Nate Grey, The X-Man

Since I'm almost thirty posts in, I kind of thought it was about time to put up a post concerning my all time favorite comic book character, as well as the namesake of this blog, Nate Grey. When I was a kid in the 90's, I was a huge X-Men fan(who wasn't in those days). However, my love of all things X didn't stop with the two primary X-titles, I also read X-factor, Peter David was inspired on that series, as well as X-Force. X-Force quickly became one of my favorite books, because the characters were younger and more rebellious then the primary X-teams. I also liked the mysterious leader of X-Force, Cable. This was back in the day when there was next to nothing known about Cable's history, except for the fact that he was from the future and his arch nemesis, Stryfe(who with Magneto were my favorite X enemies at the time)shared Cable's face. The mystery pertaining to Cable was one of the things that drew me into the character and even after it was revealed that he was the time lost son of Cyclops and Jean Grey, I was still a fan.

In the mid 90's, Marvel went through with their very ambitious "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, but unfortunately for me, I had stopped reading comics by this time. When I started reading em again, I started collecting where I left off, at the "AOA" storyline. I managed to acquire every issue from that crossover, and enjoyed it more then any crossover I had ever read in any comic book. In particular, the character of Nate Grey especially caught my eye. Here was a character that was based on one of my favorites(Cable), but didn't have Cable's lack of powers. Nate was created in a laboratory by Mr. Sinister, using the DNA of Cyclops and Jean Grey, as the ultimate weapon to use against Apocalypse, in the case Sinister ever planed a coup. Ultimately, Nate escaped from Sinister's lab and was picked up by a traveling entertainment group, headed by the AOA version of Forge. Nate had unfettered psionic powers, as well as being short tempered and tended to get himself in situations that normally would be easily avoidable. In the AOA world, when he beat Sinister to death, Nate had made a fan of me. He then went after Apocalypse himself, but wound up running into the top villain working under Apocalypse, Holocaust. During the course of their battle, Holocaust and Nate were transported to our Earth, where he marveled at the differences between his war ravaged world and the relative beauty of our world.

Prof. Xavier, sensing the arrival of an enormously powerful telepath, and being incredibly nosy, sent his astral projection out to discover the cause of the disturbance, and spied on Nate. Nate realized he was being watched and still leery due to his experiences from his world, attacked Xavier's astral projection, and destroyed it. From this point, Nate would have a hard time ever trusting Xavier and the X-Men from that point.

Many people crossed into Nate's life, including the clone of his mother, Madeline Prior, whose relationship with Nate I'll get into later. The Sinister of our world, as well as one on his past workers, Threnody also gets involved with Nate. Nate winds up searching out Moira MacTaggart, the renown mutant geneticist, who informed Nate that his power output was so massive, that it was slowly but surly killing him. Nate didn't take this news well and wound up hooking up with Threnody, a fellow outcast, who had escaped Sinister. The two of them managed to get along well and wound up living together in an abandoned loft in New York City.

Threnody was drawn to death, and since Nate was dying found it difficult to stay away from him. Madeline Prior, winds up killing Threnody, or so we are led to believe, and begins to travel the world with Nate. Nate's story begins to get more and more convoluted and ridiculous until the Counter X event that took place in many of the X-titles in the early 2000's. Now Nate's character was radically changed until he had become someone completely unrecognizable. Within about 15 issues, at issue 75, Nate's comic was cancelled, and Nate himself ended up dying at the conclusion.

Now, to look a little deeper. Nate's comic was at it's prime when Jeph Loeb was writing it which was for the first 9 issues or so. He seemed to have a definitive idea as to what he wanted to do with the character, and was able to get me strongly attached to the whole stranger in a strange land prospect. Next up was John Ostrander. He kept much of the same themes that Loeb had begun, and the series continued to pump out excellent stories. Next disaster struck... Terry Kavanagh was given the writing reigns to X-Man. Now, I don't know Mr. Kavanagh personally, and can't say I can recall reading much of his other work, but it was obvious from very early on in his run, that Kavanagh had absolutely no idea as to what to do with Nate, which resulted in many comics that consisted of Nate wandering around aimlessly, doing nothing. It became worse, when he decided that Nate would become romantically involved with Madeline... Nate, she's the clone of your mother!!!!! What the hell was Kavanagh thinking by putting these two together? To this day, the sight of Nate and Maddie making out still kind of sickens me. If he wanted to give Nate a girlfriend, which would make sense, considering Nate was in his late teens and was trying to fit into his new society, he should have been with Threnody. The relationship between Nate and Threnody made so much more sense, considering they were both on the run from Sinister. But anyway, Nate and Maddie continued to travel together, with the romantic aspect of their relationship thankfully played way down, I'd imagine there must have been a lot of disgusted letters sent into Marvel after that. Jeez... The clone of your mother??? That's just wrong.

Anyway, Kavanagh continued to waste all the massive potential of character like Nate, and just had him continue to roam the Marvel universe aimlessly, avoiding contact with the X-Men. Why Nate was never added to the X-Men, I'll never truly understand. The X-Men could have used a character like Nate in the late 90's, and Nate would have infused some new blood into the X-Men titles(anything would have been better then putting Maggot on the X-Men!). But alas, it as not to be, and Kavanagh, continued to pump out horrible stories which often times made no sense or just plain fell flat. I guess nobody at Marvel cared about the X-Man comic, or with all the bankruptcy troubles they were facing at the time, none of the editors noticed that it was one of the worst written Marvel comics at the time. Kavanagh was given free reign over Nate's exploits for an agonizing 50 issues or so, before the Counter X experiment took place.

In the early 2000's, Marvel handed all the faltering X-titles over to Warren Ellis and told him to completely remake from them ground up. If the titles increased in sales they would continue, if not they'd be cancelled. Ellis actually made Nate's book interesting, but, in doing so changed the character so dynamically that Nate as no longer the same person. He was someone completely different now. He had become a humorless, almost Punisher type of character, that dealt with people/things that adversely affected Mutants, usually killing the guilty parties. This version of Nate also didn't catch on with the fans, and Nate sacrificed his life, by spreading his molecules to every person on Earth in order to prevent an alien invasion. Or some such weirdness...

That was it, Nate was dead. To this day, I sit around and wonder how things could have been different if a writer the caliber of Jeph Loeb would have continued on X-Man. I also think about what kind of take a writer like Peter David, Fabian Nicieza or even Chris Claremont would have had on Nate's book. There are so many what if's concerning Nate. What if he would have joined an X-Men team? Or even X-Force. X-Force would have been the perfect fit for Nate due to the ages of the characters on that team. Instead they kept Nate basically away from other heroes, he did have some interactions with Spider-Man but he needed to have been around his fellow mutants!

There have been slight glimmers of hope for me, when on the cover of an issue of Cable/Deadpool, Nate appeared, although it was actually a de-aged Cable. I was also hopeful the villain behind Deadly Genesis was Nate, but it turned out to be Vulcan, and just recently, Dark Beast made reference to Nate, during the Endangered Species storyline, stating that due to the strange way Nate died, it was conceivable he could be brought back. If only.

So, why am I such a fan of Nate, even after suffering through those god awful comics Kavanagh wrote? I guess it's a matter of how much of myself I could see in Nate. To me, out of every character I had ever read about, comic books or otherwise, Nate was the one I could relate to the best. In so many ways, I could understand what Nate was going through, from the fact that he was slowly dying, thanks to his own body failing him, to his massive squandered potential, to the whole stranger in a strange land concept. All of these facts rang very true in my own life at the time I first started to read X-Man. In many ways, I WAS Nate. Well, except for the whole creepy making out with the clone of your mother deal... I never had to deal with that... I, to this day, hold out hope that someone over at Marvel can see the great potential in this character and give him another try.