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That Time The Mimic Was in X-Men: Evolution
One of my all-time favorite comic book characters is The Mimic from the early days of the X-Men. I was only allowed to read so many comics from my dad’s collection when I was a kid, and some of those comics were the first handful of appearances the Mimic made when he fought and then joined the X-Men. These were just random issues, but they buried this character in my heart and I’ve been a big fan ever since.
And did you know that the Mimic exists within the world of the X-Men: Evolution cartoon? He didn’t appear in any episodes, though. The Mimic only ever appeared in the short-lived tie-in comic book series.
And that’s pretty much the point of this article. I just wanted to celebrate the Mimic a bit. I’ve been watching the fifth season of My Hero Academia and I’m a big fan of Neito Monoma, the character with the Copy quirk and therefore a version of Mimic’s powers. And what better way to celebrate the Mimic than to mention this fun bit of Mimic trivia!
X-Men: Evolution was a fun show and a major fan favorite. It had a ton of X-Men characters throughout its run. My favorite X-Men character, Multiple Man, had a minor role on the good guy team. That was fun. But Mimic never made it into the show itself.
Just the short comic book series.
He played a classmate of Spyke who kept pushing him to take more risks while skateboarding. They discover Calvin’s powers and Spyke brings him to the Xavier School, where Calvin’s powers go wild.
In the end, Xavier calms him down, discovers that he’s not a mutant and then Calvin gets a chip on his shoulder and walks out. Short and sweet. And then forever lost in time. But as a Mimic fan, it’s just fun to know he — sort of — exists in the X-Men: Evolution universe. It’s not often that the tie-in material gets to adapt new characters separate from the main series.
Oh, hey, did you know that Mimic also appears in the X-Men Animated Series from the 90s? He had a very brief appearance in the Days of Future Past/Age of Apocalypse alternate timeline. But while everybody else gets post-apocalyptic redesigns, Mimic shows up in his original 1960s bright orange duds!
That was definitely fun! And this has been your tiny bits of Mimic Monday Trivia.
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The 6 Characters I Would Use in Secret X-Men (My Dawn of X Comic)
It’s that time of year again: San Diego Comic-Con! Except the world sucks and those of us in America are going to die from a horrible virus that’s ravaging our dumbest states! Comic-Con, like everything else, was cancelled this year. They’re going to make a lot of big announcements virtually, and I’ll still report on them on this blog if they’re fun enough. But really, the main thing I care about is my annual tradition of fan-casting a superhero team!
And since San Diego Comic-Con is not real this year, then neither is my superhero team! Meet the Secret X-Men!
So basically, ever since Dawn of X revived and relaunched the X-Men franchise, we have seen all manner of new X-Men comics come and go. We’ve got X-Men, New Mutants, X-Force; we had Fallen Angels for a bit, and we’ve got Marauders and maybe the Hellions; a new X-Factor is supposed to be coming out. There’s a ton of freestyle X-Men books, is what I’m saying. Me being the creative chap that I am came up with one of my own: Secret X-Men. And since it’s probably far too late for me to get my foot in the door of Krakoa to pitch this idea to Marvel, I’m just going to make a fan-casting blog post about it!
I’ve done a bunch of these over the years. They’re basically just a fantasy game where I get to write some major team comics and pick my own roster. Last year was Guardians of the Galaxy. I’ve done the core X-Men team. I’ve done my version of X-Force. I’ve done the Avengers, the Justice League, the Fantastic Four, the Teen Titans, the Defenders and the Exiles. So enjoy those old lists and join me after the jump for my idea and the team roster of the Secret X-Men!
And feel free to share your own dream Dawn of X comics, real or imagined, in the comments below! This is just going to be a creativity free-for-all.
Read the rest of this entryMimic is Alive and a Mutant!
I realize this new likely only matters to me and a select few Mimic fans in the world. But this is my blog, it’s a random Thursday, and even the barest mention of Mimic in an X-Men comic is an event. The dude is pretty rare. And he’s supposed to be dead!
But this week’s issue of House of X finally reveals how all of those previously dead mutants have come back to life in the big new relaunch. It involves a group of mutants combining their powers to basically super-clone the dead and essentially give them new life. It all makes sense in the context of the issue, which I’ll be including in my weekly comic reviews on Saturday.
The important part is that, in writer Jonathan Hickman’s prose materials, he name drops the Mimic as someone who can step in and take over for this group of mutants.
I realize the silliness of posting a picture of text
He also says that Mimic is a mutant. This isn’t historically the case. He was originally a normal human who developed his mimicry powers through a science experiment. Though there were times where some writers established that the experiment simply brought out his latest X-gene.
Honestly, I doubt Hickman has given much concern for whether or not Mimic is a human or a mutant. The important thing is that he has benefited from all these resurrections and he’s back among the living! That’s exciting news.
Unless all of this is some big feint and he goes back to being dead at the end of it…
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In a Little More Than 2 Years, Nearly Every Single One of My Favorite Comic Book Characters Has Been Killed
As a longtime comic book reader, I have my personal list of favorite characters. Everybody has one, right? Those characters that you love to read about and see pop up in new comics. For a lot of people, their favorite characters are big name superheroes, like Spider-Man or Batman. For me, I tend to prefer the smaller supporting characters. That’s just what happens when you read a lot of comics and are exposed to a lot of characters.
As such, when I started this blog back in 2011, one of my earliest Lists of Six was my top six favorite comic book characters of all-time. With the exception of one name, that list has remained pretty firm over the past eight years.
In the past two years and a couple months, nearly every character on that list has been killed. Several characters in my Honorable Mentions addendum have been killed. And a couple other characters I love have either been killed or nearly killed within this time frame.
I don’t…I don’t know what’s going on.
I don’t presume to think this is some sort of targeted attack on yours truly. I think this is just the unfortunate cost of loving minor comic book characters, the sorts of characters that can be chewed up and spit out as any given writer sees fit.
But damn, this has been pretty hard on the soul.
And I guess I just felt like listing them off, as if that would help me somehow. Let’s start with my favorite characters list:
Multiple Man was killed in Death of X #1 in October 2016.
He’s still dead. Multiple Man has returned to comics, replaced by one of his duplicates. And his character has been re-written as a feckless coward. So that’s some good salt in the wound.
The Mimic was killed in Extermination #5 in December 2018.
This one was really disappointing. He made a surprise appearance in Extermination after being out of comics for a few years. I knew from the moment he appeared that he probably wouldn’t survive the series, and I had to wait several months for those fears to be confirmed.
Phil Urich was killed in Amazing Spider-Man #797 in March 2018.
Phil was my favorite superhero as a kid, and the first comic I actively started collecting on my own, issue-by-issue. I endured years of him being transformed into an unrepentant villain before they finally put him out of his misery.
Tim Drake was killed in Detective Comics #940 in September 2016.
Thankfully, his death was a fake out. He survived and returned to service shortly thereafter. He’s even gone back to being just “Robin” instead of the far more ridiculous “Red Robin”. So there’s at least one happy ending in this list.
That’s it for my list of favorites. I listed “Robin” on that list as more of the concept of the character. Damian Wayne, the current Robin, is still alive…but if I’m being honest, he hasn’t really been ‘Robin’ in a long time. The concept of ‘Batman and Robin’ as a team is pretty dead. So does that count? Not to mention that Damian was killed in early 2013. So for a short while there, Robin was dead.
The Spot is also still alive, but he’s the one character I would probably take off my list of favorites. I’ve always been a big fan of the Spot, and will always be a big fan of the Spot, but there are characters I like better. Which is probably why he’s still alive.
How about some of those Honorable Mentions at the bottom of the page?
Mach X was killed in Thunderbolts #12 in April 2017.
Technically speaking, we didn’t see a body, and that’s usually a good sign they might come back. But we haven’t seen Abner Jenkins since then, so he’s as good as dead.
The Scorpion was maybe killed in Venom Annual #1 in October 2018.
I’m not too sure about this one. It does appear that Venom kills the Scorpion, but then Scorpion has been showing up in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man recently. I may have to check and see if there’s an explanation.
Strong Guy was killed in Uncanny X-Men #12 in February 2019.
This is the most recent, and inspired this list. Strong Guy is Multiple Man’s best friend, and one of my favorite duos in comics. And now they’re both dead, and neither one particularly cares about the other these days. So just bleakness all around.
Avalanche was killed in Uncanny Avengers #1 in October 2012.
That happened a year after I started my blog and he’s still dead. The recent X-Men Gold comic introduced a new Avalanche, but I didn’t read it, and I’m pretty sure the character didn’t stick around. The X-Men have since ignored the new Pyro also, and he joined the X-Men towards the end of that comic. So that’s not looking good.
That’s the major list. Eight of my favorite comic book characters have been killed since I started this blog, most of them within the past two years or so. And only one of them has been properly ‘resurrected’ in that time. It’s just a little soul-crushing.
That’s not counting the time Stingray was nearly killed in a recent Avengers comic. Or the speculation that Simon Baz, my favorite Green Lantern, is probably going to be killed in Heroes in Crisis.
I don’t have any larger point to make. And I’m largely just whining. But c’mon. There’s only so much my soul can take. Is it really so wrong to have favorite comic book characters? Is there somebody specifically targeting me?
When will it stop?
All I really know is that Beta Ray Bill had better be very careful now that he’s a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s almost no way he’s going to survive that comic.
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Welp, the Mimic is Dead
I knew this was coming. From the very moment I found out the Mimic was going to appear in the Extermination comic, I knew his days were numbered. I held on to a little bit of hope that he’d somehow make it all the way to the end, that there was no reason to kill one of my all-time favorite comic book characters…but it was a fool’s hope.
At least he gets to go out like a badass.
That was the ending to Extermination #4, the previous issue from a couple months ago. We were all led to believe that was Young Cyclops…who gets immediately harpooned by Ahab. It was a big cliffhanger.
But in this week’s Extermination #5, we find out that was Mimic…who had somehow found the time to grab Cyclops’ visor off his head, shove Young Cyclops to the side and attack.
That’s not even how Mimic’s powers work. He doesn’t need the visor to use his copied Cyclops powers. They really just wanted that fake out kill to make people think Young Cyclops had been killed instead. But more on Mimic’s powers in a bit.
This has not been a good year for me. They killed Phil Urich. They nearly killed Strong Guy and Stingray. And now the Mimic is dead for no good reason. At least he died a hero.
And to think, all this time, his death was just waiting for us. Like Malcolm Reynolds said, about someone carrying a bullet for you and you don’t even know it. All this time the Young X-Men were around, their removal was going to involve killing the Mimic. Yeah, the original creators that brought them into X-Men comics probably didn’t plan it this way. I’m sure using the Mimic was just a quick fix idea that got thrown into the mix at this late stage. But the future is the future, and this was always going to happen this way.
But you want to know what the worst part is? The part that really sticks in my craw?
The creative team had to willfully ignore everything in this issue that would have normally let him live. Based purely on how his powers work, the Mimic didn’t need to stay dead by the end of the issue.
Mimic copies the powers of people in his proximity. He doesn’t need to touch them, like Rogue, he just has to be near them. He has some measure of control as to who he mimics and when, but it’s otherwise automatic. In fact, this is how he “came back to life” the last time he was “killed” back in the early 1970s. The Mimic automatically copied the powers of a nearby Wolverine and healed the radiation that had killed him.
And wouldn’t you know it, there were three Wolverines in the big fight in Extermination.
Honey Badger, X-23 and Old Man Logan are in the same scene, in close proximity to the Mimic. All he’d have to do is nothing, and his powers would automatically copy any of them and he’d heal the simple chest wound and be fine.
It’s not like Mimic was a major player in Extermination. It’s not like his death was crucial to saving the world or anything. It was a throwaway death so that Marvel could get a fake out cliffhanger in the penultimate issue. There’s absolutely no reason why there couldn’t be a throwaway panel at some point in the issue.
“Oh, hey, Mimic, you’re back?”
“Yeah, I just copied Logan over there and healed. I’m fine, thanks.”
Done and done.
But nah, Marvel decided to keep him dead. Because why not? Where’s the harm?
I’m not particularly bothered. It stinks that he’s dead, but death never sticks in comics anymore. Just this year, we’ve had Jean Grey and Multiple Man come back from the dead. This final issue of Extermination also brings another X-Man back from the dead. And there’s no way they’re going to keep Cable dead after he was killed earlier in Extermination.
So Mimic will be back someday. I just gotta wait for it.
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Henchman-4-Hire 