William Baker was born in Queens, New York. At the age of three, young Billy was abandoned by his uncaring father and forced to live in poverty with his mother, who worked as a cleaning lady for a meager salary, and as a result, succumbed to alcoholism. Because she could not provide luxuries for young Billy, she sometimes took him to Coney Island beach, where Billy relished creating sand sculptures. He also enjoyed sculpting and working with sand in school, where he was encouraged by his teacher, Miss Flint, on whom he had a crush.
Billy was bullied by a boy named Vic and his two other friends at school, until he learned how to fight, inspired by his observations of the sand and water at the beach, to use a technique in which he used his opponents’ motion against them, “slipping through their fingers like sand”. After this, Vic and the other two bullies now became Billy’s friends all the way through high school, during which Billy channeled his anger through football, and adopted the nickname “Flint”, both because it sounded imposing and because it reminded him of Miss Flint. He also turned to theft and cheating to get through class and make ends meet at home.
After Vic incurred a large debt to the mob, he begged Flint to throw a football game in order to pay off the debt. After doing so, Flint’s coach threw him off the team, telling him that he had thought Flint would “make a mark” on the world, but that he now saw that Flint would never accomplish anything. Flint beat up the coach, and was expelled from school, after which he turned to a life of crime, and soon found work as a mob enforcer. He became involved in more and more illegal activity, and slowly developed a violent and bitter personality. Eventually he ended up imprisoned on Ryker's Island for his crimes, where he met his father, Floyd Baker. He befriended his father, but didn’t reveal who he was, giving only his nickname, Flint, and a false surname, Marko, which was inspired by his former coach’s taunts about “making a mark” on the world, and which would become his regular alias. (He also changed his name to prevent his mother from discovering that her son was a criminal.) Marko spent years in and out of jail, which was made bearable only by the presence of his father. After Floyd was released from prison, Marko decided to escape.
Immediately, he fled to a nuclear testing site on a beach near Savannah, Georgia where he came into contact with sand that had been irradiated by an experimental reactor. His body and the radioactive sand bonded, and Marko's molecular structure was altered into a sand/dirt-like substance that could transform any or all of his body into sand. Impressed, he adopted the name Sandman to match his new powers.
- Leitner suit and head
- Original T2 body
- Hand by me
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