When I started this website (well it was a Tumblr at the time) I made the overarching goal of talking about every mutant ever. The problem is, there isn’t a ton to most mutants. Sure I can sometimes squeeze blood from a stone and write 1200 words about Negasonic Teenage Warhead but there are a ton of characters that it is hard to even write 100 about. So that’s what I’m gonna do this week, just lump them all together. Here are the odds, the ends, the weirdos, the requests that even I had to look up. Here are the leftovers.
Bonebreaker
During the Dark Phoenix Saga, Wolverine killed a lot of dudes. They took their best shot, now it was his turn. As time went on, Marvel leadership wasn’t 100% comfortable with their most bankable star being a mass murderer and forced Claremont to walk back some of Wolverine’s more brutal moments. From that came The Reavers, the rebuilt, cyborg versions of the dudes Wolverine turned into cold cuts, and they straight hated the X-Men. Bonebreaker was, and remains, the most memorable Reaver for one simple reason, he is half tank. Donald Pierce and Lady Deathstrike took a dude who was all torso and said “legs are for chumps”. They gave him tank treads and a killer mohawk and decided that this was the ideal all humanity should strive for. The more murdery members of the X-Men have killed Bonebreaker several times but it never seems to stick and he keeps treading along to torment the X-Men.
Ugly John
Some mutants have all the luck. They get cool laser eyes or knives in their hands. Others get two extra faces that are just as ugly as their regular one. That’s Ugly John for you, a guy who drew the shortest straw in mutant life. John was an Australian mutant who came into some trouble with a Sentinel. Fortunately for him, Cyclops and Wolverine were there to kill robots and save mutants. Unfortunately, on their way back the mutant all-stars got distracted and captured by Cassandra Nova. The senior X-Men were able to withstand the torment Nova put them through but John wasn’t going to survive. Cyclops put an end to his suffering and John continued to be Ugly in mutant heaven.
Forearm
Forearm has four arms. Rob Leifeld is richer than me. Life isn’t fair.
Brother Brit-man
Brother Brit-Man is a member of the Captain Britain Corp from the same Earth as Spider-Gwen, though she doesn’t know it yet. If Alan Moore got really into The Grateful Dead and then also became a guardian of the multiverse (which I am like 70% sure he already is) this is what he would look like. He is easily the grooviest version of Brian Braddock throughout all of crosstime.
Eye-Scream
Most of the time the goofiest characters come from alternate joke universes and we all accept that there is a finite amount of silliness in the 616. Then I remember Eye-Scream exists and that there really aren’t any rules. Eye-Scream was a mutant with the ability to turn his body into any flavor of ice cream. He was jealous of all the cool mutants like Colossus and Nightcrawler and wanted to eliminate them in order for all the guys with leftover powers to take control. He set off all the alarms in the X-Mansion but the team thought the clown Professor Xavier had hired for Kitty’s 14th birthday party was to blame. As an aside, damn Chuck, the girl has fought demons and Xenomorph knockoffs and you think a clown is the right things for her 14th birthday? While the X-Men battled Obnoxio the Clown, Professor X discovered Eye-Scream in the sub-basement and froze Eye-Scream solid by lowering the temperature in the room.
This is dumb for two reasons. Firstly, commercial A/C systems cannot effectively reach the temperatures needed to cause ice cream to solidify in the way depicted in this comic. As someone who thinks about commercial refrigeration almost as much as he thinks about X-Men (this is not a joke), this technical misunderstanding is deeply upsetting to me. Secondly, even for a comedy issue that’s a pretty lazy resolution. Regardless, Obnoxio put whipped cream and a cherry on top of Eye-Scream and left the X-Men in a huff.
MeMe
Meme was a Morlock with the ability to absorb others into his body mass like a creepy Akira monster. Tentacle armed Jean Grey killed him by shutting off his brain. I straight up forgot he existed until someone corrected me about the next character.
MeMe (No the other one)
MeMe was a mutant with technopathy who went comatose after the Alexandria Incident. Then Hope stole her identity, became a drone, and euthanized her. She is way more memorable than the Morlock one.
Tusk
Before all this nastiness with the M-Pox, the X-Men and Inhumans teamed up to defeat minions of Apocalypse known as the Dark Riders. They were composed of wicked mutants and Inhumans alike, and Tusk was among their number. Looking at him, you would think Tusk’s powers involved being a rock monster, but that’s not all. Tusk can also create mini-me’s out of his back to torment his foes. He was with the Dark Rider’s when they captured the wee baby Cable and died with them when Magneto finally blew Genosha up. More importantly, he showed up on X-Men The Animated Series without any context and just had a guy pop out of his back like it was no biggie.
Alpha Achromic
The White Sky Organization specialized in made to order super people. Wolverine’s horrible kid, Daken, contracted them to make clones of Omega Red implanted with false memories that Wolverine murdered their parents. To save his teammate, Deadpool fought fire with fire and created his own super best friend, Alpha Achromic. The Omega Clan was comprised of Omegas Red, White, and Black. Deadpool (read Rick Remender) decided the best way to fight multicolored Omegas was to create the exact opposite, a colorless alpha. Where the Clan had implanted memories of Wolverine killing their parents, Alpha Achromic had implanted memories of Wolverine giving him a puppy. He covered X-Force’s escape and saved his best friends Wolverine and Deadpool.
There you have it, nine characters that aren’t going to get full entries but count as characters. I am not going to rank them against everyone else on the list (unless there is sufficient outrage) but I enjoyed writing about them. It is part of what makes the X-Men such a rich franchise. There are tons of fascinating bit characters just waiting for a writer to grab ahold of them and make them something special. As the years have gone by, the X-Men have developed a detailed mythology around these little details and notes in stories. The world of the X-Men is great because the world of the X-Men is a living breathing place full of interesting tales around every corner.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
