This article is about the Image Comics character. For the Marvel Comics character (also known as Fascination), see Technet (comics).

Scatterbrain (real name Gage Reinhart) is a fictional comic book superhero, a member of the superhero team Dynamo 5, which appears in the monthly series of the same name from Image Comics. Created by writer Jay Faerber and artist Mahmud A. Asrar, Scatterbrain first appeared in Dynamo 5 #1 (January 2007).

Character profile

Following the assassination of Captain Dynamo, the much-beloved superhero protector of Tower City, his widow, former government agent posing as a now-retired investigative reporter Maddie Warner, discovered from his personal effects that he had been unfaithful to her countless times. Despite her devastation at this discovery, Warner realized that without a full-time protector, Tower City would be vulnerable to Captain Dynamo’s legion of super-villain enemies. She used her skills and the information she discovered to track down five people who could be Dynamo’s illegitimate children.

Gage Reinhart was the fifth of Captain Dynamo’s children Warner contacted. Gage is a 17-year-old Eastbridge, Texas high school football star who led his division in tackles for the entire season, and is the darling of both his female schoolmates and college scouts. Faerber has described Scatterbrain as “a popular, arrogant jock who never gave a damn about what anyone thought - until he can literally hear those thoughts. And he may not like what he hears.” Scatterbrain’s name may also be a reference to his obtuseness or absentmindedness, as he made a pass at Scrap during their first meeting, requiring her to remind him that they were half-siblings. Gathering all five of the children together, Warner exposed them to the same unidentified radiation that gave Captain Dynamo his powers forty years earlier, unlocking their powers. Gage inherited his father’s telepathy. Donning a costume with the same color design as his father’s, Gage took the codename Scatterbrain, and works to protect Tower City with his newly discovered brothers and sisters, whom he is still getting to know.

Scatterbrain has often been instrumental in the team's confrontations with its adversaries. One month after gaining his abilities, Scatterbrain and his siblings fought the paramilitary organization known as The Veil. Although he and the team acquitted themselves well against that foe, Visionary was kidnapped during the fracas, and brought to The Veil’s base. It fell upon Scatterbrain to use his telepathy to track Visionary via his brainwave pattern, which led to Visionary’s rescue.

Despite his telepathy's usefulness, however, Gage has lamented the adverse side-effects that his powers and his involvement in the team has had on his life. His inability to fully control his telepathy, his tendency to pick up the thoughts of others that he finds hurtful, and the manner in which new aspects of it may suddenly evolve unexpectedly, have been a source of irritation to him, often causing him to long for a more empowering ability like his sister Olivia's flight. The difficulty in finding time for both his high school career and his superheroics has led to some sleeplessness, and tension between him and Maddie Warner. Gage also came to blows with his brother Spencer (Myriad) in Dynamo 5 #9-10, over Spencer engaging in a romantic embrace with a schoolmate of Gage's while Spencer, a shape-shifter, was impersonating Gage when Gage was in a coma. Spencer was given this mission by Maddie Warner in order to quell suspicion on the part of Gage's family, who are unaware of his life as a superhero, but Gage saw this act as an invasion of privacy on Spencer's part, though Spencer wondered if it was motivated by racism because the girl in question was black. Spencer apologized to Gage, and confessed that, having grown up in foster homes, and having never had a real family or popularity in school, his experience with Gage's family opened his eyes to what he had missed all his life, and got carried away. Sympathetic to Spencer's feelings, Gage forgave him.

Powers

Scatterbrain is a telepath who can read other people’s minds. His power is both voluntary and passive; While he can use his power to deliberately read someone's mind, he can also involuntarily pick up the thoughts of those around him, even when he does not wish it. He can also use his telepathy to remotely track people whose minds he has read, by sifting through the brainwave patterns he can sense, which are apparently unique to each individual. He can not read someone’s mind if they are unconscious. For the first four issues of the series, he could not use his telepathy as an offensive weapon, or control other people's thoughts and actions, as other comic book telepaths like Professor X can. However, in Dynamo 5 #5, Scatterbrain was attacked and electrocuted by Voltage, a villain who can wield electrical energy. This triggered an ability on Scatterbrain's part to cease Voltage's electrical attack by merely thinking about it, and rendered Voltage unconscious. It also briefly knocked Scatterbrain into semi-consciousness. Scatterbrain also has the ability to completely wipe out a person's memories, giving them total amnesia, as he did with his half-sister Synergy in Dynamo 5 #7, though this act left him in a coma for a day or two. In issue #9, during this coma, Scatterbrain discovers that he is also capable of astral projection, and was able to instantly transport his astral self to familiar locations by merely willing it. He appeared at his high school, where he was attacked the villainess Brains, another telepath. Brains claimed that that location was "her space" and "her private place", and engaged Scatterbrain in what appeared to be a physical altercation between their astral forms, but when Scatterbrain responded in kind, he inadvertently transported them to a featureless white location that he speculated was "his place", and was able to manifest his abilities according to his own imagination, multiplying his form several times, and attacking Brains en masse, forcing her to flee the astral plane, and bringing him out of his coma.

References

External links

• Dynamo 5 Home page