We have met a lot of foes who have always been obsessed with the idea of eliminating everything a hero cares about. The Flash has been a victim of villains with that worldview as well. It is time for you to get introduced to the villain who was once a close friend of the Flash, among his many foes.
Hunter Zolomon’s origin is unlike any other villain story we have ever seen. That is because he did not decide to be a villain until much later in life. Hunter is given a second chance at life after a terrible and traumatized background. New beginnings, on the other hand, might inevitably lead to new regrets. You could be caught between sympathizing with him and holding him accountable for betraying Flash after hearing his narrative.
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The comic book origins introduced him very differently
Hunter Zolomon made his first appearance in the world of DC Comics in The Flash: Secret Files & Origins Issue #3, which was published in November 2001. Although in this issue, he had not yet become Zoom. So, stick around to find out when that happens! He was created by an incredible writer who has worked on a lot of our favorite DC characters like Green Lantern, Aquaman, Flash, and more.
It’s none other than Geoff Johns and the illustrator Scott Kolins. Now, before getting into his story, allow us to first jog your memory about the Rogues. The Rogues are a team made up of the Flash’s enemies. So, we all know Barry Allen as the second Flash, the first being Jay Garrick. Now, he obviously had a lot of enemies whom he imprisoned. But, none of them had ever worked together until Captain Cold and Trickster broke out of the prison to execute the same crime.
Even though they had no plans to join forces at first, they realized that they were a good team when going up against the Flash. And that’s how the Flash’s adversaries eventually built a series of frequent alliances and came to be known as the Rogues. In this comic, we are going to be dealing with one of the Rogue’s members. And no, that villain is not Hunter Zolomon. His origin in this comic is quite surprising, actually.
He graduated as a profiler specializing in metahuman criminals from the F.B.I.’s investigative support unit at Quantico. Then he was immediately sent to Keystone City, the home of the third guy to assume the mantle of the Flash, Wally West, Barry Allen’s nephew. Keystone City is also known for the Rogues, who have highly advanced technology and metahuman abilities.
Now, after arriving, Hunter Zolomon, who walks with a cane, is first met by officer Fred Chyre. At precinct 242, he meets Detective Jared Morillo, who is worried that he forgot to get flowers for his wife for her birthday. But of course, Flash comes in handy to help out his friend. After all, he needs the detective to focus more on the case at hand than on being concerned about his wife.
It looks like Hunter Zolomon’s reputation is quite common knowledge since he is considered one of the FBI’s best and brightest, and youngest. He finally meets the Flash for the first time. And it appears that this moment means more to him than even his wedding day. He truly admires the Flash. Much like the other two heroes who were called the Flash before Wally West, he also acquired the gift of superspeed by being struck by a bolt of lightning.
And because his story is like an open book to the public, he is loved by everyone. Clearly, Zolomon wishes to aid the Flash in his journey to get rid of the villains. Now, the case that has been bugging both Flash and Detective Morillo is that just before Zolomon’s arrival in the city, the entire staff of Keystone’s number 1 radio station was murdered. And not just a simple murder; in fact, the D.J. was mutilated to such an extent that his tongue and vocal cords were actually missing.
The murderer even left a message written in blood that said, “Hush! No more questions.” Now, I’m sure even we can guess that there’s clearly a motive here. Flash has already figured out that the villain behind these murders is obviously Murmur, a member of the Rogue who is known for his art of shutting people up. But where is he headed now? Who could possibly be his next target?
As our hero dwells upon it, Hunter Zolomon being the Rogue Specialist, showcases his excellent deduction skills. Dr Christian Amar, a.k.a. Murmur, was a respected physician in Keystone before he was convicted of the mime murders. He also had a speech impediment which was discovered when he appeared on a talk radio station and was stuttering while answering back to an angry caller.
And the radio station at which this happened was exactly the one he had attacked. Good job to Zolomon for such impeccable work on his first case with the Flash. It looks like he is far more intelligent than his reputation suggests. Now, the only other station where he spoke, which is still in business, is KKSS. It is clear where Flash has to go next. But when Flash asked him to tag along, he denied it due to his bad knee. Poor Zolomon, he did crack the case!
After reaching the radio station, Flash is able to catch Murmur just in time before he does any actual damage with all the deadly tools he was carrying around in his utility belt. However, Flash is unable to arrest him because of the sudden arrival of two other members of the Rogue, Magenta, and Girder. They manage to rescue Murmur, and Flash has to head back without catching any criminals.
The issue ends with Hunter Zolomon accepting the tiny victory of saving lives for the day as he walks back to his apartment. It looks like Zolomon is hiding a lot of skeletons in his closet! And it is time for us to uncover them.
He didn’t have the best childhood
Hunter Zolomon was born and raised in the city of Richmond, Virginia. From an early age, his home environment was quite unhappy, and he was not very close with his parents because they hardly ever spoke to one another or to him. The day when Hunter was to leave for college, he returned home to discover a swarm of cops inside his house. Who knew that this day would be marked as a dreadful memory in his brain forever?
He learned that his father was a serial killer responsible for the deaths of five young girls. Hunter’s mother handed over her husband to the cops, but he murdered her as well and was eventually executed by the cops after refusing to go with them voluntarily. As sad as this event is, it is only the first of many tragedies which will befall Hunter. So, this tragic discovery about his father’s true nature led Hunter to be completely obsessed with figuring out how the criminal minds work. He wished to stop murderers like his father from ever hurting innocent people.
So, Hunter attended George Mason University to study psychology and criminology, where he met his girlfriend and later wife, Ashley. They later joined the F.B.I. together and became agents. Hunter admired her father almost as much as he admired his girlfriend. And while working in the FBI’s profiler section under Ashley’s father, he eventually started to see him as somewhat of a father figure.
This mindset is probably justified by the lack of fatherly affection he experienced as a child. During that period, Zolomon studied dozens of low-level super-criminals and honestly thought that most of them were misjudged and mentally damaged because of their terrible backgrounds. Maybe he had this empathetic side because he could identify with them as his past was far from pleasant.
Just when things seemed comparatively better in his life, an awfully tragic incident took place. When Hunter was analyzing a costumed criminal known as “The Clown,” he underestimated the villain’s juvenile mentality and told Ashley’s father that the criminal they were after would be unable to confront his adult life, and that’s why he would most likely not use a gun as a weapon. Unfortunately, his calculations ended up being incorrect.
As a result of this incident, Ashley’s dad was murdered, and Hunter was shot in the left leg in the crossfire, which rendered him partially disabled. He would never be able to run again and would now have to walk with a cane forever. As if his life didn’t already have enough altercations, Ashley soon left him because she blamed Hunter for what happened to her father.
Even the FBI terminated his employment. It’s as if his life did a 180. I don’t think they should have held him accountable for that because I hardly doubt that there has been an agent in the history of the FBI who has not made a single mistake. Anyway, to top it all off, much later, it was revealed that Hunter’s calculations about the criminal were, in fact, accurate and that the criminal was set up by Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash.
It was after these drastic changes that Hunter Zolomon went to Keystone City and started working as a profiler with the Department of Metahuman Hostilities. The only thing he hated most about this job, and rightfully so, was the fact that he would always have to be the guy behind the desk, despite cracking so many cases for the Flash.
How did a good guy transform into a supervillain?
Hunter Zolomon was gravely wounded and was left paralyzed from the waist down when Gorilla Grodd staged a massive prison break at Iron Heights. Gorilla Grodd is a nasty super-intelligent gorilla who obtained his abilities after being exposed to a meteorite. Now because Zolomon and Wally West have such a great dynamic and friendship, Hunter asked him to utilize the time-traveling Cosmic Treadmill in the Flash Museum to travel back in time and prevent this incident from happening altogether.
For those of you who don’t remember, Barry Allen built the Cosmic Treadmill in order to use it to travel in the past as well as the future by using his superspeed. Now, despite Hunter’s requests, Wally denied it, stating that he could not risk damaging the time stream. Obviously, Hunter was furious, and he thought that Wally had declined his request because, unlike the former Flash Barry Allen, West had never experienced any kind of personal tragedy or grief.
As a result, he could not possibly comprehend the significance of Zolomon’s request or how dreadful it genuinely felt to endure such a loss. So, Hunter used his brain where he shouldn’t have and broke into the Flash Museum in an attempt to utilize the cosmic treadmill by himself. Of course, it did not work and resulted in an explosion that destroyed the museum and pushed Hunter’s link to time out of sync.
According to Jay Garrick, this might have created a time vortex that led Hunter Zolomon to be disconnected from the present timestream. Due to this, he was now able to slow down time relative to himself, even reducing it to a total standstill while still being able to move normally through it. This created the illusion that he was moving at super speed. So, it looks like he has at last acquired the powers that can drive him into becoming the very thing he swore to protect the world from.
Hunter’s sanity was soon long gone, and he started to feel that if he could just inflict a considerable loss on Wally’s life by killing his wife Linda Park, he might end up making the Flash an even better hero. So, as a result, he became the new Zoom or the second Reverse-Flash. Zolomon adopted this name from Professor Zoom, Barry Allen’s archnemesis and the first Reverse-Flash. Zoom eventually caused a lot of damage that caught the attention of the scarlet speedster.
But in order to destroy the new threat that Zoom posed, Wally needed to match his fourth dimension, “speed.” As a result, Flash had to borrow speed from Kid Flash, as known as Bart Allen, and Jay Garrick. This already puts Zoom in a dangerous spectrum because Flash had to increase his speed two folds in order to fight him. West was eventually able to put an end to Zoom’s terror and stop him from killing his wife Linda, who was pregnant with twins at the time.
But it looks like West did incur a loss because Linda suffered a miscarriage due to being partially impacted by Zoom’s sonic boom. Soon enough, by using the minor “rips” in time caused by the use of Zoom’s powers, West was able to drive Hunter into a temporal anomaly, in which he would see his father-in-law’s death over and over again while being in a catatonic state. This fate sounds quite cruel enough.
Ashley, Zolomon’s ex-wife, took his position as a profiler in Keystone City, where she spent a considerable amount of time trying to communicate with him. But Ashley was hospitalized for a short period of time due to a car accident. And it was at this point that Hunter awoke from his coma due to concern regarding his wife. But he still decided to remain in his cell.
Zoom in The Flash TV series
If you have been an avid watcher of the Flash Tv series, then I’m sure you are aware that the Zoom we see in the comics, and the one in the tv show, are drastically different. Now, of course, they share some similarities in that their childhood trauma is the same. But, the adult life of Hunter Zolomon in the tv series is quite unusual as well as perplexing.
His character first appeared in the series in Season 2. Now, we know all the fuss there is about the multiverse. In fact, Barry Allen was also not averse to it in the show. He embraced the existence of multiple Earths all too well. So, what happens in The Flash is that Barry Allen is from Earth 1, and Hunter Zolomon is from Earth 2. After witnessing his mother’s death, he grew up with a penchant for bloodlust. So, naturally, he became a serial killer.
As for his powers, he gained them while being exposed to waves of dark matter that erupted from a particle accelerator explosion. It was then that he became Zoom and started terrorizing the people of Central City. But like any greedy villain, he was not satisfied with his speed powers. And in an attempt to increase them, he developed a Velocity serum that would drastically increase his powers. Therefore, this gave him more confidence to wreak havoc and fear among the people of the city.
Although as jolly as that might seem for him, his life took a turn for the worse when he started to see the side effects of his serum. Unlike the serum in your skincare routine, it looks like this one did not quite comply with Zoom. In fact, the serum was now killing him. So, as a result, he became desperate to find a cure across the multiverse. That’s when he fought another speedster to acquire that man’s speed for himself. And this guy was Jay Garrick.
He failed in his attempts to absorb his speed and then had a rather surprising idea. He imprisoned this speedster so that no one could ever find him and took over his identity of ‘Jay Garrick’ in order to become the new hero of Central City. That’s when he started living a double life, just like Superman’s Clark Kent and Batman’s Bruce Wayne, except Zoom’s dual identity was somewhat an extreme.
On the one hand, he started appearing in public as Jay Garrick and became the Flash of Earth 2, helping and saving the people from other metahuman criminals like Sand Demon and Dr. Light. At the same time, he also maintained his identity as the terrifying Zoom, still roaming the streets of Central City, the villain from whom no one is safe. Imagine he would just go back and forth, basically fighting himself.
Attacking the city in one moment and then quickly appearing as the Flash to fight Zoom so that people didn’t question Flash’s absence while Zoom destroyed their city. His powers certainly allowed him to continually deceive people. And he did this to give people hope as the symbol of the Flash but then also took it away as the symbol of Zoom. Now, when he accidentally reached Earth 1, he found out about Barry Allen.
Now, Barry is the Flash of this Earth, and Zoom, currently under the alias of Jay Garrick, found out that Barry’s speed force is the answer to saving himself from death and literally becoming the fastest man alive (once again). So, of course, he wanted to steal it. And as devious as he is, you can only assume what his plans would now include. Before actually stealing Barry’s speed, he wanted to make sure that Barry was as strong as he could possibly be.
So, he would constantly release his metahumans from Earth 2 to fight Barry, forcing him to improve his abilities. While he was doing this, he also decided to finally introduce himself to Barry and his team as Jay Garrick, the Flash from Earth 2 who is stuck on Earth 1 and is being hunted by Zoom. He kept on complying with the team in order to gain their trust and eventually become Barry’s mentor.
During this time, Hunter also fell in love with Caitlin Snow, who created Velocity 9. In his attempts to make his story as Jay Garrick appear all the more appealing, Hunter even went back and brought a time remnant version of himself from the past so that he could become Zoom and kill the supposed Jay Garrick so that it would further motivate Barry to increase his powers. His ultimate purpose was to wipe out the entire Multiverse, except for Earth-1, which served as the center of the Multiverse.
Eventually, when his real identity as Hunter Zolomon was revealed to Barry Allen and his team, he even kidnapped Wally to force Barry to give up his speed force in order to save his newest family member. Ultimately, he was stopped by Barry, who used a Time Remnant to disable Zoom’s machine. Barry was ready to kill him when two Time Wraiths came from the Speed Force. The Time Wraiths then converted Zoom into a decayed specter-like entity known as Black Flash and pulled him into the Speed Force.
Zoom has undoubtedly appeared to be more deadly and vile in the TV show as compared to his character in the comic book.
What makes Zoom so powerful?
As we have discussed earlier, in his comic book story, Zoom has the ability to alter time relative to him. He uses time travel in every step that he takes, and in most instances, he is also seen to be comparatively faster than even Wally West. Because of the temporal nature of his speed and the fact that he isn’t a speed force conduit, he is able to avoid the regular obstacles that other Flash-type speedsters have, such as friction.
Since he is moving at a normal speed while the rest of the world is “slow,” those obstructions have no effect on him. Although eventually, after the events of the DC Rebirth, he does acquire the speed force, which only makes him stronger. And along with that, he also gets sage force which allows him to use telepathy and telekinesis.
Zoom can also quickly react to danger and events due to his delayed sense of time. He was able to deflect any blows delivered by the Flash at lightning speed. His ability to manipulate time allows him to produce a superhuman force with the effects of massive superhuman strength. He has also been said to have thrown punches more powerful than Superman. However, if you ask me, Zoom can still not be compared to Superman.
Apart from this, a very incredible power he has is that his brain synapses speed up significantly when he manipulates his personal time-field. This enables him to think much faster than a regular human. Well, he certainly isn’t a regular human from any angle. Such enhanced abilities also increase his hearing, where he is easily able to hear the buzzing of a fly even from down the hall.
As a side-effect of his time manipulation, Zoom can actually project the lightning that he creates. In fact, it also allows him the ability to produce far stronger sonic booms and shock waves with just the snap of his fingers. Earlier, he had used this ability to murder Wally and Linda’s unborn twins.
What’s about to surprise you is that, as it turns out, Zoom has exhibited the capability to provide other beings a type of “super-speed” by granting them the power to control their relative time through Zoom himself. He was able to give this power to Inertia, a clone of Bart Allen from the future.
As for some of his other abilities that stem from his early life as a guy who helped Flash in solving criminal cases, he is exceptionally skilled in Tae Kwon Do, Martial Arts, and FBI training. Tactical analysis and his study of psychology and criminology serve as his cerebral abilities. That’s the intellectual combination you get when a good guy turns into a bad guy.
Well, some might say that his reasons for turning into the villain were not precisely justified, but at the same time, we also can’t deny the fact that he possibly went through a lot of severe trauma and loss, both as a child and then as an adult. Imagine being held responsible for killing your own mentor. That’s definitely going to leave a mark on your mind forever.
Despite that, all in all, Hunter Zolomon, a.k.a Zoom, surely served as a great example of how our famed heroes like the Flash can sometimes be quite selfish. Perhaps, he should have been a better friend to Zolomon than he was.
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