Real Name: Alpha

Identity/Class: Terrestrial artificial creation

Occupation: Currently unrevealed; former explorer and prisoner

Group Membership: Stranger's laboratory subjects (former)

Affiliations: Defenders (Doctor Strange/Stephen Strange, Hulk/Bruce Banner, Nighthawk/Kyle Richmond, Valkyrie/Brunnhilde), Professor X;
    former pawn of the Overmind (possibly);
    association with the Futurist;    
    former servant of Magneto and ally of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (Blob, Lorelei, Mastermind, Unus)

Enemies: Blob, Lorelei, Magneto, Mastermind, Stranger, Unus;
formerly the Defenders and Professor X

Known Relatives: Magneto/Max Eisenhardt (creator)

Aliases: The Ultimate Mutant

Place of Creation: Abandoned subterranean Deviant city, New Mexico

Base of Operations: Currently unrevealed;
    formerly the Stranger's Laboratory World
    formerly Magneto's Carlsbad Caverns base, New Mexico

Extent of Education: Self-taught

First Appearance: Defenders I#15 (September, 1974), (fully seen) Defenders I#16 (October, 1974)

Powers/Abilities: Alpha possesses unmeasured telepathic, teleportational, and telekinetic powers, as well as a highly advanced intellect. He could transmute elements, restructure matter, reverse the aging process, project force fields, teleport himself and others, fly, survive in the vacuum of space, etc. His telekinetic powers enabled him to lift a fifty-story skyscraper and the surrounding land into the air. His powers are not without limits, and he is presumably less powerful than the Stranger.

Initially, he had a hairless, hulking Neanderthal-like body, which likely possessed great strength -- in that form, he retained his full power, but lacked the intellect to utilize it properly; he could not even speak on his own, and could only follow direct orders. With each use of his powers, Alpha progressively evolved, and his brain (and cranium) grew in size -- within hours after his creation, he became a being of great intellect, with a form to match.

He is roughly ten feet tall, though he almost certainly can alter his physical form at will

Height: 9'
Weight: 240 lbs.
Eyes: Yellow
Hair: Bald

History:
(Defenders I#15 (fb)) - After escaping his prison at the center of the Earth (@ Avengers I#111), Magneto inadvertently tunneled into a long lost cavern containing the remnants of an ancient civilization (see comments). Within this cavern, he found advanced machinery, and a library of books which he managed to decipher. After learning a spectacular secret, he returned to the surface, gathered an incarnation of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and set up a base in the Carlsbad Caverns. From there, Magneto began to use the secrets he had discovered to grow his own mutant -- the Ultimate Mutant!

(Defenders I#15) - Professor X learned of Magneto's plot, but with the X-Men otherwise occupied (@ Marvel Team-Up I#23), he recruited the Defenders to assist him. The heroes located Magneto's base and managed to take out the Brotherhood members, but Magneto then completed and released Alpha.

(Defenders I#16) - Under Magneto's command, Alpha cast aside the heroes and then teleported the mutants out of the cavern, which Magneto had just sealed. Alpha followed the mutants to the United Nations Building, where Magneto demanded control of the world. When his demand was refused, Magneto had Alpha tear the UN Building from the surrounding block and lift it far into the air.

   After escaping from the cavern, the Defenders and Professor X soon arrived to fight them again, but by this time, Alpha's mind had evolved to the point that he questioned Magneto's order to destroy the heroes. Nonetheless, when Magneto commanded him, Alpha formed an army out of concrete to attack them. When the Defenders overcame this onslaught, Magneto commanded Alpha to slay the heroes. Alpha had no desire to take the life of another, but when Magneto told him that the Defenders were evil, Alpha turned the Hulk to stone. In short order, Alpha had subdued Nighthawk and the Valkyrie as well, but Professor X appealed to Alpha's sense of reason, telling him that it was Magneto who was the true menace. The curious Alpha, his head now greatly swollen, examined the very nature of all present, weighed them against each other, and determined that Xavier had been telling the truth. Alpha then age-regressed Magneto and the Brotherhood into infancy, restored the UN Building, and returned the heroes to normal.

   Realizing that there was no longer a place for him on Earth, Alpha then flew off into space.

(Quasar#14 (fb) - BTS) - Under unknown circumstances, Alpha was captured by the Stranger, who made him the subject of his experiments on his Laboratory World. He was apparently placed alongside the Futurist--an evolved human of similar appearance and ability--who had also left Earth to explore space.

(Quasar#14, 15, [16]) - While exploring the Stranger's Lab World, Earth-S' Hyperion (Mark Milton) passed through the environment that housed Alpha and the Futurist. Soon after, these two, like many other of the Stranger's subjects, felt the psychic pull of the Overmind, who sent them to attack the Stranger and any who stood beside him.

   However, rather than follow the Overmind's bidding, Alpha and the Futurist took advantage of their newfound freedom to escape the Stranger's Lab World.

Comments: Created by Len Wein, Sal Buscema, and Klaus Janson.

In the Marvel Universe, "mutant" most often refers to a being born of the human race, but possessing superhuman powers by nature, rather than by artificial empowerment. Alpha is actually a genetic creation, much like Him/Adam Warlock, and would not seem to be a true mutant. But it sounded cool, I guess...

The OHotMU Deluxe Edition#7 entry on Magneto revealed that the cavern base found by him was actually deliberately left for him to find by Maelstrom, a hybrid Deviant/Inhuman, for his own reasons.
--Thanks to TJ Burns for pointing that out.
Thanks to Gammatotem for originally providing the second form and to Skippy for originally providing the third and fourth form.

Profile by Snood. Expansion by Ron Fredricks.

CLARIFICATIONS:
Alpha, the Ultimate Mutant has known connections to:

• Alpha - robot created by intellectual robots of Mad Thinker--Marvel Team-Up I#129
• Alpha - Warzone--Web of Spider-Man I#44
• Alpha (Dr.Hywel Griffin) - head of Griffin Technologies, creator of Omegans--ClanDestine#2
• Alpha - see TRIAX--Warlock & the Infinity Watch#3
• Alpha-1 of Earth-New Sun - alternate dimensional counterpart of Black Womb Project--Gambit III#24
• Alpha-32 - see OMEGA-32--Thunderbolts I#49
• Alpha & Beta - second group of apes, briefly used by Red Ghost--Iron Man I#15
• artificial mutants - earlier attempt by Magneto to create mutant slaves--X-Men I#18
• Earth-Ultimate - an alternate Earth dimension, better known as Earth-1610--Ultimate Spider-Man#1
• other "Alpha" or "Ultimate" or "Mutant" characters

	cavern At some point in the past, it was a subterranean base used by Maelstrom (see comments); it was located in the vicinity of Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. The cavern contained advanced machinery, as well as a library of books with Maelstrom's secrets of genetic engineering. Long after it was abandoned by Maelstrom, the cavern was inadvertently discovered by Magneto, who eventually used the equipment and the knowledge he had gleaned from the books to create Alpha, the Ultimate Mutant.
	When Alpha emerged from his creation chamber, Magneto sealed the cavern's entrance, then had Alpha teleport him and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants away, leaving the Defenders trapped inside. The Defenders managed to dig a makeshift tunnel out, but the crude passageway collapsed afterward, and the cavern was buried beneath untold tons of rock. (Comment: It was unclear whether the lost cavern was the same location where Magneto created Alpha -- it's always possible that Magneto relocated some of the machinery to another cavern that was closer to the world's surface.) --Defenders I#15 (Defenders I#15-16

images: (without ads)
Defenders I#16, p16, pan1 (main image - fifth form Alpha, symbolically "weighing" Defenders and Brotherhood of Evil Mutants)
Defenders I#16, p1, pan1 (primitive, first form)
Defenders I#16, p8, pan2 (second form)
Defenders I#16, p13, pan4 (third form)
Defenders I#16, p14, pan3 (fourth form)
Defenders I#16, p18, pan3 (head shot, final form)
Defenders I#15, p11, pan1 (in flashback, Magneto discovers cavern)
Defenders I#15, p11, pan2 (in flashback, Magneto by cavern's machinery)
Defenders I#15, p11, pan3 (in flashback, Magneto in cavern's library)
Defenders I#15, p9, pan3 (Alpha in creation chamber; Magneto (foreground))

Appearances:
Defenders I#15 (September, 1974) - Len Wein (writer), Sal Buscema (pencils), Klaus Janson (inks), Glynis Wein (colors), John Costanza (letters), Roy Thomas (editor)
Defenders I#16 (October, 1974) - Len Wein (writer), Sal Buscema (pencils), Mike Esposito (inks), Glynis Wein (colors), Charlotte Jetter (letters), Roy Thomas (editor)
Quasar#14-15 (September-October, 1990) - Mark Gruenwald (writer), Mike Manley (pencils), Dan Panosian (inks), Len Kaminski (editor)