Virgil Hawkins is a fourteen-year-old who attends a boarding school with his best friends Richie Foley, Tim Drake and Stephanie Brown. A gang leader recently helped Virgil, hoping to recruit him, but Virgil is hesitant, as he knows his mother died in an exchange of gunfire between gangs. The gang eventually leads Virgil to a restricted area for a fight against an enemy crew, but it was interrupted by police helicopters. During the dispute with the police, chemical containers explode, releasing a gas that causes mutations among the people in the vicinity (this event was later known as "The Big Bang"). As a result, Virgil obtains the ability to create, generate, absorb, and control electricity and magnetism—he takes up the alter-ego of "Static". The gas also gives others in the area their own powers, and several of them become supervillains. The mutated people become meta-humans known as "Bang Babies" and their mutations apparently spread to other people around them.
