to absorb and output tremendous amounts of energy. Slaine lashed out against his operation managers, and started to hunt down the other Star-shards, hoping they could effect his condition.

Slaine, now going by Flashpoint, hunted down several of these shards, which alleviated his condition briefly, but the effects were temporary. During one such acquisition, he was confronted by Nightwatch. Flashpoint's abilities proved too strong for Nightwatch, and he absorbed the shard, but no no avail. Nightwatch, unable to stop Flashpoint and feeling empathy for his plight agreed to help him break into the military base containing the final two shards, provided they don't kill anyone.

Nightwatch and Flashpoint successfully infiltrated the base, but Flashpoint started to rapidly lose control of his powers. As Flashpoint started to go critical, Nightwatch threw him the shards, then trapped him in a gravity well to prevent any fall out. This choice was fortunate for Nightwatch, as Flashpoint, despite absorbing the shards, was molecularly dissolved by the radioactive energies he was producing.