Moondragon
Heather Douglas

Powers

Talents

Genetics, Biochemistry

Contacts

Defenders and Avengers, Sundragon, Infinity Watch, Eternals, Captain Mar-Vell

History

Heather Douglas is the only daughter of a real estate agent Arthur Douglas and his wife Yvette. One night when Heather was three years old, she and her parents were returning to Los Angeles after a short vacation in Las Vegas when they happened to witness the approach of a scoutship belonging to the mad Titanian named Thanos. Wishing to maintain secrecy, Thanos caused the Douglasses' car to crash and burn, killing all the occupants but Heather, who had been thrown from the car. (Arthur Douglas was later resurected in a new body as Drax the Destroyer.)

Alone on the desert, the child was rescued by Mentor, who was the benevolent ruler of the Eternals of Titan, and who was also Thanos's father, and had been monitoring his evil son's activities. Taken to the settlement of Eternals on Titan, Heather Douglas was placed in the Shao-Lom monastery to be schooled in the arts and disciplines of theascetic monks of Titan. (These arts and disciplines had their origins in the teachings of the Priests of Pama, a pacifistic sect of the alien Kree. See Mantis). The Shao-Lom taught her complete control of her body and mind as well as the total mastery of her latent psionic potential. She also became an acomplished athelete, martial artist, and geneticist. Although she herself was not an Eternal, Heather progressed far beyond her fellow students in the Shao-Lom arts of mind and body.

Douglas pushed her mental exercises beyond the limits of her teachers' powers. Eventually she sensed a malevolent spiritual presence and made psychic contact with it. The presence was that of the Dragon of the Moon, a cosmic entity that claims to have existed before the creation of planets in the cosmos, and to have destroyed entire civilizations. The Dragon existed on Titan before Mentor settled there, and claimed responsibility for destroying the Eternals of Uranus wha had previously lived there. The Dragon has claimed that it corrupted Thanos. It began to take over Douglas's mind and to corrupt her, but aided by the psionic barriers protecting Titan, she drove the Dragon from her mind.

Douglas's defeat of the Dragon filed her with pride and apparently augmented her psionic powers. She grew haughty and mocking, and became distant from the priests. When her studies were finished, she chose Moondragon as her name within the order of priests in commemoration of her victory. Her decision shocked the priests. She came to regard Mentor and the entire population of Titan as, in her words, "fools and idiots." Soon she left the order, assured of her own superiority, ready to become the savior of the universe, even if she had to subjugate other sentient beings' wills to hers to do it.. Moondragon was unaware that the Dragon was continuing to inflence her subconsciously, and that its goals were becoming hers.

Thanos eventually grew powerful enough to challange his father's rule, and launched an attack against Titan that destroyed much of its civilization, including the Shao-Lom monastery. Fleeing Titan in her own space vessel, Moondragon came to Earth where, under the name Madam MacEvil, she began testing some of Earth's superhuman champions for possible use in the war against Thanos. She also experimented with the gentic make-up of a number of human beings, using Titanian technology to turn three Earthmen into Angar the Screamer, Ramrod, and the Dark Messiah.

Soon after Thanos was vanquished, Moondragon became involved with the Avengers, when their enemy, the time master Kang, the Conqueror, believed that she might be the Celestial Madonna, the woman destined to bear humanity's future savior. However, it was Mantis, another associate of the Avengers, who was designated the Celestial Madonna, much to Moondragon's dismay. Nonetheless, Moondragon began to make her feelings of superiority to commonplace humanity (as well as to the majority of Avengers) known, eventually denying her humanity and claiming to be a goddess. Offered membership in the Avengers, she refused, but continued to associate with them periodically.

A turning point in Moondragon's thinking came when she helped out the Avengers battle the power-siphoning being from the future Korvac. Scanning Korvac's mind, she learned of his plan to remake the universe, eliminating all chaos, including free will. When the would-be god commited suicide, she mourned his passing, believing his goals to be correct. She then began devoting her efforts to righting what she percieved to be wrongs by imposing her will upon those individuals and groups who did not conform to her sense of propriety. She finally went so far as to mentally enslave the population of an entire world, Ba-Banis, stiffling its civil war at the expense of usurping its people's freedom. In pursuit of her ends she manipulated the Avengers, and before the Avengers were able to overthrow her domination of Ba-Banis, she took the life of her father, Drax the Destroyer. The Asgardian god Thor, a member of the Avengers, turned Moondragon over to his father Odin (ruler of Asgard) for punishment.

Odin forced Moondragon to wear a headband that greatly reduced her mental powers. She could not use her mental powers beyond a certain limit without the headband causing her great pain, nor would Odin's spell allow her, or most other beings, to remove the headband from her brow. Odin entrusted Moondragon to the custody of Brunhilda the Valkyrie, a member of the team of superhuman champions known as the Defenders, which Moondragon reluctantly joined. At first she secretly sent out low-level telepathic messages, hoping to draw menaces towards the Defenders headquarters, in the hope that they could somehow remove her headband. She was also again consciously being tempted by the Dragon of the Moon, but she continued to resist it. Despite her initial contempt for the Defenders, she increasingly sought to be accepted by them as a good person. Finally she and the other defenders were captured by Asgardian trolls. One of the trolls could remove the headband if only she aided him with her psionic powers. The Dragon tempted her with offers of power if she did so. Rejecting the Dragon and her own potential for evil, Moondragon proved herself to Odin, and the spell was broken, so that her headband fell from her brow.

Moondragon continued to work with the Defenders, but she eventually learned she was dying. She had been infected by spores from a mutated plant creature, and cells of an organism of this kind had supplanted much of her digestive and circulatory systems. The organism apparently controlled her heart and lungs. Moondragon was again contacted by the Dragon of the Moon, which offered to rid her of the organism, thereby saving her life and giving her great power as well. As pain over came her, Moondragon became desperate to save her life, and gave into the Dragon. Now thoroughly corrupted by the Dragon and endowed with much more power, Moondragon battled the Defenders. The Valkyrie, endowed temporarily with more power by Odin, along with her fellow valkyries fought against Moondragon and the Dragon. Moondragon retrated in anguish when the Defender Cloud, whom she once loved, told her she hated Moondragon and attacked her.

Moondragon left, but she returned weeks later to destroy the Defenders. But this time they were joined by a mysterious being Interloper, who had fought the Dragon of the Moon many times in te past. Following Interloper's instructions, the Defender called Gargoyle created demonic emotions of fear, and Manslaughter, who was a former enemy of the Defenders and with whom Moondragon had established a mind link, projected the fear into Moondragon's mind along with his own insanity. Overwhelmed, Moondragon retreated.

But the Dragon, which needed Moondragon to remain on this plane of existence, persuaded her to turn to the alien Beyonder for the power she needed to be certain of defeating the Defenders. The Beyonder increased Moondragon's power and she once again attacked the Defenders. She cast cast the Gargoyle's human soul from his body, which fell under the Dragon's control. Interloper, the Valkyrie, Manslaughter, and the Defender Angromeda jointly hurled the power of their lfe forces against Moondragon, The Dragon and the possessed Gargoyle. The rest of the Defenders went to rescue innocents whom Moondragon had endangered, and when they returned, Moondragon, the Gargoyle, Interloper, the Valkyrie, Andromeda, and Manslaughter had all seemingly been transformed into statues of ahses and dust, and the Dragon of the Moon was was apparently gone, presumably unable to remain in this dimension without Mondragon. The "statue" of Moondragon crumbled before the survivors' eyes. This turned out to be an elaborate deception by the Dragon.

In the aftermath of the battle of The Infinity Gauntlet Adam Warlock gave Moondragon the Mind Gem to use and guard as a member of the Infinity Watch. Eventually the team disbanded and all the gems (except the Soul Gem belonging to Adam Warlock) were lost.

Until recently she has been on retreat on Titan. Now she is training the young Genis-Vell, Captain Marvel, in the mental disciplines necessarry to control his cosmic awareness