Breach is a 2005 comic book series from DC Comics. written by Bob Harras with art by penciller Marcos Martin and inker Alvaro Lopez. The series is centered on a US Army
Major named Tim Zanetti, who gains superpowers in a scientific
experiment gone wrong. Zanetti was working for "Project Otherside", a
secret sub-Arctic nuclear reactor where scientists are probing other dimensions.
In an accident at the facility, Zanetti is caught in a dimensional rift
and afterwards is found in a coma with his body forever changed. His
body is placed in an isolation chamber for the next twenty years, at
which point he awakens. His body has become a conductor for a mysterious
and deadly energy, able to "melt" biological substances with only a
touch, and so he has to be dampened with a special containment suit.
Left behind while Zanetti is comatose and presumed dead are his wife
Helen and son Tate. Like Captain Atom before him, Zanetti wakes years after the
experiment which transformed him. He discovers that his former
colleague, Major Mac McClellan, has taken his place in his former
family, marrying Helen, and has risen in the military to the rank of
General. For some still unknown reasons he decides to tell Zanetti that
his family had died the very moment he came to contact with the rift.
MacClellan plans to use Zanetti, now dubbed "Breach", as a tool against
invasion by the race of transdimensional creatures called the Rifters. The Rifters are creatures from the far side of the dimensional
rift that created Breach. They need to inhabit and take over human
bodies in order to take a physical form. Once in human form, they also
possess the same deadly attributes of Breach himself, but are totally
enslaved by their natural instincts. The declared goal of the Rifters is
the global destruction of what they refer to as "the weak ones", the
humans, and a particular Rifter agent, Jakob Kekana. Kekana was a young herdsman in Africa
when he was possessed and deformed by a Rifter. Now known simply as The
Herdsman, he has been sent to track down Zanetti and probe him to
discover why he is not bound to the parasitic Rifter mind. He has
acquired an unsurpassed power, strong enough to take down even Superman. For still mysterious reasons, Talia al Ghul is helping the Herdsman, who far from considers her a "weak one". Breach distances itself from the standard superhero
formula by focusing on the tragedy, rather than the triumph, of its
title character. Constantly driven to the verge of madness by the Rifter
infection in his body and mind, Breach holds onto the memories of his
family to keep him sane. This binds him to a strict moral code that, for
example, has stopped him from killing two Rifters that possessed
innocent children. Breach has tangled with the Kobra organization and has met up with members of the JLA, including fights with Superman on more than one occasion.