Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #302: The Chain Gang (Villains)

OK, I know what you’re thinking, hypothetical reader:  I already covered the Chain Gang.  Well, yes and no.  The Chain Gang I covered something like 30 entries ago was a DC Comics group of antiheroes.  This article covers a Marvel Comics group of villains.  Different group.

Though it was just as difficult to find pictures of these guys on Google Images…

I have a certain affection for the 90s Marvel hero Sleepwalker.  He was an alien from another dimension who found himself stuck on Earth, stranded in the mind of a human host, originally only capable of coming out of his host’s mind when said host was unconscious.  The character played like a Silver Age throwback with a lot of goofy adversaries that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in a comic produced decades earlier.  I covered that guy in this series before.  In fact, he was one of the first.

Anyway, even a hero as short-lived as Sleepwalker apparently needs some reoccurring villains.  And outside of the guy with the atomic powered-pool stick, that would be the Chain Gang.

The Chain Gang was originally four inmates at a New York City area prison.  During the events of The Infinity Gauntlet, the foursome, all chained together, managed to escape the prison and, in an attempt to break the chain holding them together, they broke into an advanced laboratory where a random explosion charged the four with superpowers.  However, they could only retain those powers as long as they stayed chained together, and despite the fact two of the four openly despised each other.

The four men were:

Willis Hayworth, the Master Link, who had superhuman strength.

Timid Ray Morgan, known as Missing Link, gained the power to teleport himself or the whole gang.

Latino stereotype Hector Fuentes, AKA Uplink, had the power to sense a number of electronic and mental energy sources.

And white supremacist Ernie Mills was the Weak Link, who could drain the strength and energy from other living things.

Now, when the Infinity Gauntlet wiped out half of all living things in the universe, Sleepwalker was outside of his human host, film student Rick Sheridan.  As fate would have it, Rick faded away with the half of the universe that was killed, and Sleepwalker was fine outside.  Being a hero, Sleepwalker went out to fight the chaos going on all around, but Sleepwalker’s own strength needed to be renewed by going back inside Sheridan’s mind.  So, the more Sleepwalker helped other heroes in the streets, the less powerful he became.  Eventually, he found the Chain Gang and they roughed him up a bit.  But the dimensional barriers were weakening and Sleepwalker found one way to defeat the Chain Gang.

See, with the barriers between dimensions weakening, Sleepwalker was able to take them to his home dimension of the Mindscape.  There, he gained all his strength back and easily defeated the Gang by using his warp vision to seal them up in boxes, after which he returned to Earth and left them there.

And then the Infinity Gauntlet was snapped again, erasing everything that happened in the previous 24 hours.  All the people who disappeared came back and hardly anyone remembered what happened during that horrible day.

This effect did not extend to the Mindscape where the Chain Gang stayed trapped for a while and remembering everything until Missing Link managed to teleport the group out of their trap.  They then teamed up with Sleepwalker’s supposed archenemy Cobweb (a bad guy from the Mindscape spoken of more than seen), allowing them to return to Earth, fully remembering what happened while Sleepwalker didn’t.

And, to make matters a little sillier, the Chain Gang had their own host to emerge from in the form of Sheridan’s dog Rambo.

It took a little more effort for Sleepwalker to defeat both Cobweb and the Chain Gang, but that was about all she wrote for the Chain Gang.  While Sleepwalker does get the occasional guest appearance in different comics, his enemies are all more or less forgotten, and quite frankly, they were oddballs and weirdos like the Chain Gang.  So…maybe it’s for the best.

Or maybe the next Chain Gang will have a decent picture selection on Google Images…