"FLIP"
"FLIP"
Real Name: Possibly Flip Winsor
Identity/Class: Human mutate
Occupation: Pawn of Winsor
Group Membership: None
Affiliations: Unkillables (Marjorie Brink, Mortigan Goth, Madcap, Paradox, Monark Starstalker, Scavenger (Robert Nicolle), Harry Sikes, Vic Slaughter, Suicide (Chris Daniels), Yi Yang), X-Men (Beast/Hank McCoy, Cyclops/Scott Summers, Dazzler/Alison Blaire, Emma Frost, Wolverine/Logan/James Howlett)
Enemies: Winsor
Known Relatives: Winsor (father), unidentified
mother;
Dr. Victor von Doom ("uncle" - presumably
unrelated, but raised Winsor as a ward of the state);
Winsor's "siblings" (presumably just
the people Winsor was raised along with, rather than true relations)
Aliases: None
Base of Operations: Unrevealed; formerly a secret lab associated with a warehouse in Hunter's Point, presumably just north of San Francisco (see comments)
First Appearance: Wolverine: The Best There Is#2 (March, 2011)
Powers/Abilities:
Height: Approximately 4'2"? (not good references for
people of known height standing next to him)
Weight: Approximately 75 lbs. (largely due to his oversized brain)
Eyes: ??? (looks orange to me)
Hair: Dark brown???
History:
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#3 (fb) - BTS / Wolverine: The Best There Is#11 (fb) - BTS) -
Flip is the son of Winsor (aka Contagion), a Latverian illegitimate bastard,
inbred (and/or crossbred) via very weak bloodline. Winsor, either via natural
mutation, experimentation, or other means became a "stew of exotic and nigh
impossible contagions," of which he eventually gained reasonable control, though
he was unable to infect or alter himself.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#3 (fb) - BTS) - Winsor never meant to have a child, but his "cruel mistress" (who was of no relation to Winsor whatsoever, which Winsor considered most scandalous) ultimately delivered him an illegitimate child, Flip. Being new blood, Flip lacked certain qualities and resistances.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#3 (fb) - BTS / Wolverine: The Best There Is#5 (fb) - BTS) - Winsor employed a varied group of virtually unkillable henchmen who could both endure extended stays in his presence, and whose radically varied immune systems and healing factors offered hope of offering antibodies that might cure Winsor (and Flip, as he originally claimed).
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#11 (fb) - BTS) - Winsor found his son's immune system especially pliable, and infected him with a virus that hypertrophied his neural tissues while using a viral mutation of technarchy cells to repattern his brain as a receptor for similar life forms.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#3 (fb) - BTS) - Winsor infected Flip with virulent intelligence, causing rapid cellular and synaptic growth beyond the capacity of his skull, which would eventually cause his brain to rupture/explode.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#5 (fb) - BTS) - Winsor purportedly made Flip smarter so Flip could cure Winsor.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#12 (fb) - BTS) <Months before the main story> - Flip grew psychic neural paths. Reading memories kept him from going insane with boredom. He realized Winsor had never planned to cure him and just wanted to watch while his head exploded.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#12 (fb) - BTS) - Flip used the time to alter the structure of the technarchy mutation receptor Winsor gave him, turning it into a broadcast antenna.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#2) - Seeking Winsor behind a closed door at his base, Wolverine instead found the masked Flip (at this point, Wolverine had no idea who he was).
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#3) - Winsor's agents
incapacitated Wolverine via the Corruptor's sweat, and Winsor had Slaughter
chain Wolverine to a seat in such a position that
if he extended his claws he would stab the similarly chained and trembling Flip
in the face).
Shortly after Wolverine's revival, Winsor introduced and
unmasked Flip, explaining how Flip was
both innocent and mortally ill. Winsor offered Wolverine the choice of putting
Flip out of his misery, which Flip requested;
or Wolverine could subject himself to a agonizing experimentation in hopes of
learning the means to cure Flip,
which would most likely result in failure and a hellish death for Flip. Winsor then
attached an explosive collar to Flip, one that would decapitate Flip if it was
tampered with, or with Wolverine tried to leave, attack Winsor or one of his
henchmen, withhold his assistance, or in any way undermine Winsor's efforts to
kill his son. Winsor further clarified that he would rather kill Flip instantly
than see him die in agony, and would do so if he lost the slim chance of being
able to cure Flip via studying Wolverine. Revealing his own abilities/nature, Winsor admitted that he had infected Flip. With Wolverine having
refused to kill Flip and thus having tacitly agreed to serve as his subject, Winsor shot Wolverine in the eye.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#11 (fb)) - Having procured an adaptive healer, Winsor had Wolverine infected over and over again with every possible variation of his core virus he could imagine, knowing that the antibody he would develop would give him the key to his new virus.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#4 - BTS) - As Flip watched Wolverine's torture by various Unkillables (at least Yi Yang), Marjorie reminded Wolverine that this was within his agreement with Winsor.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#4 - BTS) - As Flip watched on, Scavenger siphoned Wolverine's life force 11 times, after which it regenerated each time.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#4) - Flip watched as Goth gave Wolverine some vodka, and then as Marjorie and Winsor verbally interacted with Wolverine. Wolverine decided, incorrectly, that Winsor had faked his relationship with Flip and prepared to head out, but Winsor then afflicted him with an allergy virus that made him allergic to Adamantium, and Wolverine collapsed. Flip was disgusted with how wrong Wolverine was.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#5 (fb) - BTS) - A placebo inhibitor collar was placed on Wolverine to make him think he couldn't use his senses or pop his claws to cut his way out of his cell. They further began injecting him full of a glucose solution that was supposed to be Corruptor sweat, which would make him be more compliant. The immense psychological and physical trauma he had undergone made Wolverine believe both effects were real, kept him both docile, and kept him from using his claws or his enhanced senses.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#5) - After Madcap tormented Wolverine,
Wolverine swore he would kill Madcap if he weren't full of Corruptor juice.
Wolverine mistook Flip's repeated comment "Please." for requests to kill him.
Finally, Flip said, "Please, will you stop being so stupid all of the time."
Flip further insultingly explained how it was a placebo collar to make Wolverine think he didn't have powers,
so he wouldn't pop his claws and cut his way out of his cell; and that if had a
real inhibitor collar, it would have inhibited his healing factor and ruined Winsor's experiments. Flip
continued, explaining how they didn't want to use the
Corruptor's sweat because they wanted to keep Wolverine's system clean for
accurate results. Wolverine offered that he knew a number of brilliant
people who could help Flip; bored with talking to Wolverine, Flip explained how,
to keep himself from fatally strangling himself, he was thinking in Urdu,
translating what Wolverine said into Hindi, transcribing their conversation into
cave paintings, creating a binary code that would describe those images,
visualizing how that would feel as Braille, and then speaking it in English --
that kept a little over 1% of Flip's brain occupied, which meant he needed only
about 80 similar puzzles to dumb him down to the level of Wolverine's
friends...until his brain would grow some more, which it was always doing. Wolverine
told Flip he should be smart enough to make a healing potion once Wolverine had
a healing potion. When Flip said he couldn't do that, Wolverine reiterated that
he could get him help, starting by getting him away from these people. Flip
angrily countered that he was one of "these people," and that Winsor had given
him these powers so Flip could cure him. Flip argued against Wolverine killing
Winsor, admitting Winsor to really be his father. Flip acknowledged that his dad
was a bad person, but that he was still Flip's dad..."virally smart doesn't mean
emotionally mature, ok?" As Wolverine realized Winsor had been experimenting
with healing factors to heal himself and began getting dressed, Flip proudly
announced that he discovered a Mersenne prime number with over ten million
digits.
Arriving alongside Scavenger and Suicide, Winsor
congratulated Flip but wished he would stay focused on the task at hand, as
splitting his mental energies distracted him and made him chatty with the help.
Wolverine incapacitated Scavenger, Slaughter, and Suicide, and then Winsor
stunned Wolverine with his gun-rocket-launcher-cane before fleeing. Flip noted things
to be almost interesting as Wolverine escaped the cell and encountered Yi
Yang.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#6 - BTS) - Winsor and Marjorie discussed Flip's unexpected introduction
of chaos into their plans, and Winsor commented how he'd like to encase Flip in
amber at the moment his head finally exploded. Nonetheless, Winsor credited Flip
for fulfilling his most essential role by sharing his DNA, and he couldn't fault
Flip for boring of the exercise and trying to introduce a greater level of
unpredictability.
Eventually, a resistant Wolverine
seemingly cured Winsor of his Contagions and left him for the Corruptor to kill.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#11 (fb)) - Wolverine's command allowed Winsor to infect himself, and he created a virus that healed his DNA by eating the flaws that limited the range of viruses he could create.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#10 - BTS) - Winsor recaptured Wolverine, along with allies Monark Starstalker and Reality-80324's Paradox.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#11) - Back at his base, Winsor strode past his former henchmen (the "Unkillables") and Monark and Paradox, all incapacitated by Winsor's various pathogens, and taunting his captive audience, Wolverine and Flip (the latter of whom voiced repeatedly that he now hated his dad, while Wolverine told Winsor that he knew how he was going to kill Winsor (and everything)).
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#12 (fb) - BTS) - Via Flip, Wolverine shared with the Unkillables and the Corruptor how he planned to finish off Winsor.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#11) - Via the antibody Wolverine had developed to resistant Winsor's infections, Winsor visualized the negative template for a virus that incorporated all things natural, unnatural, technonecrotic, and truly dead.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#12 (fb) - BTS) - Via Flip, Wolverine mentally instructed the approaching X-Men via Emma Frost that they couldn't take Winsor and advised them to drag out the struggle and keep him occupied.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#11) - Monark re-established himself and broadcast a protocol to the nanites in Wolverine's systems, telling them to disassemble the suggestant virus Winsor had hit him with.
(Wolverine: The Best There Is#12) - After Winsor incapacitated the X-Men in a protracted struggle, Wolverine revealed how he had instructed Emma to drag the fight out. Wolverine then explained that he hadn't come up with the idea on his own, and when Winsor demanded to know who had done it, Flip revealed his involvement, telling Winsor that if he had been a tiny bit less of a ####, he probably would have let the others die. Flip then sent a self-destruct signal to all the technonecrotic virals within a mile, which neutralized all of Winsor's recent viruses, including his healing restraints, insectivirals, Corruptor variants, custom x-gene virals, extraterrestrial exotics, and his own healing virus. As Wolverine grabbed Winsor by the neck and raised his claws, Marjorie stopped him, explaining that Winsor was relinquishing control of his genome, so that if he was cut again it would kill everything for miles around.
Revealing Flip had helped him share his ideas with the Unkillables and the Corruptor, Wolverine gathered them around him and told Winsor that they had taken every infection he could muster and could probably literally swallow anything else Winsor had. When Winsor reminded that his contagions would be released into the atmosphere and groundwater, Wolverine had the Corruptor dump a whole bucket of his sweat on Winsor and command him to contain himself; in response, Winsor generated a virally absorbent fungus as an organic containment shell. Wolverine then advanced on Winsor and apparently carved him up (off panel), as Flip said, "Love you, Dad."
Flip begged Wolverine to end his life before his head exploded; Wolverine apparently complied.
Comments: Created by Charlie Huston and Juan Jose Ryp.
Profile by Snood.
CLARIFICATIONS:
No KNOWN connections to:
images: (without ads)
Wolverine: The Best There Is#11, pg. 5, panel 2 (face)
#12, pg. 15, panel 4 (main)
Appearances:
Wolverine: The Best There Is#1-3 (February-April, 2011) - Charlie Huston
(writer), Juan Jose Ryp (artist), Jody Lehup & Sebastian Girner (assistant
editors), Axel Alonso (editor)
Wolverine: The Best There Is#4-5 (May-June, 2011) - Charlie Huston
(writer), Juan Jose Ryp (artist), Sebastian Girner (assistant
editor), Axel Alonso (editor)
Wolverine: The Best There Is#6 (July, 2011) - Charlie Huston
(writer), Juan Jose Ryp (artist), Sebastian Girner & Jordan D. White (assistant
editors), Axel Alonso (editor)
Wolverine: The Best There Is#7 (August, 2011) - Charlie Huston
(writer), Juan Jose Ryp (artist), Sebastian Girner (assistant
editor), Axel Alonso (editor)
Wolverine: The Best There Is#8-10 (September-November, 2011) - Charlie Huston
(writer), Juan Jose Ryp (artist), Sebastian Girner (editor)
Wolverine: The Best There Is#11-12 (January, 2012) - Charlie Huston
(writer), Juan Jose Ryp (artist), Sebastian Girner (editor), Nick Lowe (senior
editor)
Last updated: 05/01/14
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
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