Vessel (comics)

Vessel is a fictional villain created by Marvel Comics for their team called Gene Nation. His first appearance was in Uncanny X-Men #323. He is one of the few members to remain in all three incarnations of the team.

Fictional character biography

When the mentally unstable Mikhail Rasputin flooded the Morlock tunnels, many were believed dead. However, at the last instant Mikhail used his powers to open a portal into a parallel dimension dubbed The Hill. In this dimension, time moves at a faster rate, and even though it was a manner of months in the main Marvel Universe, it had been between 10-20 years on the Hill.

On the anniversary of the Mutant Massacre, a horrific event in which Mr. Sinister's henchmen the Marauders killed many Morlocks, the members of Gene Nation reappeared in the main universe (Earth-616). Their mission was to destroy one hundred humans for every Morlock life that was lost. Vessel along with Sack were the first members to show themselves, killing a few civilians. They battled with Wolverine, Storm, Cannonball, and later Beast and were hardly fazed by their show of force. Wolverine was unable to harm Vessel, who boasted that his ability to heal was better than Wolverine's fabled healing factor. He discovered that inside of Vessel were "shining lights" that must be released in order to defeat him. Once this was revealed the two Gene Nationals fled.

Afterwards, a team of X-Men and the Morlock Callisto confront an attack group from Gene Nation including Vessel, threatening the lives of several civilians by attaching incendiary devices to them that were regulated by Marrow's heartbeat. Seeing it as the only way of stopping the terrorist, Storm rips out Marrow's heart. Defeated, Callisto takes Vessel, along with the remaining members of Gene Nation, back to The Hill.

A few months later, Storm is kidnapped by Mikhail and taken to The Hill. Once there she has to fight her way to the top of the hill where Mikhail lives, where she successfully overpowers him. Vessel is one of the team that had successfully reached the top, yet he had decided to take on the moniker of "Snow". Having won the victory, Storm forces Mikhail to take all of the people living on The Hill back to the real world. In an effort to give the mutants a new start, she settles them in a village outside of her home town in Africa.

However, they wouldn't get much of a chance to start over because shortly after they were placed in Africa the Dark Beast gathers some of the original members, along with some new recruits, to form a new team. The express purpose of this team is to capture test subjects for the evil genius, namely the students of Generation X. Now returning to his former name, Vessel, along with Hemingway, were the only member of Gene Nation to be unsuccessful in their quarry, the newcomer Gaia. Along with the White Queen and Nate Grey, the three defeat the team.

Vessel's final appearance was in the pages of Weapon X where he joins his old teammate Marrow, who is now leading Gene Nation, as her personal bodyguard. After manipulating the perfect killing machine Agent Zero into unintentionally killing his former sidekick, the assassin hunts down and kills every member of Gene Nation in an act of vengeance, Vessel being among the first. However, he spares the life of Marrow because he does not want others to see her as a martyr.

Powers and abilities

Vessel is capable of absorbing the physical and psychic residue from the deceased to increase his size, strength, durability, resistance to injury, and healing ability to superhuman proportions. In order to do him physical harm one must release the "shining lights", or psychic essences of the deceased, from his body through physical force.

References

External links

• Vessel on Uncannyxmen.net
• Gene Nation feature on Uncannyxmen.net
• Vessel at the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe
• Vessel at the Comic Book DB