Onslaught X-Men
Its confirmed that Onslaught learned from Nate, how to apply his psionic powers to manipulate the “Astral Plane” into the “Corporeal World.” http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/314/84384710.jpg
Cable v1 #30
This one is a bit hard to describe, its like two feats in one. It seems Nate can telekinetically hold the immediate vicinity suspending any activity from time or space.
X-Man Annual 1996
A vary impressive display of TK and TP. Nate fine tunes his TP to track down every viral strain, to pluck it from billions gallons of water. http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/19...96page33ima.jpg
X-Man #28
This has to be one of X-Mans most impressive display of power, and personal will. The deadly agent known as “Cold Snap“, could sweep away uncalculated deaths. Yet Nate released it all, in a sealed environment on himself, to avoid its use as a terrorist weapon.
Check out this scan. It points out the amount of pain Nate is going through to bring himself back to our reality. And despite the fact he will not submit. Nice demonstration of will power. (please log in to view the image)
Pray that your loneliness
My spur you into finding
Something to live for
Great enough to die for
Story Gude
Warren Ellis
October 1999
Premise
Nate Grey is a biological weapon.
He was grown on an alternate Earth from the genetic materials of Jean Grey, and Scoot Summers. He was developed to be the most powerful combat telekine in the world. Any World.
His world died in nuclear conflagration. Nate Grey was at ground zero when this first wave of missiles detonated. Flashpoint-
- and then he stood in a different light. On our Earth.
The most freighting psychic talent ever known, blasted clear of a dying universe, on an Earth he barely recognizes…..
**********
Nate Grey is the X-Man: the most powerful mind on Earth, existing outside human society, guarding the world at his furthest edge from that which lies beyond. He has become a shamanic figure, the powerful outsider who protects his village from the bat things in the night. His village is the global village.
To be a shaman, you to be comfortable in a world you can’t explain.
Problems
As it stands now, Nate Grey has no goals, nothing to do, and a death sentence. John Ostrander stuck him with a Dead At 21 tv show plot engine - there’s a ticking bomb in his genetic structure that’ll kill him on his 21st birthday that’s aside from the other unresolved annoyances the series has accreted, such as a pregnant ex-lover, and a transient supporting cast I can barely understand. This series is only gong to work if its pared right he hell back to set of a core concepts that you can hold in your hand. It needs to stand or fall on Nate Grey himself. Which means we have to ensure it doesn’t fall.
It’s been to easy, in the past, to jam generic super-hero-comic elements into X-Man to keep the plot ticking over (or, at least, to have the appearance of ticking over).Just bunging in your all-purpose Armored Government Bastards who kill muties just doing it, and if I catch you pulling something like that I’ll have you held down, and -Bleak- by well matured lepers.
The shaman exists outside his tribe. Classically, his home is kept some distance outside the boundary of the village. He moves in the spaces beyond, protecting his people. Mircea Eliade wrote an excellent book called the Shamanism. Check it out for its symbolic value. (Don’t look at me like that. The entirety of Grant Morrison’s run on JLA if lifted from classical myth.)
Nate Grey is the Ultimate Outsider. (Or the Outsider, if you fancy reading a bit of Colin Wilson.) He wasn’t even born here. (Perfect alienation symbol - he is a bloody alien.) His the rebel without a cause,: he is that perfect wounded-looking James Dean figure, a rifle over his shoulders, set apart by who he is, what he is, on the outside looking in.
This will be reinforced by the visual redesign: jet black leather jacket, and pants, no blue highlights, no yellow trim. Black leather. Crop his hair short.
Think of him now, not only as a mutant action hero type, but also a a figure in the mode of Doctor Strange, John Constantine, the Phantom Stranger. The man on the outside looking in, saving people who sometimes have no idea he’s even there. He is the unanchored figure, seemingly drifting across the world, following paths only can detect. Only seemingly drifting - he knows what he’s doing, and where he is going, now.
And what he’s doing is worming himself into those strange, and unknown situations where only some like him can set things right.
He is a shockingly powerful mental talent. He can read minds, fly, crack rocks, start fires, move himself through the multiverse, blot out the -bleak- sun, solely by the power his terrible brain. His only limit is his own body; sooner or later, he’s going to run up against a wall of fatigue, and his body will exhibit symptoms of extreme stress. If there is a secondary limit, then it’s the limit of his imagination; hes now aware of all that he is capable of. He’s learning new applications of his telepathy, and telekinesis all the time.
What has changed him is the discovery of his own nature. He’s now stridently aware that all he is a is, is something designed to commit mega death. A Nate Grey is a thing meant to expunge life from entire worlds. And that’s given him purpose. To become something other than a weapon. To deliberately go out, and save life. To die for worlds instead, if need be.
Okay. First the actual back story to the character, and then the new spin.
Madelyne Pryor previously existed as a clone of Jean Grey by Mister Sinister as a ‘replacement Jean Grey” for Scott Summers to shag, and make pregnant because Mr. S wanted the child, but forget that. This Madelyne Pryor was created by Nate as a misguided attempt to provide himself with some kind of surrogate mother/guide/whatever. I presume we can put down the fact that she arrived in fetish gear to the fact that he’s a teenager. Since then, she’s advised him, teased him, depended on him, kept him alive, and stuck her tongue down his throat. And till no one knows who or what she is.
Here’s what she is.
She is a clone of Jean Grey. But she’s not from around here. She is from a littler further down the spiral: Earth-998, to be precise. She is a powerful psychic talent from an alternate Earth. She studied Nate Grey from across universes with her appalling mind, waiting for the perfect point to introduce herself into his proximity. He created nothing: she simply tapped into that power, and used it to help move herself across the multiverse to his side.
You see, she needs a Nate Grey. There wasn’t a Nate Grey on her Earth. And she’s been looking for one some time. Our Nate Grey appears to be a paramount expression. She needs him. I mean, what world ruler wouldn’t want the most powerful biological weapon in the multiverse? And she can’t wast to much more time, because that genetic time bomb is just tick tick ticking…
All of which will be dealt with in issue 5-8 of this run. (After 8, we wont see her again. But this is the biggest dangler in the series, and needs to be dealt with. It’s a hurdle we need to get over, and leave behind.)
So why did she believe herself to be a resurrected Sinister-created clone? Because she was in shock from the first multiversal jump, her brains were scrambled - and that is, indeed, how she started out on earth., designed to have Scoot Summer’s child. But she became more than that.
Supporting Cast
Major break with tradition. There is no supporting cast.
The other characters in the book change with each new story, generally, as Nate moves into a new situation, deals with new people,. There will be recurring characters, certainly, and my suggestions in that regard follow. But understand that they do not, cannot form stable issue-to-issue supporting cast.
Charles Xavier
Xavier should have taken a lot more interest in Nate Grey than he has to date. Xavier is suppose to be a professor, for -bleak- sake, why does he not behave lie a man with the normal degree of scientific, and medical curiosity? People are now aware that Grey is the sole survivor of a torched parallel Earth. And the genetically enhanced child of an alternate Jean/Scoot Summers couple. He is the single repository of knowledge of a parallel world culture, and the only known example of a “hothoused” mutant. This is someone Xavier would want to meet, and learn from.
Moira MacTaggert
I fear for making any other bastard having to write that accent…but there’s something that needs dealing here. Moria MacTaggert has “The Legacy Virus”, the prion that attaches to, and attacks mutant genetic structures. And Nate Grey can cure that. This is a second year storyline. Towards the end of year one, we do a story wherein Nate turns his frightening talent inward, on his own booby-trapped genetic structure. And he uses his telekinesis, focused on the molecular level, to defuse the DNA bomb nestling in him. And if he can do that o himself, he can do that to someone with LV. And that is process that, when studied, and analyzed and followed with Shi’ar field technology like that which equips Moira medical lab…could be replicable.
What this book requires is both mood, and majesty. Atmosphere is paramount: from the Third Man through to se7ven, the Crow movies back to Millennium, X-Man needs a palpable sense of noir threat, and strangeness. But, without wanting to contradict that, when Nate Grey uses his powers, we need to feel it. When telekinesis, and other psychic talents are used in the anime Akira, there is an absolute feeling of thunder, of something massive, and supernatural moving. Physical laws warp, things fall upward, there are sudden start silence, and great hammer blows of unknowable powers in motion.
Emphasise the moments. The still image can have power without it trying to evoke dynamic motion in generic super hero style. Catching the moment where Orson Welles’ face emerges from the shadows, when a strange child hangs in the air with rocks falling upward all around him, when the side of a building literally bursts, and releases a sharp rain of glittering glass shards, when Antonio Banderas, and Salma Hayek walk towards us hand-in-hand with the vast hot bloom of an explosion behind them…
…visual action fiction is told in moments. Striking single images. Work them as different, and compelling as you can. No one’s going to complain about the lack of a big-pic-of-A-puncing-B if your giving them something they just have to look at.
Every issue, you’re freebasing fice action moves down into 22 pages.
5-8: “Further Down The Spiral”
Detailing what happened in the six-month time gap between the February 2000, and March 2000 issues.
Begins one month in, with Nate waking up in bed with Maddy, turning on hotel TV to find coverage of a huge disaster in Quito, Ecuador, whole city wiped away -
- which triggers flashback memory of him actually doing it.
Maddy wormed her way into his mind finally, and partially controlling him.
Maddie is from an alternate Earth whose Nate Grey died horribly. Most Nate Greys burn out or die prematurely from faulty genetic time bombs.
Alternate Earths.
Note: Our Earth is Earth-616
She is from Earth-998 - further down the spiral…
9-12
Self contained single issues, with threads connecting them.
Nate Grey goes inside himself: turns his TK on his body, to hunt down, and defuse the genetic bomb within himself.
Uncanny X-Men #378-379
Apocalypse was attempting to become more powerful than The Dark Phoenix, Onslaught, or even The Celestials. Gathering 12 powerful mutants, the represent a specific alignment/element.
New Mutants v2 #25
Dream Match: X-Man vs Avengers
Nate is attempting to escape this reality, when he is suddenly attacked by the Avengers. Nate than releases is all fake (Inception Style!), and wakes up hooked up to the machine.
This goes to show how potent his mind is. Previously it was stated that its damn near impossible to trick his mind with illusions. Since Nate’s mind is far to grounded to reality. I can only conclude that the dream educing machine, is far more elaborate than Mysterio illusions.
KMC Community Forums
Mar 16th, 2010 07:52 PM
