Real Name: Franklin Hall
Occupation: Former physicist
Identity: Publicly known
Legal Status: Citizen of Canada with no criminal record
Former Aliases: None
Place of Birth: Banff, Alberta, Canada
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: None
Group Affiliation: None
Base of Operations: Mobile
First Appearance: AVENGERS #158

History: Franklin Hall was a scientist working at a private physics research facility in the Canadian Rockies on a practical teleportation device. In the midst of an experiment, Hall overloaded the power handling capacity of his equipment, causing an explosion that intermingled his molecules with the sub-nuclear graviton particles that were being generated in a nearby series of companion particle accelerators. Recovering from the accident, Hall discovered that he could mentally control gravity. A man of great ambition, he designed a costume, called himself Graviton, and took over the research facility, lifting it several thousands of feet into the sky. Alerted to his threat, the Avengers tried to rescue the facility. In the fury of battle, Graviton unleashed sufficient power to cause the matter of the sky-borne laboratory to collapse inwardly around him. The matter of the facility was infused with the atoms of his body for a time, giving his new 60-foot form a massive gravitational field. Eventually, however, he was able to separate his organic atoms from the atoms of the land mass he had merged with. Still disoriented, the now-human Graviton attempted to find a female companion by taking a New York department store hostage and levitating it above the skyscrapers. Graviton was exiled to interstellar space by the thunder god Thor, but returned to Earth when a spatial anomaly occurred nearby. Setting up a base of operations in Los Angeles, Graviton attempted to unite all of its criminal mobs under his leadership, but was thwarted in the attempt by the West Coast Avengers. Graviton is currently in police custody, under heavy sedation to prevent him from using his power.

Hall again returned to battle the Avengers in revenge, but during the battle the Avenger Vision merged his intangible android body with Hall's, then increased his density, causing Hall's to collapse in on itself. Hall was thus shunted from reality, finding himself in another dimension. The natives of the dimension, which Hall named the P'Tah, hailed his arrival as one of a god's, and Hall used this to his advantage, although their limited intelligence soon left frustrated. Using his scientific abilities, he constructed a beacon so that someone might find and rescue him.

After many months, Hall's signal was noticed by the villain Techno, who at the time was working with the evil Baron Zemo. At Zemo's direction, Techno reconfigured a robotic version of the monster known as the Hulk, and Zemo set the robot Hulk against his former lackeys, now the hero team Thunderbolts, who fought the Hulk. The battle allowed the robot to siphon and store enough energy to breach the dimensional barriers and release Hall. Not caring about the particulars of his rescue, Hall lashed out at the Thunderbolts and the Great Lakes Avengers (then, the Lightning Rods) who were on the scene. He was about to kill them all when the Thunderbolt Moonstone convinced Hall that his power and ambition meant nothing if he had no goals. Losing face, Hall left the scene to think about this fact.

Hall soon returned, commanding a large mass of floating land and declaring himself ruler of a new nation, Sky Island. He recruited his subjects, dubbed Sky Raiders, and a harem in return for granting them the power to defy gravity, and they began to loot and pillage San Francisco, California. He was again opposed by the Thunderbolts with their ally, the mutant hero Archangel, and he summarily defeated them. They were freed by the Thunderbolt Jolt, who borrowed technology derived from X-51 (aka Machine Man) whose flight capabilities were powered by "canceling out the gravity equation." Now unaffected by Hall's power, the Thunderbolts escaped and continued to battle, ultimately canceling out Hall's access to his power. When Hall regained his power, gravitational force rushed inward, collapsing inward on himself once again. Hall was shunted to another dimension once again.

There, Hall was rescued by a mysterious stranger, a representative of the P'tah known as M'Reel, and both came to Earth. M'Reel encouraged Hall to begin discovering his true calling, and Hall recruited Moonstone of the Thunderbolts for help, still spurred by her accusations of thinking too small. Moonstone helped Hall to further refine his godlike power and fueled his ego, thinking that by so doing, she would be better able to manipulate him for her own ends. Instead, Hall embarked on an ambitious plan to capture every major world city, hold the world's heroes captive, and literally reshape the planet in his own image.

Also bent on revenge, Hall confronted the headquarters of the Thunderbolts, although the team at this time had disbanded and been replaced by the Redeemers. The Redeemers opposed Hall and were killed, except for the Fixer, who joined Moonstone alongside Hall, and Citizen V, who recruited the remaining Thunderbolts to confront Hall. Through a mixture of surprise tactics and negotiation, all of the Thunderbolts managed to fight Hall to a standstill, and Hall sustained fatal injuries as a result. At this time, Fixer discovered M'Reel was surreptitiously using Hall's ambient energies, funneling them in order to open a portal to the P'Tah's dimension. M'Reel succeeded in opening the portal, revealing this to be his motives in helping Hall. The Thunderbolts fought back the P'Tah invasion, but it took Hall's dying effort to cause the portal to implode, sending himself and the P'Tah back. At the same time, Hall attempted to save the Thunderbolts from a similar fate, using his powers to send them to the planet known as Counter-Earth. Presumably, Hall was unable to survive his injuries and the dimensional fold.

Height: 6 ft. 1 in.
Weight: 200 lbs
Eyes: Blue-grey
Hair: Black

Strength Level: Graviton possesses the normal human strength of a man of his age, height, and build who engages in minimal regular exercise.

Known Superhuman Powers: Graviton possesses the ability to mentally manipulate gravitons (that carry the attractive, gravitational force between atomic nuclei), enabling him to control gravity. He can surround any object or person including himself with gravitons and anti-gravitons (particles similar to gravitons but with opposite charge and spin), thus increasing or decreasing the Earth's pull of gravity upon it. By decreasing the pull of gravity beneath him, he can fly at any speed or height at which he can still breathe. By increasing the pull of gravity beneath his opponents, he can pin them to the ground, having made them too heavy to move, or cause sufficient gravitational stress to impair the normal functioning of the human cardiovascular system. He can also cause an inanimate object (such as a 1-foot diameter rock) to radiate enough gravitons to give it its own gravitational field, able to attract nearby matter and energy.

By rapidly projecting gravitons in a cohesive beam, he can generate a force blast with a maximum concussive force equivalent to the primary shockwave of an explosion of 20,000 pounds of TNT. He can also create a gravitational force field around him capable of protecting him from any concussive force up to and including a small nuclear weapon.

Graviton can exert his gravitational control over a maximum distance of 2.36 miles from his body. Thus, the maximum volume of matter he could influence at once is 6.88 cubic miles. He once exercised this control by lifting into the air an inverted conic frustum-shaped land mass whose uppermost area was 4 miles across, and causing it to fly as though it were a dirigible. He can also erect a gravitational force-field of similar proportions. (Graviton can perform as many as four separate tasks simultaneously. (He has not only lifted a 4 mile wide land mass as high as cloud level, but he has also surrounded himself with a force-field, gravitically held most of the Avengers against a slab of rock, and projected force-bolts at Thor all at the same time.) Graviton can use his power at maximum capacity for up to eight hours before mental fatigue significantly impairs his performance, and considerably longer (up to eighteen hours) if he conserves his energy during that time.