Maddie Warner

Madeline “Maddie” Warner is a comic book character, the mentor and leader of the superhero team Dynamo 5, who appears in the monthly series of the same name by Image Comics. Created by writer Jay Faerber, Warner first appeared in ''Dynamo 5 no.1 (January 2007).

Warner is the widow of Captain Dynamo, the much-beloved protector of Tower City for forty years, and a former agent of a government superhero monitoring organization known as F.L.A.G., who used the cover of an award-winning investigative journalist, now retired. Dynamo was eventually found dead, naked in a hotel bed, the cause of death attributed to some type of poison on his lips, though the details of his death were not released to the public. He had been assassinated by Widowmaker, who had been hired by Hunter Blackthorne. Although Warner did not know this, she did suspect that condition and setting in which his body was found was not natural, but arranged by whoever murdered him in order to further tarnish his image. In sorting through his personal effects, Warner discovered his little black book, which was filled with detailed information on countless incidents of infidelity on his part. Although devastated by the extent of her late husband’s indiscretions, Warner was faced with the problem of Dynamo’s numerous enemies, who would now take advantage of Tower City in his absence. Although other superheroes attempted to pitch in to keep the peace, Warner decided that Tower City needed a permanent protector.

Scouring through the information she gleaned from her husband’s belongings, she located five young people she believed could be his illegitimate children: Vancouver, British Columbia high school geek Hector Chang, Washington DC lawyer and activist Olivia “Livvie” Lewis, aimless ne'er do well and ladies’ man Spencer Bridges, Hollywood, California theater employee and NYU Film School graduate Bridget Flynn, and Eastbridge, Texas high school football star Gage Reinhart. Gathering them together, Warner exposed the five to the same radiation that Dynamo had been exposed to forty years earlier, unlocking their own latent superhuman abilities, with each one manifesting one of the five powers that their father possessed. Donning costumes with the same color scheme and design as their late father, the five of them carry on his legacy as the superhero team the Dynamo 5, while coming to terms with learning about the father they never knew, and the four new half-siblings they each now have. She is determined to mold them not only into a team, but into a family as well, and functions as their mentor and “unofficial sixth member”, calling the shots from the same headquarters once used by Captain Dynamo, and keeping in constant remote contact with them during their missions. Although she must deal with the fact that they are constant reminders of her late husband’s infidelity, she is insistent that they act not only as a team, but as a family as well. Despite her matronly role and demeanor with the team, however, she can be ruthless with enemies that she perceives to be threats, and will not hesitate to kill them, as she did with The Superior, the leader of an organization called The Veil that had kidnapped Visionary, even though Visionary had been returned, and the Superior had been captured. Remarking on the fact that the team is unaware that she is a former agent of F.LA.G., she commented ominously in Dynamo 5 #1, “Kind of makes you wonder what else I never told them, doesn’t it?”