The Badger

 

Real Name: Norbert Sykes

Identity/Class: Normal (?) human

Occupation: Bodyguard and general gopher for Ham

Affiliations: Ham, Mavis Davis, Nexus, Judah the Hammer, Warren Oates, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Bill Fields, Wombat, Kid Kang, Daisy Fields

Enemies: Ron Dorgan, Roach Wrangler, Lord Weterlackus, Larry, Hodag

Known Relatives: Mavis Davis (wife), Larry (step-father)

Aliases: Emily, Gastineau Grover DePaul, Leroy, Alice, Max Swell, Pierre

Base of Operations: Barneveld, Wisconsin

First Appearance: The Badger #1 (Capital Comics, 1983)

Powers/Abilities: Badger is an expert at hand-to-hand combat. He began his training in Shorin-ryu but has since gone on to master dozens of obscure, esoteric, arcane, not to mention abstruse martial arts, the likes of which you seldom hear about.

He can also talk to the animals - just like Dr. Doolittle. Only with better results.

According to Ham Badger becomes momentarily insubstantial when he changes personalities.

History: "The Badger is Norbert Sykes, a Vietnam veteran suffering from an extremely rare multiple personality disorder: Seven great personalities in one. The personality most frequently inhabited by Norbert, indeed almost exclusively preferred, is the Badger, a self-styled crime fighters who rides the highways and by-ways of America, meting out bloody justice to jaywalkers, ticket scalpers, indifferent teenaged fast food clerks, in fact, any damn body he feels like because he's CRAZY!

Badger lives with Ham the Weather Wizard in a castle south of Barneveld, Wisconsin. Ham and Badger met while both were inmates at a state mental hospital. Through cunning and chicanery, Ham has amassed a considerable fortune."

Badger is the story of an insane hero. The man who would become the Badger was christened Norbert Sykes. Sykes was an abused child, suffering for years at the hands of his step-father Larry. Then as an adult he went to Viet Nam where he spent several months as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. His fragile sanity finally snapped, and he adopted several distinct personalities to cope with the traumas in his life. One of these is the Badger, a vigilante who believes that God is a Badger called Myrtle (like I said, he's not sane) - this is now his dominant personality, and the one with the best knowledge of martial arts. Back in the US he was institutionalized for a while, after he was caught by the police beating up some punks who had annoyed him, until another inmate Ham, a 4th century Welsh druid (it's a weird and wonderful strip at times, and can be as insane as the character), explained to him how to fake it long enough to get discharged. Badger now works for Ham as an odd-job individual (and given the nature of what Ham is, they can be exceptionally odd jobs). He met his wife, Mavis Davis, during a far Eastern martial arts contest.