SPARKPLUG

Real Name: Olga Katrina Gottmann
Identity: Not Publicly Known
Occupation: Florist/Adventurer/Politician
Group Affiliation: League of Champions
Bases of Operations: San Francisco CA, Karlsruhe Germany
Place of Birth: Amazon Forest, Brazil
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: Teresa Katrina Feran (sister), Tomas Gottmann (brother), Philip Gottmann (brother, deceased), Katrina "Kathy" Feran (mother, missing)

Height: 5'10"
Weight: 150 lbs
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Blonde
First actual appearance: Champions v2 #3 (November 1987)

Olga Gottmann has led what might be characterized as a confusing and occasionally very frustrating life. To start with, she's the little sister of one of the world's most famous people, Terri Feran, aka Flare. That alone would create issues for most people, but to Olga's credit, she pretty much takes that in stride. Of more significance are all the changes she's been through.

But let's start at the beginning. As is Flare, Olga is a daughter of Katrina (Kathy) Feran, aka the Golden Warrior. And, as was Flare, Olga was also a product of "Projekt Wunderkinden," the genetic experiment conducted by the ex-Nazi scientist, Hans Gottmann, that was meant to create a new breed of super-powered warriors who would serve to wreak vengeance upon the Western democracies.

The effort didn't work out as planned. Not only did Flare turn against her creators and join the League of Champions, she also directed them to Gottmann's secret base in the Amazon rain forest, and Projekt Wunderkinden was unceremoniously halted. But Gottmann did manage to escape, and took young Olga with him.

Some months later, Gottmann was approached by the sorceress Dark Malice, who also had a grudge against the Champions, and suggested that they work together to prepare a trap.

As her sister was before her, Olga was artificially aged to young adulthood, greatly enhancing her rudimentary ability to generate and control electricity. And in an effort to ensure that Olga would not also betray him, he allowed Malice to cast an enchantment on her that would reduce her intellect to that of a child.

When the inevitable happened, and Flare returned to the ruins of Projekt Wunderkinden, Hans Gottmann and Olga were there waiting for her. Flare was taken by surprise and captured. And when the Champions followed, Olga tried her best to put them off guard by impersonating her sister long enough for Gottmann to punish Flare for her betrayal by permanently removing her photokinetic abilities.

Unfortunately for Gottmann, the childlike Olga wasn't quite capable of convincing the Champions she was Flare. Gottmann was defeated and captured, Flare was rescued, and the Champions took Olga home with them.

It quickly became clear to Flare that Olga's mind was recovering from what had been done to her. And since it was going to take Flare a while to regain the full use of her own abilities, the Champions decided to find out exactly what Olga might be capable of by including her on one of their missions. On that mission, Olga did make one big mistake, but otherwise she performed well enough that the Champions were satisfied with her capabilities.

Olga adopted the code name Sparkplug (the English translation of her childhood nickname Zunderkerze, or Zundie for short). She started wearing a yellow, white, and orange costume designed for her by Flare's friend, Donnah Hannah. And the Huntsman set her up with a secret identity (and a source of income) as the proprietor of a little flower shop known as "Olga's Flowers."

It was at her flower shop that she met the intrepid newsman, Jimmy Dooley. Thinking he might be on to a something scandalous, Dooley had set out to learn why Donald Hunter had gone to the trouble of setting up and financing this Olga Gottmann girl's business venture. Dooley realized almost immediately that the dark-haired Olga was in fact that new electric Champions girl wearing a wig. But Olga admantly refused to admit it. And Dooley was so charmed by her stubbornness that he found himself playing along with her game. Dooley's goal became not so much to prove Olga Gottmann was Sparkplug as it was to figure out how to get her to fess up to it.

Sparkplug and Dooley shared several adventures together, and soon found themselves in a romantic relationship, but for various reasons Olga didn't think Dooley was good husband material. When she learned of the existence of Blue Bolt, an electrically powered hero close to her own age, she presented herself to him and suggested matrimony, but things didn't work out. She then set her sights on Donald Hunter, who was rich, highly intelligent, and obviously of good genetic stock. But Olga's effort to land Donald was cut short when Malice reappeared.

Malice had a plan to use pieces of the souls of the Champions as the seeds by which she would recreate and rule over the gods of Olympus. In the process of fashioning a new incarnation of the goddess Athena, Malice stole so much of Olga that she was left virtually mindless. And a short time later, out of sheer spite, during a battle with the Champions Malice finished what she'd started by making Olga into an infant.

After baby Olga was adopted by Rose, it quickly became evident that the process by which she'd been artificially aged was still in play. Baby Olga was growing up about twice as quickly as a normal child. It was when she again reached adolescence that she came to the attention of one of Rose's oldest enemies, the self-styled "Dark Lord of Elves," who liked the look of her and decided to taunt Rose by stealing her daughter away to his realm in Faerie, where he would make a fairy girl of her and take her to be his wife.

Rose was, of course, infuriated by the abduction. This was, plain and simple, rape. With help from her cousin Britannia, and from none other than the goddess Athena, Olga was rescued. And when the Dark Lord protested that by the laws of Faerie, the girl was now his wife, Athena countered that argument by lopping off his head.

When it was over, Athena agreed that the best way to deal with whatever trauma young Olga had suffered as a result of what the Dark Lord had done to her would be to replace her memories of the Dark Lord with memories of the life Malice had taken from her. Those memories still existed inside of Athena, and with assistance from Rose's friend Mnemosyne, the Olympian goddess of memory, they were successfully transferred back to Olga.

Seeking to reclaim her past life, teenaged Olga came to live with her sister Flare for a while. Seeking to emulate Flare's success as an international fashion supermodel, she tried her hand at that, but it wasn't her cup of tea. She then enrolled as a student at Caltech, where at the time her friend Icicle was also taking classes, and in short order earned herself a bachelor's degree in (to no one's surprise) electrical engineering.

By this time, Olga had aged to the point that she felt comfortable picking up the pieces of her old life. As Olga Gottmann, she returned to her flower shop, and as Sparkplug resumed active duty as a member of the League of Champions. She even tried picking up where she'd left off in her relationship with Jimmy Dooley. But there was something missing. There was still a hole that needed to be filled.

She started wearing a new Sparkplug costume that was darker than her old brightly colored outfit. And she began looking for her brother Tomas, who had been missing for all these years. With help from Donald Hunter's father Roland, she found a lead that took her to Karlsruhe in Germany, only to discover that Tomas had been driven quite mad by the abuse he'd suffered years earlier at the hands of the notorious Erik Schadel.

As a consequence of what Olga was forced to do in order to save her own life and the life of Willy Reismann, an employee of Roland Hunter who'd been assigned to serve as her companion and guide, Tomas now lies comatose in a hospital in Karlsruhe. Olga currently divides her time between San Francisco and Karlsruhe, serving not only as a reserve member of the League of Champions, but also as Germany's national heroine. She was also recently elected as one of Germany's representatives to the European Parliament.

Olga has recovered her memories of everything that happened to her when she was abducted by the Dark Lord of Elves. Those memories trouble her a bit, but as she puts it, everyone is the sum total of everything she's experienced. And the brief time she spent as a fairy girl has provided her with a couple of significant benefits. For one thing, she now has a sensitivity to magic that enables her not only to detect the presence of magic, but also to get a sense of what kind of magic it is. For the other thing, she seems to have stopped aging. She looks to be somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty, and hasn't been getting any older.

After the incident with her brother Tomas, Olga did enter into a brief affair with Willy Reismann, but she's always set her sights higher. And when the opportunity to do better presented itself, she took it. She's entered into a relationship not with Donald Hunter, but his father Roland. And perhaps to her own surprise, that relationship seems to be working quite well. Roland puts up with her temper, and is confident enough in himself to be able to indulge her in whatever silliness might strike her fancy. As Donald put it upon finding out about this, "Olga's always needed someone like Roland to be the George Burns to her Gracie Allen."

And for all her fiery temper, and her tendency to be vicious, Olga Gottmann is at heart a comedienne. She loves puns, non sequiturs, and illogical logic. Flare tells the story of when teenaged Olga was living with her. Flare had to rush out to a modeling gig, told Olga there was a package on the table in the living room, and asked her to take it to the post office. With a twinkle in her eye, Olga replied, "Okay." When Flare came back, the package was still there, but the table was gone. "Oh," wondered Olga when Flare asked her about it, "you meant for me to take the package to the post office?"