Rapture

Rapture

deceased

Personal Information

Name: Rapture
Real Name: Sharona Jackson
Former Aliases: N/A
First Appearance: Savage Dragon #4
Death Issue: Savage Dragon #43 / Savage Dragon #44 / Savage Dragon #103 / Savage Dragon #134/Savage Dragon #234
Cause of Death: Incinerated by DarkLord / Blown up on Darkworld / Consumed by Universo / Head crushed by Solar Man/Head smashed into the ground by Alex Wilde
Group Affiliations: Freak Force,The Special Operations Strikeforce, the Covenant of the Sword
Height: 5′ 7″
Weight: 120 lbs.
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Brown with a white patch
Date of Birth: 09/17/72
Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois
Base of Operations: Chicago, Illinois
Other Distinguishing Features: N/A
Marital Status: Unknown
Known Relatives: Malcolm Dragon (son), Joshua L. Jackson (father, deceased), Martha Monroe (mother) Thunder-Head (son) Willie Jackson (brother) Dee Dee Jackson (sister-in law), Jackie Jackson (nephew), Janet Jackson (niece), Jermaine Jackson(nephew), La Toya Jackson (niece), Marlon Jackson (nephew), Michael Jackson (nephew), Randy Jackson (nephew), Tito Jackson (nephew)
Powers: Rapture possesses the ability to generate vast amounts of electrostatic energy which she can release and harness. The limits of her powers are, as yet, unknown but she can mentally control the amount of electricity she discharges. She can emit lightning-like electric arcs from any part of her body which she can propel through the air or through other conducting mediums. This discharge travels at the speed of lightning, about 1,100 feet per second. At close range she can easily kill a man.
Rapture also has a limited ability to absorb the electrical energy from other sources and add to her own. Rapture’s body is immune to the effects of electricity and could not be electrocuted no matter how high the voltage. Rapture, although fairly athletic, has had limited experience in hand-to-hand combat.

History

Sharona Jackson came from an extremely poor family. Her parents were never married and her abusive father drank himself to death. Her mother, a prostitute, disappeared when Sharona was quite young, leaving the young woman to live in the streets and turn to her mother’s occupation for survival, and she took on the nick-name Rapture. Eventually, she fell in with a group of girls who worked for a pimp named Bryan Louis Leroy Walker. Walker was a tyrant. After he had beaten another prostitute, named Tracey Brown, to death with a baseball bat, Rapture fled. She moved to another area of town and tried to get things together there.

Rapture_new.jpgOne night, Rapture was approached by an old man riding in the back of a black limousine. Thinking it was another “pathetic old John” she went with him. It was, as it turned out, Mighty Man’s old foe, Dr. Nirvana. Nirvana had been abducting people he figured wouldn’t be missed and was trying to induce super-powers and duplicate the circumstances that, he thought, created Mighty Man. Nirvana planned to give himself powers, crush his foes and rule the world. Rather than experiment on himself, he was using homeless as guinea pigs. They had all died.

Nirvana’s experiment on Rapture worked, but resulted in an explosion that ripped apart his lab, killing his assistant. It fried off Nirvana’s hair, burned his flesh and left him in a coma. He wound up in the hospital, Rapture wound up with the ability to generate vast amounts of electricity, due to a genetic anomaly.

With her newfound powers, Rapture confronted the evil Bryan Louis Leroy Walker and threatened to end his life right there. The super-powered girl named Ricochet was on her way back to her underground home after being rejected from the police force due to her age. She spotted the super-powered woman and tried to prevent her from killing Walker, resulting in a scuffle between the women. Rapture decided that it wasn’t worth throwing her life away for revenge and agreed to turn Walker over to the authorities but the criminal pulled a gun on her, giving Rapture the chance to kill him due to self-defense.

Ricochet introduced her new friend to the growing super-team of the Chicago Police Department and she was asked to join them. Due to restrictions imposed by the local government and their police superiors, the freak officers quit the police force and struck out on their own as bounty hunters, joining up with the veteran hero SuperPatriot and the new Mighty Man.

Freak Force went on to battle a number of menaces, ranging from the supervillains like the Fantastical Force, the Covenant of the Sword, the Throwaways, Master Atom, Bludgeon, their own evil clones and the Frightening Force, to the extraterrestrial Martians, Matrix Swarm and Cosmic Cops. They even faced off against other heroes like Badrock, the Wildcats and Cyber Force.

Rapture became the first long-term of the Dragon and the two enjoyed a very happy, if turbulent relationship. Her jealousy and constant flirtation would jeopardize their happiness but it wasn’t until Rapture gave birth to the policeman’s child that the relationship ended. Dragon had suspected that his lover had had an affair with singer Peter Klaptin, due to rather compelling video evidence (it was all a big mistake), and the couple split up. When the Covenant of the Sword secretly abducted the child and faked its death, the trauma broke the two heroes up for good, but they remained good friends.

Eventually, Rapture accompanied most of her teammates in joining the United States government’s new super-team to replace Youngblood (presumed dead from the Martian attack), the Special Operations Strikeforce. She joined an expedition team into another dimension where they confronted the ruler of Darkworld, a parallel version of Earth. DarkLord refused to give up his power or end his mad quest to exchange the surface of his world with that of the Earth, and when he was confronted by Rapture, the villain incinerated her without hesitation.

Dragon was left stranded on Darkworld along with his teammate Smasher and attempted to locate that reality’s version of Rapture to save before the planet died. This search failed and that Sharona Jackson was killed when Darkworld exploded.

Rapture was one of hundreds of super-powered females that were gathered together by Damien DarkLord. Although details of her own timeline are unrevealed, it can be assumed that the majority of her origins are similar to the original Rapture. The main difference being, obviously, that she did not meet her end at the hands of DarkLord.

When a raid on the Covenent of the Sword stronghold in the Hamptons was performed by Dragon, Rapture was liberated from her servitude of the sinister organization. All of the abducted or recruited females were taken back to Chicago, Illinois where the scientific genius of Rex Dexter was employed to aid them in returning home.

Rex Dexter performed a number of experiments until he was finally able to determine which timeline each of the women came from. He was then able to construct a device which would send them all home, but the world which both Rapture and an alternate Smasher hailed from was now gone. With nowhere else to go, the two women opted to remain on this Earth as they had no counterparts left; those from this reality were deceased.

The S.O.S. offered these two women positions on their pared down roster and they moved into their complex in Washington, DC. Rapture had continued to raise her counterpart’s orphaned son, Malcolm Dragon. Unfortunately, the arrival of Universo meant the deaths of almost everyone on Earth as the entire planet was consumed.

In the second reality that Dragon called his home, Barbaric was never recruited onto the Chicago Police Department which in turn led to Ricochet getting rejected due to her young age. This would prevent the teenaged heroine from running into Rapture as she confronted her former pimp, the murderous Bryan Louis Leroy Walker. The prostitute would cold-bloodedly murder the man and become a fugitive from the law.

The details of Rapture’s life in this timeline remain unknown but it has caused her mind to become fractured, turning her into an incoherent mess. Rapture was recruited regardless by August DeBliek Jr when he was assembling Freak Force, inspired by Dragon’s stories of the team in his home universe. This experiment was a total failure and Rapture, now obese, returned to her previous life.

After losing her weight, the unstable Rapture became targeted by the villain Johnny Nitro for a brutal physical and sexual assault. She was spared this fate by Solar Man who incinerated her assailant. When Rapture moved to thank her savior, Solar Man’s true intentions were revealed. As punishment for the murder of Bryan Louis Leroy Walker, Solar Man took Rapture’s life by crushing her skull.

An alternate universe Rapture later shows up and holds Angel, Alex, and Jennifer Murphy hostage in Dimension-X. She wants to the women to have sex with the Bully Boys as they have become sexually frustrated and angry.  Her son Michael with Dragon from another Dimension comes to help and after a long battle Rapture ends up dead when her head is crushed into the ground by Alex using the Power Glove.

Appearances

BADROCK ANNUAL
Oneshot

DART
3 (Image)

DEADLY DUO VOL.2
2

DRAGON
2

FREAK FORCE VOL.1
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

FREAK FORCE VOL.2
1, 2, 3

GLORY VOL.1
1

MARS ATTACKS IMAGE
2, 3, 4

SAVAGE DRAGON
4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 50 (F/B B/U), 61 (F/B), 63 (Dream) 75, 91, 100, 101, 102, 103, 112, 115 (B/U), 134, 163 (T/F), 194 (F/B), 230, 231, 232, 233 , 234

SAVAGE DRAGON ½
Oneshot

SAVAGE DRAGON: RED HORIZON
2, 3

SAVAGE DRAGON: SEX AND VIOLENCE
2

SHARKY
2

SHATTERED IMAGE
2, 4

STAR
3, 4

SUPER FREAKS
One-shot (Not in continuity)

THOR VOL. 2 (Marvel)
26 (unofficial)

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES VOL. 3
11

VANGUARD: STRANGE VISITORS
4

WILDC.A.T.S
14

EXTERNAL LINKS:
Image Comics Database profile

TurtlePedia profile