Tombstone
Real Name: Lonnie Thompson Lincoln
First Appearance: Web of Spider-Man 35
What's His Problem? Growing up in Harlem, Lonnie found that his albinism and soft voice made him a focus of ridicule. When classmate Joe Robertson didn't mock him like everyone else, Lonnie developed a steady, if twisted and perverse, loyalty to the man who would become chief editor of the Daily Bugle. The discovery that his unusual size and strength was handy for extorting lunch money from his peers made getting through school a little easier. Adopting the cruel childhood taunt of "Tombstone" as his underworld name, Lonnie became a mob enforcer. He was an efficient enough killer to attract the attention of the Kingpin, and later worked as Hammerhead's chief enforcer.
Powers: Tombstone was pretty much just a really big, strong, homicidal maniac until Web of Spider-Man 66, when a confrontation with Joe Robertson at Osborn Chemical Plant went awry and Lonnie ended up being engulfed in Diox-3, an experimental plant preservative. Turned out it worked pretty well on humans, too; as well as granting him super-human reflexes, the chemical combined with Tombstone's skin, creating a substance hard enough to repel bullets and withstand bomb blasts, so that Lonnie literally became a walking "tombstone."
Favorite Quote: "Robbie, he's my pal. Nobody kills Robbie while I'm around. Nobody -- unless it's me." (Web of Spider-Man 68)
Heroes He Keeps Running Into: Tombstone felt betrayed by Robertson, whom he considered his only childhood friend, after Robertson testified about a murder he'd witnessed Lonnie commit twenty years earlier. His attempts to exact revenge against Robbie and Robbie's family brought Tombstone into continual conflict with Spider-Man. Robbie himself was able to stop Tombstone a couple of times, once by pricking him with a pitchfork and once by shooting him after Tombstone lunged at him. (That latter incident, though, is one more example of why one shouldn't play with guns, as it led to the whole Diox-3 immersion and a more powerful Tombstone.) Darkhawk became another foe when Tombstone ripped the amulet from Powell's android alter-ego and tried to take it for his own. The amulet picks its own power-wielders, and fortunately for law-abiding citizens everywhere, Lonnie wasn't even on its short list. Tombstone also had the ignominy of being trashed by the Scarlet Spider in about a dozen panels back when Marvel was trying to make us care about Ben Reilly (ironic how they spent a lot of time after that trying to turn Peter Parker into Ben Reilly ... but I digress).
People Who Think He's Not So Bad: Tombstone is feared by all. Even when they were young, Robertson harbored no illusions about Tombstone's stability or capacity for brutality; after Lonnie turned on his mob boss Hammerhead, the underworld, too, became wary of him.
Most Despicable Act: According to his own boast, Tombstone is personally responsible for hundreds of deaths incurred during his time as a mob enforcer (Darkhawk 10); going by the sadistic way he killed Robbie's friend Bruiser when the three men were in prison, none of those deaths were particularly painless for the victims.
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