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In Reality Z-25 31-H, Hank Richards was a handsome young, pluridisciplinary scientist with “several PhDs from Harvard and Yale”.
He became the research assistant of the brilliant and reclusive inventor Professor Madison, but became increasingly jealous of her other assistant, the talking, mutant bunny Rodney Rabbit, who understandably to stick in people's minds more than the fairly ordinary-looking Richards. One night, he took control of a giant robot Madison had been building and used it to break into her vault to steal her experimental Deathray, which he mounted onto the robot, preparing to rain fire down onto the world — starting with Madison and her visiting friends Kelly and Jenkins. However, after Kelly and Jenkins uncovered his plot before he'd intentionally revealed himself, they managed to defeat him fairly easily, with Rodney short-circuiting the control node of the robot, knocking out Richards in a blast of neuroelectric feedback. (COMIC: Ghost in the Apparatus of the Spirit in the Shell of the Machine)
Madison and the others believed Richards dead, but he actually vanished to plot his revenge. Learning that Madison had created a robot duplicate of herself in New York City, Richards, disguised as a vagrant, began working on a device to drain power from said robot body. However, he instead ended up volunteering it to help defeat the Cosmic Solution, actually working with the roboticised Madison in the process (and revealing his true identity to her as he did so). The device worked, although the way the Earth was ultimately saved had little to do with this temporary victory. (COMIC: Journey Out Of Misery)