Andrew "Slugger" Johnson was a man with an affectation for the 1950s. After he graduated from high school he ended up getting stuck in dead end jobs and menial labor. This all changed the day that he answered a want ad in the Daily Bugle placed by millionaire Gregory Gideon to work as security at his factory in Long Island.^[2] This security force was responsible for defending the factory while Gideon attempted to kidnap Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Girl of the Fantastic Four, as well as their son Franklin Richards. This was all part of a ploy to use his Eternity Machine to harvest cosmically powered genes in order to cure himself and his son Thomas of radiation poisoning.^[3] However the rest of the Fantastic Four came to their rescue, the battle ending with the Eternity Machine destroyed and Gregory Gideon dead.^[4]

Andrew survived but was bombarded with energies from the Eternity Machine. These energies attracted the Shaper of Worlds who offered to use his vast powers to create the ideal world for Johnson. The resulting reality warp created a world that was a pastiche of 1950s culture where the Wild Ones, a biker gang of "Youthies" were constantly at war with the elderly and xenophobic Patriots. They sought to obtain a powerful weapon called the Warhead, a powerful weapon created by "The Brain," a man based off of Albert Einstein. Initially, Johnson fashioned himself as the leader of the Wild Ones, calling himself the Wild One.^[2] When the Fantastic Four, the Wild Ones, and the Patriots all went after the Warhead, an increasingly unhappy Johnson became the Brain himself to defend his version of reality. Ultimately, the Fantastic Four destroyed the Warhead. In the aftermath of the battle a previously unseen society of African-Americans that were living in squalor confronted the Patriots and demanded their civil rights, pushing the 1950s inspired reality that Slugger so deeply wanted to move onto a metaphorical 1960s. In realizing that time had to move on, Slugger's world shattered and the Shaper deemed him unworthy of his gift. He stripped Johnson of his powers and left that world with Thomas Gideon as his new student.^[5]