Otto Octavius was born a cripple and so uses his mechanical arms attached to his wheelchair to compensate for his physical limitations. Growing up in South Africa, he became jealous and hateful of the Africans around him who had more freedom than him due to not being crippled. Becoming a world-renowned biologist, Otto also embraced a racist and xenophobic world-view, eventually coming to join the Nazi party. Aligning himself with the Friends of New Germany crime syndicate, Otto took to kidnapping African American minorities in New York and turning them into mindless slaves, also believing that outright genocide would be "wasteful".