Doctor Spectrum
comics character

Doctor Spectrum is the name of several fictional characters appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. There have been five versions of the character to date—three supervillains from the mainstream Marvel Universe belonging to the team Squadron Sinister (Earth-616) and two heroes from different alternate universes. The two heroes each belong to a version of the team Squadron Supreme, the Squadron Supreme of Earth-712 and the Squadron Supreme of Earth-31916 respectively). Spectrum is a pastiche of DC's Green Lantern.
Fictional character biography
Squadron Sinister
The first version of the character, Kinji Obatu, appears in The Avengers #69 (Oct. 1969), and is created by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema. The story arc introduced the supervillain team the Squadron Sinister, created by the Grandmaster to fight the Avengers. The four members were loosely based on heroes in DC Comics' Justice League of America, with Doctor Spectrum based on Green Lantern.
The Grandmaster assembled the Squadron Sinister to battle Kang the Conqueror. Spectrum is defeated when Iron Man deduces that Spectrum's Power Prism (a sentient entity called Krimonn) is vulnerable to ultraviolet light.
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This entry incorporates text from “Doctor Spectrum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.