Dynamo 5

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"A month ago, I didn't even know I had any brothers or sisters, much less super-powers. Now I'm fighting side-by-side with them to save the city from a bunch of sleazebags. Obviously, we're still getting the hang of it."

A Comic Book created by writer Jay Faerber and artist Mahmud A. Asrar which focuses on the five illegitimate children of Captain Dynamo, "the greatest superhero in the world". After he is found dead in another woman's bed, his widow tracks down the confirmed offspring, hits them with the same Applied Phlebotinum that gave their father his Combo-Platter Powers, and persuades them to follow in his footsteps as the protectors of Tower City. The Five-Man Band consists of:

• Slingshot (Olivia "Livvie" Lewis): An earnest aspiring lawyer who manifested her father's ability to fly. As of issue 25 is now known as Menagerie ( shapeshifting- limited to animals )
• Scatterbrain (Gage Reinhart): A Jerk Jock with Captain Dynamo's Telepathy. Now goes by the name Ramjet (Flight).
• Scrap (Bridget Flynn): A failed film student who became a Cute Bruiser with superstrength and near-invulnerability once her powers were activated. Now called Supervision (X-Ray vision & laser eyes)
• Visionary (Hector Chang): A shy, nerdy high-school student who can now see through walls and fire lasers from his eyes. Now goes by Smasher (Super Strength and near invulnerability)
• Myriad (Spencer Bridges): A drifter, ladies' man, and metamorph. Now called Wraith (Telepathy)

Tropes used in Dynamo 5 include:

• All Your Powers Combined: Synergy, their evil half-sibling, got all of Captain Dynamo's powers.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: And then promptly flooded.
• Badass Normal: Not as scary as Batman or some other examples, but don't mess with Maddie Warner.
• Canon Welding: This comic, Noble Causes, Fire Birds, and Venture make up a loose-knit "Faerberverse". Captain Dynamo's death occurs in the pages of Noble Causes.
  • The Faerberverse is at least tangentially connected to the "Kirkmanverse" of Invincible and The Astounding Wolf Man, since Invincible is in The Pact with Zephyr Noble.
    • Likewise, they're free to call on elements and characters from the other Image super-hero titles, or not as they see fit. For example, in Faerber's comics the current US President is Rusty Noble. In most other of the loosely connected Image super-hero line it's Barack Obama.
• Car Fu: Scrap seems to be fond of this, frequently using cars as projectiles or clubs.
• Creator Breakdown: Per The Other Wiki, the series is a product of Faerber trying to deal with his parents' divorce at a relatively early age.
• Discard and Draw: The end of the ongoing series has the kids all attacked with a weapon that counters the radiation that activated their powers in the first place, removing their Dynamo powers. When they manage to get exposed to the radiation again, the five powers are distributed differently, and one of them actually changes (where Myriad could become other people, Menagerie now changes into animals).
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Scrap
• Fantastic Drug: The Whiptail serum. After the first arc with only one person using it to transform, the serum eventually gets diluted and sold by actual drug dealers in a later story.
• Five-Man Band: Despite the use in the description, this doesn't really work- Spencer, Hector and Gage have shades of The Lancer, The Smart Guy, and The Big Guy respectively, but they're not perfect thanks to the semi-ironic power distribution, and Olivia and Bridget can't really be split into The Hero and The Chick.
• Flying Brick: Cap was one, but the "flying" and "brick" parts got split between Livvie and Bridget, so they make do with Fastball Special maneuvers. After the Discard and Draw, Gage gets a suit of armor that seems like it'll make him a more traditional version.
• Half Human Hybrids: Spencer's mom wasn't from around here. He only looks human thanks to the shapeshifting, which he already has thanks to government experiments that included exposing him to the radiation that gave Cap his powers.
• Jerk Jock: Averted. While Gage shows signs of this in the first issue, he's actually a nice enough guy, and is the first of the five siblings to start bonding with another, namely Hector, the geeky one in the group. In issue 2, they talk about girls while doing surveillance, and later Gage is very supportive of Hector's performance in the fight against Whiptail.
• Legacy Character: The Dynamo 5 are the heirs to Captain Dynamo's legacy. They're not the only ones... hell, given the flashbacks with Chrysalis and Synergy, they probably aren't the ones Cap would have picked.
• Mama Bear: Maddie In the first issue, Maddie kills the Veil and his minion in such a way that it looks like a murder suicide, after they had surrendered because they knew everything about the team.
• Disappeared Dad: Captain Dynamo had no idea that any of the Dynamo 5 existed.
• Shared Universe: Invincible, Shadow Hawk, and Savage Dragon appear at Captain Dynamo's funeral.
• Loves My Alter Ego: Subverted; Maddie is actually an Agent of F.L.A.G.
• Personality Powers: Hilariously subverted in some cases, while upheld in others. The ladies' man character can have a different face every night, but out of a set of powers which includes all sorts of Superman-type abilities, the jock character gets... telepathy.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: Maddie Warner
• Sex as Rite-of-Passage: Subverted, as Scatterbrain and Myriad seem more interested in fixing Visionary's "problem" than he does.
• Shout-Out: To Knight Rider and Da Vincis Inquest, of all things.
• They Would Cut You Up: When most of the team is taken into F.L.A.G. custody early on, one of the main questions the government spooks want answered is how they got their powers... because they've tried exposing a ton of test subjects to the radiation that empowered Captain Dynamo, and those guys all just died.