Originally born on Earth-Two, due to a strange combination of toxic chemicals mixing with sunlight within Slaughter Swamp, the man once known as Cyrus Gold had his memories placed within a synthetic life known as Solomon Grundy. However, as this process was transpiring, a Grundy was plucked from the future by Per Degaton. However, this wasn’t the Cyrus Gold version, which had been supplanted by a chlorophyll-concentrated variant created by the criminal Professor. And then that version was transformed into the intelligent Dick Cashmere incarnation. This fourth Grundy had been stripped of his Professor and Cashmere enhanced characteristics.
The Earth-One Solomon Grundy was spawned by residual chemicals in swamp water brought over by a visiting Grundy to that world, activated by the power crystal of the Parasite. This creature was eventually exiled to a distant world much as the childlike version which Degaton had materialized in 1941.
Dressed to impersonate Solomon Grundy, there were imiators of the original on both Earths. During a masquerade party, a man dressed up as Grundy... alongside another dressed up as Swamp Thing, were among the quintet of minions mentally controlled by Felix Faust. Seeking rare and precious gemstones owned by wealthy guests of this party, Faust used the five to distract the Super Friends long enough to coerce the partygoers into revealing the location of these valuables. Each had powers mirroring their real life counterparts.
Despite this, these faux-foes of the Friends were defeated by the combined efforts of a disguised Jimmy Olsen and the Wonder Twins. Once Faust was knocked unconscious, the masked guests returned to normal.
On Earth-Two, during Grundy's third appearance following his liberation from Green Lantern's green globe, Solomon terrorized five different cities across America. When members of the Justice Society arrived to battle their gruesome adversary, they met in five places at the same time! One of these Grundy's was himself an impersonator, defeated by Johnny Thunder rather easily. Yet even with his vast superhuman strength and other abilites, the Justice Society overwhelmed him and imprisoned Grundy on the moon.
There were several white-skinned synthetic life forms similar to Solomon Grundy, created by the sinister Mister Daro, that Osgood Armsby faced in June of 1938... the same month that Earth-Two's Superman debuted. And decades later, Earth-One's Superman would face several Grundy clones replicated from the original, and destroyed by S.T.A.R. Labs. It was during this latter encounter that one of the Grundys met another creature from the bayou, the Swamp Thing.
Like Dick Cashmere, Alec Holland was a normal man who had his intellect transposed into a vegetation-encrusted body. When a criminal Conclave sabotaged the laboratory of Holland, the resulting explosion mixed with Alec's bio restorative formula to form the Swamp Thing's body with Holland's intellect. Shortly after this, a piece of his plant-based arm that had been severed from his body became a mindless duplicate of the Swamp Thing, one which the original Holland version battled until the pseudo-Thing perished. This faux-Swamp Thing mirrored the irradiated pieces of wood imbued with pseudo-life by Solomon Grundy when he battled Doctor Fate and Hourman in the 1960s.
And just like Holland, Cashmere was but the second person to experience this human-swamp transposition, as another Earth-One scientist proceeded Holland in similar research. That man, Alex Olsen, like Cyrus Gold, was the template for swamp creatures that later met the protectors of Gotham City.
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