The Manifestations of Bobby Park

Publisher: DC Comics

Sixteen-year-old Bobby Park is a devoted son, helping at his immigrant parents’ laundromat business in Central City’s Koreatown. Despite their modest income, Bobby’s genius-level aptitude for science and biology earns him a full scholarship to an elite academy, but after a racially charged attack puts his father in the hospital, his stress and anxiety manifest as painful acne that detracts from all his joy and pride. Frustrated by failed attempts to clear up his skin and tired of dissociating to tolerate his life, he takes matters into his own hands, concocting his own cure using the academy’s state-of-the-art facilities.

The trial serum is an instant success but comes at a great cost. Beyond his newly acne-free face, Bobby sees the reflection, and hears the voice, of an alter ego named Atlas Ahn; a muscled extrovert with catalog-model features—the exact opposite of how Bobby sees himself. And when an attack at the academy leaves Bobby critically wounded, Atlas convinces him to take his hand, which unwittingly unleashes a hulking monster known as Gemini.