History:
Stewart Silverback is an investigative journalist who was invited to a press conference in an alleged haunted house by the eccentric inventor, Dr Pete Pachyderm. Doctor Pachyderm was a reknowned ‘ghost hunter’ who claimed to have invented a device that would both detect, capture, and analyze the disembodied spirits of the deceased. Pachyderm unveiled to a smattering of doubtful reporters his “Ghost Hutch” that looked more like a giant brass egg than a high-tech device. Pachyderm was unable to manifest any kind of result and as the scoffing reporters began to leave he became flustered and desperate enough that he accidentally overloaded his device. As Silverback and his peers watched in horror, the ghost hutch sucked the inventor inside of it and began to shoot errant fingers of violet energy into the room. Silverback ran to Pachyderm’s rescue but when he got to the device he was struck by the eldritch energy and carried with it around and around the egg, still in a state of running. After what seemed like hours to the two trapped animals but was in fact moments, the ghost hutch exploded.
When Silverback woke up in the hospital, he was told that Dr Pachyderm had disappeared. Seemingly, Silverback had not suffered any lasting effects, but when he was released to recuperate at home he found that he could move at amazing speeds. Silverback decided to use his new abilities to right many of the wrongs he had reported on in his career.
Later it was learned that Dr Pachyderm too had survived the accident, but he had become the monstrous intangible Elephantom. The two crossed paths many times in their careers, becoming archnemeses.
Appears in “Mid-Afternoon of the Living Dead” (published in Funday Sunnies 2009) and “Eye Eye Eye” (published in Mega-Fauna 2014).