Marvel Comics has just revealed in the preview for The Amazing Spider-Man: Curse of the Man-Thing that one villain secretly cracked the code to the Super-Soldier Serum years ago: Dr. Curt Conners, aka the Lizard. Many of the smartest minds in the Marvel Universe have tried to reproduce Serum but it has always been assumed no one has done it—until now. Dr. Conners has been known to mess around with secret formulas, which is actually how he ended up becoming the Lizard, so it is easily believable that he is smart enough to have figured out the Super-Soldier Serum as well.
After losing his arm in war, Dr. Conners started experimenting with combining the DNA of reptiles and humans, hoping to find something that would allow him to grow his arm back. Using himself as a test subject he was thrilled when one version worked, however it had more of an effect than he had hoped for. The reptilian DNA his serum was based on mixed itself with his DNA, altering it in the process, changing him into the villainous creature known as the Lizard. The Super-Soldier Serum isn’t too different from the serum he was working on to get his arm back, as it too alters the DNA of who it is injected into. Captain America might be the most popular Super Soldier, but there have been many others including the Winter Soldier, Isaiah Bradley, the Sentry, and Red Skull.
In the preview pages for The Amazing Spider-Man: Curse of the Man-Thing by writer Steve Orlando and artists Marco Failla, Guru-eFX, and Daniel Acuna, and letterer VC’s Clayton Cowles, Captain America is able to make contact with the man inside of Man-Thing, Dr. Ted Sallis, who reveals the origin of the swamp creature. It turns out that he has been trapped inside of Man-Thing’s mind, due to the use of the Super-Soldier Serum, but admits he is not the one who created it.
Sallis says that credit goes to Curt Conners—he’s the one who cracked the SO-2 formula. It is likely he stumbled across this while working on the serum that turned him into the Lizard. This serum of his created another creature, the Man-Thing. It caused Dr. Ted Sallis to be trapped inside of the Man-Thing’s mind for years, where he feels he deserves to be. Feeling down on himself, he asks Steve to leave him alone in the prison that he has earned.
With Captain America now out of the Man-Thing’s mind and back on the streets of New York with Spider-Man, he is off to find Dr. Curt Conners and pick his brain about the Super-Soldier Serum. Hopefully any insight that the Lizard can give them will help them defeat the deadly Man-Thing vines that Marvel’s version of Poison Ivy has set loose on the entire planet. Find out what happens next when the full issue of The Amazing Spider-Man: Curse of the Man-Thing hits shelves and online stores Wednesday April 28th.
