Plasmus

Plasmus
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	The New Teen Titans #14 (December 1981)
Created by	Marv Wolfman George Pérez
In-story information
Alter ego	Otto Von Furth
Team affiliations	Brotherhood of Evil Suicide Squad Secret Society of Super Villains
Abilities	Enhanced strength, speed and endurance Burning touch can liquify solid matter Superhuman durability Super-regenerative capabilities

Plasmus is a fictional DC Comics supervillain and an enemy of the Teen Titans.

Publication history

Plasmus first appeared in The New Teen Titans #14 and was created by George Pérez.

Fictional character biography

Otto Von Furth was a mine worker in East Berlin, Germany until an unexpected cave-in trapped him and four fellow miners for seven days. During those days, Otto's co-workers died, leaving him as the only survivor. He and his fellow miners had been mining for radioactive radium and ended up exposed to it and when rescued, he was rushed to the hospital. Otto is later kidnapped by Ex-Nazi General Zahl who mutated him into a blob-like state. His body changes into an unstable protoplasm. He is brought into the Brotherhood of Evil where he took the name Plasmus. He and the Brotherhood of Evil fight the Teen Titans on different occasions. He enjoys these fights but regrets not being the one to finally kill General Zahl. Later, Plasmus ends up as one of the many meta-beings corrupted and brainwashed by a cult-leader.^[1] The rest of the Brotherhood of Evil reform into the Society of Sin. He is later recruited into Lex Luthor's Suicide Squad where he apparently dies fighting Imperiex.

Plasmus accepts an invitation to join the Secret Society of Super Villains in the Countdown to Infinite Crisis series Villains United.

Plasmus is featured in Infinite Crisis as part of a small group of villains that bombs the city of Blüdhaven. The creature known as Chemo is dropped from an aircraft and detonates, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

During the One Year Later crossover, Plasmus rejoins the Brotherhood of Evil. He is also seen in Salvation Run. He is used by Lex Luthor as a power source for a teleportation device, and is killed when it self-destructs.^[2]

Plasmus appears in Blue Beetle #1 from The New 52 (a reboot of the DC Comics universe). He is one of the villains looking for the scarab with Phobia and Warp.^[3]

Powers and abilities

With his radioactive and chemically-converted body, Plasmus' touch can bring a fiery death onto his opponents reverting them to a protoplasmic state. The touch has no cure and no normal human has withstood it. Plasmus can also loosen his cells so that bullets can't hurt him. He is also able to gather his body if it is scattered while in its less cohesive state. In a certain sense, he is almost identical to the sinister Preston Payne, the third Clayface. Both can, as noted above, melt people into protoplasmic jelly, and have a great deal of control of their gelatinous bodies.

In other media

• Plasmus appears in the Teen Titans animated series with his vocal effects provided by Dee Bradley Baker. He is depicted as a large magenta sludge monster, lacking his comic-book counterpart's protoplasmic melting powers. He is actually human, but he only reverts to that form when unconscious, much like the fifth Clayface, Cassius "Clay" Payne. From the brief scene when he spoke, the human side of Plasmus fears his alternate nature and loses all control when it emerges. In this form, he can detach varying quantities of himself which can act independently, and often take the form of crab-like creatures. The design of Plasmus' human form is based on series producer David Slack. Because Plasmus's human form is barely clothed, Slack jokingly stated "I don't know how much it looks like me and I'm certainly not letting these guys see me in my underwear." In the first episode, "Divide and Conquer", he was kept unconscious in a stasis chamber of the prison until Cinderblock stole it so he could be used for Slade's purposes. He has since been not much more than a nuisance for the Titans. In "Transformation", the mixing of his temporarily disrupted body structure with raw sewage transformed him by giving him multiple green eyes and making him more powerful, now able to spit acid. Later, he is recruited by Terra and Slade and ordered to distract Cyborg and Beast Boy. In "Aftershock (Part 2)", he was fused with Cinderblock and Overload into an even worse creature known as Ternion. After the Titans defeated him, the three were diffused and became separate again. Plasmus again appeared to menace the Titans on their last day on Earth, in "The End Part 1", where he was defeated single-handedly by Raven. He then made a cameo, along with his fellow minions, as an ally of the Brotherhood of Evil. After that, he is seen in the episode "Calling All Titans", in a whale-like state being mounted by Trident. In the episode "Titans Together", he is responsible for Tramm's capture as he unexpectedly appears alongside Trident to shove Tramm into a rock (Trident did the same to Aqualad, resulting in Aqualad's capture). He was knocked unconscious during his final fight with the Titans, reverting him to his human form and flash-frozen along with the rest of the Brotherhood. As of Season Four, Plasmus, along with Cinderblock, has the most appearances (eight in total, including the story arcs) out of all Slade's other minions (Overload only appeared five times).
• Plasmus appears in the Teen Titans Go! episode "You're Fired!" with the same appearance from the previous series. He is attacking a planet when the Titans arrive, which is destroyed due to Beast Boy's indecisiveness. Plasmus is later seen fighting the other Titans in the city as Beast Boy sabotages the efforts of his replacement, Jayna of the Wonder Twins.

References

1. Birds of Prey #69-72 (September–October 2004)
2. Salvation Run #7
3. Blue Beetle vol. 8 #1 (September 2011)