Blink (comics)
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Blink (Clarice Ferguson) is a Marvel Comics superheroine featured in various X-Men-related series. Created by Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira, she first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #317 (1994).
Blink has made one of the most impressive transitions from throwaway character to star heroine in comic book history. She is a descendant of Apocalypse
A mysterious, unstable mutant with the ability to teleport, Blink died within a month of her first appearance in 1994. However, Lobdell and Madureira redefined Blink as a more confident and assertive character in the parallel universe storyline "Age of Apocalypse" (1995). After that storyline, Blink became a fan favorite and readers wrote thousands of letters, requesting that the character return.
Eventually, Marvel launched the parallel world series Exiles in 2001, which has featured Blink prominently.
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[edit] Age of Apocalypse/Exiles Blink
[edit] Early years
In the Age of Apocalypse storyline, Professor X was killed years before he ever formed the X-Men. An alternate reality unfolded into which the 5,000-year old super mutant Apocalypse gained control of North America and implemented a genocide campaign against regular humans.
Clarice Ferguson was born in Cartusia, Bahamas. Her purple skin complexion revealed her to be a mutant at birth. Her parents accepted this fact but feared their daughter would not be accepted by the local population. When Clarice was four, the Fergusons moved to Miami, Florida, United States. They hoped Miami would be home to a mutant population where an older Clarice would be able to socialize.
Clarice was a child when Apocalypse took over Miami. Blink was discovered by Apocalypse's Horseman Mister Sinister and his right-hand, the Dark Beast, who experimented on her, refining her powers (thus explaining the differences in the abilities of the regular Marvel Universe Blink and her Age of Apocalypse counterpart).
However, Sabretooth and Weapon X, members of the resistance force, the X-Men, raided Beast's laboratories and rescued Blink. She then became the adopted daughter of Sabretooth.
Blink grew into adulthood with the X-Men. She was impulsive and not always willing to follow orders, but became an important X-Man. In a limited series which focused uniquely on her character, Blink was briefly transported into the Negative Zone, where she became romantically involved with the amnesic Annihilus, although he forced her to leave when he began to transform back into his original form.
Eventually, the X-Men encountered the time traveling X-Man Bishop, who set a course of events that prevented the death of Professor X, eliminating the Age of Apocalypse reality.
[edit] Miniseries
Blink had her own four-part miniseries, bridging Age of Apocalypse with Exiles. In it, she has a falling out with Magneto, travels to the Negative Zone to seek aid in defeating Apocalypse but, due to the travel, loses her memory. She meets a man named Ahmyor who turns out to be the leader of a freedom force dedicated in removing Blastaar from the throne of the Negative Zone. Blink, not knowing who she is or where she came from, joins this force and, in turn, falls in love with Ahmyor--who, they both later learn, is a previous stage of Annihilus, who Blastaar took the throne from. Blink regains her memory and manages to save Annihilus before teleporting back to her own world, which soon ends. The final issue of the series finds her teleported to a desert, where she meets Nocturne.
[edit] Exiles
Before it ended, however, Blink was mysteriously transported to a strange desert plateau, where she met a group of other mutants from various realities who had been unstuck in time. A cosmic monitor called the Timebroker explained that each had become "unhinged" from reality, and their new mission was to visit various parallel worlds and "correct wrongs."
Blink became the leader of this group of Exiles and formed a relationship with her teammate Mimic. They went to many worlds, fighting the Hulk, Galactus, Weapon X, Mojo, and the Vi-Locks among other enemies. On the world where a mutated strain combining the Legacy Virus and the Techno-organic virus was taking over, Blink was infected by it. She was later cured, however, by the intervention of the Norse gods. The Exiles were celebrating when the Timebroker appeared, saying that Blink was going home. Blink was teleported away and was replaced by Magik.
However, the Timebroker lied and instead of sending her to her home dimension, she was quarantined in a previous reality the team had visited. There, the Exiles were paired up with Weapon X and given the assignment to kill a young child named David Richards, who, left unchecked, would become an all-powerful megalomaniac. Instead, Sabretooth opted to stay and raise the child so that he would not become evil. He had failed. When Blink landed in Sabretooth’s reality and helped him destroy Sentinels, David hijacked her teleporting ability and made her kill dozens of humans. Blink was scarred by the experience, and would have kept going had Sabretooth not saved her.
She was later rescued and came back to the Exiles after Sunfire died. For the next mission, they were given the task of dwindling down the ranks of the two teams to only six members by killing each other. While fighting Hyperion, who seemed invincible, Blink prevailed by teleporting his own laser attack back at him. Then, Gambit—the official leader of Weapon X at the time—blew himself and Hyperion up, thus completing the mission.
Trying to throw off the team dynamic, the Timebroker (more accurately Hyperion posing as the Timebreakers) introduced Sabretooth onto the team. This caused Clarice to doubt her leadership abilities and defer to Sabretooth's advice, a fact that Mimic was not happy about. The Timebroker gave Blink a mission in which she was instructed to kill Mimic soon after, but she refused. When she did, the Tallus shifted from her arm to Sabretooth's, making him the de facto leader.
The next ploy of Hyperion to try and disrupt the team was by introducing Holocaust, from Sabretooth and Blink's home reality, into their ranks. However, this had a rather productive effect. Holocaust became obsessed with finding the source of the Timebroker's broadcasts and, experimenting with a shard of the M'Kraan Crystal, the Exiles teleported into the Timebroker's base—Panopticron. Once there, the team found a resurrected Hyperion who had taken over the crystal citadel and had been manipulating their missions for quite some time. The Exiles began to fight him again, suffering the death of Namora and and Holocaust as well as the near-fatal wounding of Morph and Mimic. However it was Blink, once again, who saved the day. Since Hyperion had learned his mistake from their last battle, Blink had to come up with a new strategy for defeating the powerful foe. She did this by teleporting a lot of sand into him, effectively incapacitating him, and then marooning him on his desolate home dimension.
As the events of the House of M warped reality, the Exiles found themselves in the midst of it (since they had decided to drop Beak back home). The mad, reality warping mutant Proteus found himself reborn and was able to escape to another reality before Earth-616 was set right again. The Exiles endeavored to track him down since they felt responsible for his release—Proteus had discovered the existence of alternate realities via accessing the Tallus. Shockingly, Proteus infected Mimic, and Blink was unable to save him before his body withered away into a lifeless husk. This severely affected Blink, but what's worse is that Proteus seemed to retain some of Mimic's memories of he and Blink's relationship and proported to love her. Her relationship with Sabretooth was also affected. The man that she once looked up to as a mentor and called "Mr. Creed" was now only referred to as "Victor", showing the distance that was growing between them.
Swearing revenge, the Exiles tracked Proteus down to the Future Imperfect reality, but were unable to prevent the madman from taking another life. This time Proteus took the body of Morph, but with Blink's quick thinking she was able to trap Proteus in Morph's body by blinking a behavior modification crown onto his head, causing him to believe he really is Morph. With the hunt for Proteus at an end, Blink remained an Exile to continue fixing damaged realities. She and the other Exiles returned all former members of the Exiles and Weapon X that were trapped in the Stasis Gallery to their home realities, dead or alive. Blink was going to bury Mimic in the Panoptichron desert until Power Princess suggested that she check with Mimic's family on burial wishes. Blink returned Mimic to his home reality for burial, and spent some time with his version of the X-Men, almost accepting their wish for her to join their team.
Recently after a mission, were the Exiles had to save Galactus. Blink once more called Sabretooth 'Mister Creed.'
[edit] Ultimate Marvel
In the Ultimate Marvel universe, a pink-skinned young girl with purple hair and a diamond in the center of the forehead is one of the mutants who appear on-screen as potential candidates for Emma Frost's mutant group. However, the President's dialogue ("No to the magnet girl and no to this one who looks like she crawled out from under something...") implies that she, the "one that looked like she crawled out from under something" (along with Polaris), was rejected. The two females chosen were Karma and Dazzler, "the one with the MTV hair".
Later, Blink is mentioned as having participated in the premier episode of a mutant-hunting game show run by Mojo Adams. This implies that she may have been killed, but her fate in this universe remains unclear.
[edit] Earth-616 Blink
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In the primary Earth-616 continuity of the Marvel Universe, Blink was first introduced in the "Phalanx Covenant" storyline, in which the extraterrestrially-derived techno-organic beings called the Phalanx captured her and several other young mutants to assimilate their powers. This version of Blink was tense and panicky and frightened of her powers (having "woken up in a pool of blood" after her first use of them). Clarice could not properly control her powers, and apparently was unable to teleport anything in an intact form. Instead, any object or person caught in Blink's teleportation field, also known as a "blink wave", would be shredded. She eventually used her abilities to "cut-up" Harvest, a Phalanx entity guarding her and her peers, but apparently was caught in her own teleportation field and died in the process. Because of her sacrifice, the remaining captives were set free and became the X-Men junior team Generation X. It is uncertain where the shredded remains of Harvest and Blink ended up.
[edit] Blink survives
An alternate version of this Blink appeared in What If? vol. 2 #75. In this story, Blink survives, but the other young mutants die in her place. Blink ends up in the realm of the cosmic entity known as the In-Betweener, and amazingly seems to kill him in battle. Blink uses her newfound reality-warping powers to "improve" the world, and among other things causes human/mutant conflict to end. However, when she attempts to save the members of Generation X from their deaths, the resulting paradox (if Generation X survived, then Blink could never gain her new powers in the first place) caused reality itself to begin disintegrating. Ultimately, Blink undid all the changes she had made, and the In-Betweener revealed that she had not died at all. He then took Blink on as his apprentice, training her in the proper use of her new powers.
[edit] Ancestors
In the Apocalypse Vs Dracula mini series written by Frank Tieri, it is revealed that in London, 1897 Apocalypse's genetic descendants called the Clan Akkaba had a member called Frederick Slade. Slade was characterised with pink hair and eyes that were tinted green, and he had the ability to teleport himself, others and selected objects with a 'blink' effect. In the hope that the Clan Akkaba would still continue, Apocalypse's servant Ozymandias, made sure that Frederick would sire a child with a woman known as Miss Ferguson. Given the similarity in powers and allusions made within the mini series, it is assumed that Clarice Ferguson/Blink is a descendent of the 19th Century Frederick Slade and Miss Ferguson and therefore a descendent of Apocalypse.
As the Age of Apocalypse diverged from Earth 616 decades later, with Charles Xavier's death at Legion's hands, it is obvious that the AoA Blink is also a descendant of Apocalypse.
Recently, Slade showed up still alive but elderly in an issue of New Excalibur and leading a new Clan Akkaba along with Ozymandias. Whether this could lead to the return of the 616 version of Blink has yet to be known.
[edit] Powers and abilities
Blink has the ability to teleport herself and others at will. While the regular Marvel Universe version of Blink had little control over her abilities, the Age of Apocalypse/Exiles Blink had mastered several methods of utilizing her powers.
Blink can teleport large masses, including sizable groups of people. She can also teleport only parts of objects. She can open portals that displace projectiles and even enemies that threaten her. She can focus her ability into short, transparent, crystal-like javelins, which teleport whatever people or objects they touch. She usually keeps a supply of these in a quiver around her back. Her teleportations are always accompanied by a "blink!" sound, from which she takes her codename.
Offensive use of these powers include throwing her javelins charged with teleportation power. When they hit a person they can either teleport then away, or stun them unconscious by putting them "out of phase".
She can also charge her javelins so they can cut through objects by teleporting the matter elsewhere as it touches an object.
She has proven many times to be a skilled hand-to-hand fighter, and it is unknown whether her enhanced agility is the result of simple training or a consequence of her mutation.
Blink also has a somewhat unusual appearance with lilac skin, dark pink hair and green eyes (this was a change in Exiles: both MU and AoA Blink had white eyes with a blue sheen). She also has pink marks across her face: these were present at birth, and are not scars, tattoos, etc.
[edit] Other media
Blink appeared briefly in a non-speaking cameo in a fifth season episode of the 1990s X-Men animated series titled "Bloodlines".
Blink is an essential non playable character in X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, providing her teleportation abilities for the player.
