I’m considering all the aspects of a mutation to be a single origin even if some of the powers are delayed.
Does Dionysus count?
Oh, and Kurt/Nightcrawler literally has two origins. In the one that made cannon, his mom was Mystique and his dad was from a long line of demon-like mutants. In the original (and IMHO better origin) (sadly I cannot remember which writer this was) Mystique’s longtime ally Destiny was Kurt’s mother. Mystique and Destiny were revealed to be longtime lovers, and Mystique had used her shapeshifting abilities to temporarily grow some additional body parts and was Kurt’s biological father.
Another X-Man, Hank McCoy, a.k.a. Beast, started out as a mutant with superhuman strength, speed, and agility (as well as a genius-level intellect); he also had a “simian” build, with long arms and large hands and feet. But, overall, he still looked fairly human:
Then, after drinking an experimental serum of his own design, which enhanced his physical abilities, he also sprouted blue (or black) fur over his entire body:
Rick “Hourman” Tyler built a superheroing career around firing up sixty-minute doses of superathleticism thanks to his dad’s work on the Miraclo serum — and, years later, got a heck of a lot better at being in the right place at the right time upon also gaining flashes of sixty-minutes-from-now precognition.
Earlier this summer I was talking with a neighbor (who turns out was a fellow fan back in the day) about what the title literally asks for: not two sets of powers, not powers+tech, but TWO ORIGINS.
Our first two examples were Hawkman and MisterMiracle.
I was raised in the 60s with the “original origins”. So Hawkman had a secret identity, Carter Hall, who worked in a museum. But he was really Katar Hol, a policeman from another planet (I’d assume Thanagar, but I don’t remember them getting specific, originally). And he could fly, thanks to his wings and… Nth metal?
(Note: this is all paraphrased from comics I read over fifty years ago…)
So, using advanced science to act as a detective, and the ancient weapons he was surrounded by (partial to a big-ass mace, as I recall), they billed him as “Using the Science of the Future with the Weapons of the Past… Hawkman!”
Then DC gave him a second, entirely different, origin that I know nothing about… and from what I hear, many more confusing origins and retcons.
…
Now, Mister Miracle had two equal and separate origins, to the extent that, when DC published Secret Origins, MM had two completely different stories.
Again, what I grew up with was an escape artist named Scott Free who traveled with a carnival.
Later, Jack Kirby rewrote his origin as being born on New Genesis but raised on the planet Apokolypse by Granny Goodness, as a (disciple? pet project? son?) of Darkseid. He escaped and ended up as… an escape artist named Scott Free who traveled with a carnival.
(Note: also paraphrased from ancient comics, sorry…)
But, hey, Kirby was The King. I say he gets to mess with any character he wants (even Jimmy Olsen and Don Rickles).
The Phantom Stranger has (last I counted) 6 origins-
He’s the Wandering Jew who mocked Christ and was condemned to walk the earth.
He’s the last survivor of Sodom and Gammorah.
He’s a time traveller from the end of the universe who ended up at the Big Bang.
He’s an angel who refused to take sides during Satan’s rebellion and is welcome in neither heaven nor hell.
(those are all from the same issue of Secret Origins)
He’s one of The Watchers, angels who had sex with human women and fell from grace. (From the Vertigo Phantom Stranger one shot)
In the current reboot of the DC Universe, he’s Judas.
Drax the Destroyer
In the comics, Arthur Douglas was a human whose family was attacked and killed by Thanos. Kronos placed Arthur’s soul into a new super powerful body.
In the movies, Drax is an alien whose family is killed by Ronan the Accuser and is naturally super tough.
Ant-Man — who invented a helmet that let him command bugs — would retain the strength of a normal-sized man when he’d shrink down to the size of a bug, which was enough for him to start fighting crime and saving lives.
He eventually came up with a way to become a giant, getting stronger than a normal-sized man: this was useful when interspersed with his previous schtick, but was so useful on its own that he spent plenty of comic-book issues getting the job done while neither talking to bugs nor going below a six-foot height.
Some time later, he went nuts and forgot that he’d ever been Ant-Man or Giant-Man and started using a ‘Yellowjacket’ costume that let him zap people and superleap around — and, sure, he eventually regained his memory, and started using the Yellowjacket gear in concert with his other breakthroughs; but, again, that superhero costume was useful enough in its own right that he overpowered various crooks even without his tiny allies or any size-changing tricks.
And he later ditched all of that to rebrand himself as Doctor Pym, The Scientific Adventurer: getting around in a flying car that had an onboard AI, and “contained a flame thrower, acid spray, gas vent, smoke bombs, spotlight beam, magnetic grapples, legs used for scaling walls, and possessed two powerful tendrils fitted with grappling hooks which could lift several tons. Rover was often carried by Dr. Pym in his jumpsuit, shruken down in size.”
I could go on.
Guy Gardner has had at least three different Superhero identities, each with a different origin.
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A member of the Green Lantern Corps, with a green power ring.
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After he resigned from the Corps, he stole Sinestro’s yellow ring.
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After drinking some magic water, he became Warrior, with the ability to turn his arms into any type of gun.
He also briefly wore power armour made by Blue Beetle, but that only lasted 2 issues.
When I was a kid reading comics Thor was Dr. Blake, who was under an enchantment of some kind and changed into Thor. Nowadays I understand he is, was, and always will be Thor. Unless someone else is.
Yeah, I really don’t understand the whole “Jane Foster becomes Thor” thing. Thor is Thor. That’s the dude’s name. Even when he was stripped of his powers in the first movie, he was still Thor. Jane Foster becoming Thor is like Lois Lane becoming Clark Kent.
(which, OK, could happen through some sort of body-swapping shenanigans or whatever, because comic book, but that’s not what happened here)
Well, there’s always Greer Nelson in the Marvelverse, who started out as The Cat, non-super-powered (although with enhanced mental and physical abilities – kinda like Cap), with a literal catsuit and lotsa gadgets (1972).
That didn’t really catch on, so they revamped her a year and a half later so that she was now Tigra, the guardian of the Cat People who is part Tiger, with the stripes to match.
Or, for that matter, Sue Storm/Richards, the Invisible Girl/Woman, who – well – turned invisible, clothes and all. Until issue #22, when a device Reed Richards was using to measure her abilities triggered an enhancement of her powers so that she could also create invisible shields. She could then also turn other people invisible, too.
Those aren’t your usual “invisible man” powers, so when we see Violet Parr of The Incredibles exhibiting exactly the same powers (invisibility, invisible shields, making others invisible) it’s a clear tip-off that The Fantastic Four was the direct inspiration for The Incredibles.
A lot of superheroes and villains from the 1960s ended up with more complex, “deeper” and “older” origins in the 1980s and afterwards. Look at Eclipso and The Negative Man/Negative Spirit/ Rebis from DC or The Plantman from Marvel
Oh, another superhero who got a power reboot due to flagging interest was Congo Bill, who’d been in DC since 1940. Twenty years later he gained the ability to soul transfer with a golden gorilla and became Congorilla. His series ran for a couple of years more, then he ended up as a guest star.
For that matter, look at what happened to the Blackhawk team in 1967. What had been a collection of pilots from different countries in WWII (and became a series of adventurers against science fictiony threats in the 1950s and 1960s) became an action team of costumed specials.
Didn’t Reed Richards invent his stretchable suit and a flame-proof version for Johnny? I can’t remember where I got this idea though, don’t remember it from the early comics. Unlike the movie it seems Sue could turn whatever she was wearing invisible right from the start.
Kinda-sorta. Thor was always Thor, though, in order to teach him humility, his father Odin had placed an enchantment on him, placing him into a frail, human body, with the identity of Dr. Donald Blake, and wiping out his memories of being Thor. When “Blake” discovered a walking stick that became his hammer Mjolnir, it allowed him to transform back into his true form, and regain his memories.
(Note that a modified version of this “origin” story, minus the body transformation and amnesia, was used in the first MCU Thor movie. They even put in an Easter egg reference to Dr. Donald Blake, being an old boyfriend of Jane’s.)
However, the transformation enchantment remained on Mjolnir, allowing Thor to change back to Dr. Blake to maintain his secret identity on Earth. In addition, if Thor were to lose contact with his hammer for a period of time (one minute or longer, if I remember correctly), he’d automatically change back into Dr. Blake, usually at an inopportune moment.
In the early '80s, in the comic book, Odin finally took that enchantment off of Mjolnir, and placed it into another hammer, Stormbreaker, which had been made for the alien hero Beta Ray Bill, allowing Bill to transform out of the “savage” body shape which scientists on his homeworld had given him, and look more like a normal member of his species.
Cable (Cyclop’s son from the future) is mutant with telepathic powers, but then he gets a technological virus that basically gives him cybernetic powers at the cost of using his telepathic powers to keep it from taking over his entire body. At certain points in his history his mutant powers are strong enough to keep using them.
In the Ms Marvel tv series, they say at the end that she’s not only able to command the power of the Noor because she’s a djinn, but also because she’s a mutant. Not sure if that counts as two backstories, they two might just be combining to make her powerful enough to beat any of the djinn, which is fine with me..
Spoilered because, on the scale of things being discussed here, this just happened.
Costumes made from unstable molecules, IIRC.
Speaking of comic-book inventors, there’s Forge of the X-Men: grew up on the reservation learning magic, but turned his back on that to join the military and serve in Vietnam — where, in desperation, he used magic to open a portal to some demon realm to defeat the human enemy in front of him, and then called in an airstrike on his position to deal with those demons.
So he survived, minus a hand and a leg; but, since he had the mutant power of intuitively inventing stuff, he built himself a bionic hand and a bionic leg, and then he set to building plenty of other stuff so he can play Q to other X-Men playing James Bond — or, if the base is under attack, he can break out whatever futuristic gun he’s been working on and put his military training to use — or he can get reluctantly dragged into doing fieldwork, since his bionic hand can hack into computers just like his bionic leg can dampen superpowers; or he can get even more reluctantly dragged into doing fieldwork, whenever he needs to be the team’s go-to guy for dealing with mystic-portal stuff.
Or an older version of him will pop in from the future, explaining that he just now finished getting a time machine up and running and maybe he doesn’t really understand how it works but that’s not important right now; for, lo, heed this warning from some nightmarish post-apocalyptic wasteland before it is too late!
You get the idea; he’s a walking plot device.