Hector Chang is a comic book superhero, a member of the superhero team Dynamo 5, which appears in the series of the same name from Image Comics. Created by writer Jay Faerber and artist Mahmud A. Asrar, Visionary first appeared in Dynamo 5 #1 (January 2007). For the first 24 issues of the series, the character possessed laser, telescopic and x-ray vision, and went by the codename Visionary. In issue #25 of the series (October 2009), the character, whose powers had been erased in the previous issue, obtained different powers. Now possessing superhuman strength and invulnerability, he goes by the name Smasher.
Publication history Captain Dynamo, a superhero who first appeared in Noble Causes: Extended Family #2 (June 2004) was depicted as a womanizing philanderer, and in Dynamo 5 #1 (January 2007), it was revealed, after he was assassinated, that he had fathered a number of illegitimate children. His widow, former agent of the government superhuman-monitoring agency, F.L.A.G., posing as a now-retired investigative reporter Maddie Warner, gathered five of these children in order to form a team to protect Tower City in Captain Dynamo's absence. One of these was 15-year-old Vancouver, British Columbia high school geek Hector Chang. the youngest of the five. Warner exposed Hector and his four half-siblings to the same energy that gave Captain Dynamo his powers 40 years earlier, unlocking their latent powers. Hector developed his father's vision-related powers, and took the codename Visionary as a member of Dynamo 5. During the series' first year of publication in 2007, Hector and the other members of Dynamo 5 were shown confronting various threats to Tower City, as well as the U.S. government's superhuman-monitoring agency, F.L.A.G., which disapproved of their activities, while dealing with the personal conflicts that arose as a result of discovering four new half-siblings, as well as the effect that their new lives had on their personal lives at home. Hector in particular, who was conceived during a one-night stand between his mother, Jennifer, and Captain Dynamo (who had used his shapeshifting powers to disguise himself as a Chinese man), and lacked a strong male role model growing up, came to look up to Dynamo, whom he saw as his "Dad". He also came into conflict with Jennifer when she discovered his superhero life, much to her horror, and who was outraged at the danger in which Maddie Warner had placed her son.
This led into a 2008 storyline in which Warner was rendered into a coma, the team's underwater headquarters, the Aquarium, was flooded, and it was discovered that Visionary's teammate and half-brother, Spencer, was a half-extraterrestrial with an alien physiognomy who had manifested his shapeshifting ability years earlier, and not when the members of the team first met. These developments, along with the problems that their superhero lives inflicted on their personal lives, led to the dissolution of the team. Eventually, the siblings reunited, and reformed the team. In a 2009 storyline in issues 24 and 25 of the series, the team was attacked by their other half-sibling, the supervillain Synergy, who used a weapon to erase the team's abilities and capture them. The team freed themselves, and used the weapon to restore their powers, but they manifested different abilities than the ones they previously had. Hector found that he and his sister Bridget, had switched their powers. Now possessing superhuman strength and invulnerability, Hector took the new codename Smasher. In the 2010 miniseries Dynamo 5: Sins of the Father, the team faced off against the three extraterrestrial sons of Dominex, who threatened the entire planet Earth. The combined might of Dynamo 5 and several other allies failed to defeat them, and after one of the sons impaled Emily with a street sign, Hector borrowed the Winterbourne Institute's strength-amplifying Strong-Suit, and used it to kill all three of the sons, including the one who injured Emily, who had surrendered. This shocked bystanders and people watching the battle on television, and caused much consternation for his teammates. The team was not reassured by Hector's statements of regret, as the telepathic Spencer related to the others that these statements were not sincere, as Hector held no remorse for the killing the sons. Hector's relationship with Emily was also threatened, as her mother, Rebecca, blamed Hector for allowing her to confront the sons of Dominex, and not only forbade them for seeing each other, but had Emily's powers removed.
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