Harvey Elder (Earth-21399)

Early Life
Harvey Elder's physical deformities and need for especially thick glasses for his nearsightedness made him an outcast and a target for ridicule throughout his life, despite his gifted intellect.

Baxter Institute
In his adulthood, Harvey became a nuclear engineer working at the Baxter Institute, and one of the first to attempt to make nuclear energy affordable and safe to use. Even despite this, the ridicule and social exclusion continued, with Reed Richards being one of the only people to treat Harvey with respect and kindness.

Their relationship was soon complicated by the fact that Harvey had an unrequited crush on Reed's girlfriend, Susan Storm. He soon came to believe that Reed had faked his kindness for the sake of increasing Harvey's pain.

Becoming the Mole Man
On the day of the Baxter Institute incident, Harvey was one of the people caught up in the detonation of Viktor Domashev's disastrous experiment with the mysterious Cube, alongside Reed and the rest of the future Fantastic Four. Harvey was transported to a cave system somewhere below the Pacific Ocean.

It was here where he soon discovered a vast underground kingdom inhabited by the Moloids, a race of primitive apelike creatures tending to ancient, decrepit machines of apparently alien origin. In the Moloids, Harvey found a certain kinship, and also an opportunity to get revenge on the surface world that had rejected him.

Taking over as the leader of the Moloids and mastering their technology, Harvey led them in an attack on US government bases around the country, under his childhood moniker of “the Mole Man”.

Powers

 * Proximity Sense

Abilities

 * Genius-Level Intellect: The Mole Man is a scientific genius who has mastered the principles underlying the technology he discovered in Subterranea, to the point where he can even improve upon it.

Weaknesses

 * Achromatopsia: Already nearsighted beforehand, the Cube incident destroyed the cone cells of the Mole Man's eyes, afflicting him with a complete lack of color vision. Since only the rod cells remain functional, he can only distinguish between dark and light, and is unable to see clearly in bright light.
 * Photophobia: As a result of his above condition, the Mole Man has developed a fear of bright lights.