While there are exceptions, most comic book superheroes have one thing in common — they all have really impressive physiques. It doesn’t matter if you started out as a 98-pound weakling, the second you don your costume, you inevitably develop amazing pecs, impressive biceps, and a six-pack that looks like you’ve been doing stomach crunches since you were six-years-old. For some, these muscles are the result of an artist’s pencil — but for some characters like the X-Men, a muscular physique is the result of a really cool X-gene.
After all, when you’ve got a mutant healing factor like Wolverine or the ability to literally turn your muscles into solid steel like Colossus, getting and maintaining a superhuman physique just doesn’t require endless hours of pumping iron. One mutant’s power, however, allows him to enjoy a superhuman build with a hilarious trick.
Introduced in the original Excalibur comic books, British mutant Scott Wright possesses the power to alter his size, allowing him to become a giant or a minuscule spy. His powers earned him a position in a secret British national security unit called M.I.6 under the codename Micromax. Scott also kept his original job as a disk jockey and was known for being a handsome, charming man in his mid-twenties when out of costume.
Only it was all a sham. At one point, Micromax was attacked and knocked out by some powerful energy weapons. Upon losing consciousness, he reverted to his true appearance — a short, pot-bellied man with a massive receding hairline. Turns out that in addition to being able to shrink or grow his entire body, Micromax can also shrink or grow parts of his body as well — so he makes sure to redistribute his body mass on a regular basis to make himself look younger, taller, and more muscular. He even grows his hair so that it covers his entire head.
It’s an amusing revelation — and one that leads to some interesting speculation for other size-shifting heroes like Ant-Man. Mutant Great Lakes Avenger Big Bertha also has the ability to reshape her body in any way she wants, enabling her to become a superhumanly bulky woman, a plus-size model, or a stick-thin magazine cover girl.
Micromax, however, can achieve many of these effects simply by changing the shape and size of his body parts. It’s even possible that he can minimize or eliminate some health problems he may have suffered from in his “natural” state by expanding or shrinking his veins and arteries to aid in blood flow and reducing his risk of heart attack, stroke, or high blood pressure. In one Ant-Man comic, Scott Lang actually showed he was capable of similar feats, but instead of improving his health, he shrank parts of his internal organs so he could fake being sick more convincingly. If Scott can mimic the X-Men's Micromax’s abilities, however, maybe there are more medicinal and cosmetic uses for Pym Particles as well?
