Polite Dissent

Brat Pack
Rick Veitch, writer and artist

The Midnight Mink has a secret: he has a healing factor with amazing regenerative capabilities. He took a round of bullets point blank and lived to tell the tale. He didn’t come by these abilities naturally, instead it was a gift from True-Man:

…one day I got careless and [True-Man] had to perform immediate hyper-speed surgery to save my life.
That’s when he noticed I was H.I.V. positive
True-Man went away soon after that. But he left me with a parting gift…a transfusion of his own blood.
He knew his hyper-powered antibodies would make my own weakening immune system almost as strong as his own.

Now that the Mink’s sidekick, the latest Chippy, has learned the secret, he shares the healing factor with him by a transfusion.

As comic book transfusions go, this one is fairly low key and makes sense — in a comic-book science way. My main nitpick would be gravity. There’s not enough blood pressure in the Mink’s arm (even if he used an artery instead of a vein) to push the blood to the top of the IV stand. Remember that when you give blood, the collecting bag is hanging lower than you. The Mink needs to be closer with the blood transfusing directly into Chippy, or he could be above with his blood running down, or an already collected bag of blood could be transfused.

I also have some questions regarding the Mink’s description of his healing abilities. I can see how “hyper-powered antibodies” would be able to prevent disease and infections, but a lead bullet is not an infection. I’m not sure how these antibodies would be able to heal such things as punctured lungs, ruptured muscles, and so on. Antibodies do not play a role in this kind of rebuilding. Additionally, antibodies have a limited lifespan (about 3 months) and need a variety of specialized white blood cells (B-cells, T-cells, APCs and so on) around to consistently produce them. I suspect that Midnight Mink’s understanding of the whole situation is limited and the transfusion supplied more than antibodies, probably a beneficial virus or some form of modified DNA.

It also apparently only takes a small amount of the blood to pass on the healing factor. Chippy is able to transmit it to the other sidekicks with just a sip or two of his blood in a later scene of the book. This lacks the forced intimacy of a transfusion scene, but it does add in a Last Supper-like “this is my blood” connotation.

Note that I used the Brat Pack trade paperback for this review; it has some differences from the original issues.
Thanks to Jog for reminding of the transfusion scene in Brat Pack. I also note that Brat Pack is copyright 1991. This makes Midnight Mink one of the earlest H.I.V. positive superheroes, if not the first.