Merge:Moonstone


 * For the first Moonstone, Lloyd Bloch, see Nefarius.

Moonstone (real name Dr. Karla Sofen) is a supervillainness and superheroine in Marvel Comics' Marvel Universe.

History
While she nominally debuted in Captain America #192 as Doctor Faustus' "moll," her first true appearance was in Incredible Hulk #228. There, at the behest of the US Government who wished to move Lloyd Bloch to a conventional cell, she convinced him to give up his empowering alien gem by convincing him through halluncinogens and her training as a psychatrist that it was mutating him into a monster. Once he surrendered it, she proceeded to take it for herself and escape.

She later joined the Masters of Evil in their destruction of Avengers Mansion, and it was his knowledge of her psychiatric skill from this, despite their mutual loathing, that led Baron Helmut Zemo to liberate her from the super-human prison the "Vault" so that she could join his new team - the Thunderbolts - a group of villains who would pose as heroes to win the trust of officialdom and the public. As part of the ruse, she took on the name Meteorite for the duration of the con, although she became the only one to both remain a Thunderbolt and return to her old name after the exposure of their plan, and the memory of the adulation had caused most of the team to turn against Zemo.

When Hawkeye imposed himself on the team as leader, she seduced him as part of a bid for power, but later found herself thinking genuinely heroic thoughts (and found herself genuinely attracted to Hawkeye), which were eventually attributed to the wielder of the original power gem, of which hers was a fragment and sealed off from her.

Her power levels raised dramatically once she absorbed a second alien gem, from the Counter-Earth counterpart of Bloch, but as of 2004's "Avengers/Thunderbolts" limited series she lost both gems to Baron Zemo, which placed her in a comatose state.

Since then, Zemo has occasionally used her link to the moonstones to puppeteer her, but her mind remains shut down.

Powers
Moonstone draws power from an alien gravity stone, and can use the stone's elemental energy to fly, become intangible (by lowering the density of her body), and focus gravity into force blasts that she fires from her hands. She has also shown the ability to project flashes of blinding light and is described as having gained prodigious superhuman strength and speed through the use of the stone. When Moonstone absorbed a second gravity stone, she displayed the ability to control gravitiational forces to move and manipulate matter, create force fields, increase gravity around a target to crush it, generate miniature black holes, even transport objects through dimensional rifts.

Other Media
Moonstone appears as a member of the Masters of Evil in the 6th episode of the animated series The Avengers: United They Stand, voiced by Susan Roman.