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Real Name: Jack Monroe Occupation: Professional adventurer Height: 5'11" Weight: 200 lbs. Eyes: Brown Hair: Brown Strength Level: Nomad possesses the normal human strength of a man of his physical age, height and build who engages in intensive regular exercise. He can lift (press) approximately 500 pounds under optimal conditions. Powers: None Abilities: The Super-Soldier serum has heightened Nomad's physical form to the pinnacle of human perfection. Nomad has greater strength, speed, agility, endurance and reaction time than most Olympic athletes. He can run at a maximum speed of 27.2 miles per hour, for a period of 2 hours. His reaction times are almost 4 times that of a normal man's. He has several times the endurance of a normal human being since one of the effects of the Super-Soldier Serum is to augment the reduction of fatigue-producing lactic acid in muscle tissue. His natural fighting skills have been honed through extensive training by Captain America.
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The children of Clutier were placed in foster homes spread out across the country. It was decided early on that Jack would be the Bucky of a new generation. His involvment in the discovery of Clutier's betrayal made him the perfect candidate. Once his past was revealed, the public would eat it up. A boy so dedicated to his country, he turned in his own traitorous parents. During this period of change, Jack repressed the memories his entire childhood and, ultimately, would not come to grips with what he was responsible for until years later.
Jack's new home was in Naugatuck, Connecticut. Because of the government's plans for him, he was encouraged to learn everything he could about Captain America and Bucky. In 1952, Jack's foster parents were killed by Communist spies during the height of the Korean War and he was left in the custody of his aunt and uncle. However, because his aunt Joanie was a victim of alcoholism, Jack was soon after placed in McMurtry's Foster Home where he was enrolled in the Lee School for Boys. It was there that the government arranged for Jack to befriend a teacher who shared his obsession with Captain America and Bucky - a man named "Steve Rogers." This man's incredible devotion to his idol had driven him to seek out the Super-Soldier formula, change his name, even his face, in hopes of replacing the hero he alone suspected to have been killed in World War II. The end of the Korean War - and the government's subsequent lack of interest - cancelled those plans. Dejected, Steve turned to teaching.
But it wasn't long before the Red Menace reared it's ugly head right in the heart of America. Steve and Jack decided they had no choice. They injected themselves with the long hidden Super-Soldier serum and Captain America and Bucky were reborn. But due to an imperfection in the Super-Soldier serum, it began to destroy their minds. Eventually they both spiraled into a hyper-paranoid delusional state and their commie-hunting tactics managed to make Joseph McCarthy look tame by comparison. They were apprehended by the F.B.I. and when science couldn't find a cure for their condition they were cryogenically frozen in the hopes that someday they could be restored.
Several years later, the government, feeling responsible for them, roused Steve and Jack and turned them over to a mental institution in the Catskills. They weren't aware, however, that the administrator of that hospital was the infamous mind-manipulator Doctor Faustus. Faustus transformed the ersatz Cap into the Grand Director of the fascistic National Force. To prove the loyalty of his new creation, he ordered the Grand Director to kill Jack. The Director did as ordered, shooting his loyal partner point-blank in the head. Soon after, grief-struck by this abominable action on his part, the Grand Director performed a fatal act of self-immolation. Jack was not dead though, the gun had been loaded with blanks. Faustus, it seemed, had intended on keeping Jack alive to be used as one of his puppets. Before this could occur, though, Faustus was thwarted by Captain America and Daredevil. Jack was then placed into the custody of a S.H.I.E.L.D. run hospital in Washington where he underwent several years of psychiatric therapy. Mixed into the less-than-sterling treatment were several rounds of cerebral chemical depressants and stimulants and a primitive subdermal GPS locator to enable S.H.I.E.L.D. to keep tabs on him should he ever escape and go rogue. Eventually, a cure was developed for Jack's condition; he was given a three-week reorientation course and then thrust into the relative complexity of the modern world.
Once released, Jack sought out the friendship and tutelage of the real
Captain America. In order to integrate him smoothly into modern society,
S.H.I.E.L.D. decided that Jack be put into the blue and yellow spandex of Nomad,
an identity that Cap had created at a time when he had lost faith in America.
After a time, Jack went off on his own, ending up in Miami and helping
to take down the drug empire of Ulysses X Lugman, also known as the Slug.
Not long after that, Jack reunited with Cap - at the time calling himself
"The Captain" during his resignation as Captain America - along with the
Falcon, Demolition Man and Vagabond to oppose the Commission on Super-Human
Activities.
Safilios had also arranged for the shooting of another girl who happened to work at the electronics company that was developing software for the super-gun which was at the heart of the drug/arms deal. Jack followed the trail up through Lexington, Kentucky to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he rescued a prostitute's daughter from Eddie Vanelli, another pimp/drug dealer involved in the whole dirty affair. Realizing she had no future with her substance-abusing prostitute mother, Jack adopted the child himself and named her "Bucky." The whole fiasco came to a head in Juneau, Alaska, where Jack used a disk he had aquired in Minnesota to reprogram the super-gun to respond only to him, thus
rendering it useless to everyone else. While trying to escape, he was confronted by Captain America and had a final show-down with the Commission, Umberto Safilios and both the American and Russian militaries. Forced to use the gun he had intended to disable, Jack killed virtually everyone between him and freedom and fled with Bucky down through Canada to Seattle.
It was there that Jack had his first encounter with Giscard Epurer, a man who would turn out to be a key player in Jack's life in the next few months. Continuing south, Jack wound up in L.A., hooking up with a network of
con-artists, petty thieves and prostitutes known as the Undergrounders. Jack settled down for a short time, but during that period Jack confronted a number of adversaries, including U.S.Agent, Deadpool, the Punisher and an evil doppelganger of the X-man, Gambit.
After fighting for his life in the Rodney King riots, Jack decided to blow out of town. As he travelled across the south, Jack was forced to confront the realities of the homeless, A.I.D.S., gay rights and the hate spawned by ignorance. During this time, Epurer had located Bucky's mother, cleaned her up and molded her into a killing machine to defeat Jack for the possession of her daughter. Jack reluctantly conceded that she was capable of taking care of both herself and Bucky and left them to start their life together.
Immediately after, Jack was kidnapped by Doctor Faustus who manipulated him into attempting to assassinate the Slug, thus giving Faustus a monopoly on the Florida drug market. Captain America intervened and prevented Jack from murdering both the Slug and Faustus. During his brainwashing sessions, Faustus caused Jack to recall and confront the grim spectre of his childhood. Using these memories, Faustus manipulated them further, causing Jack to believe both his parents had been executed for their treasonous crimes. Faustus was finally apprehended by Captain America and sent to a minimum security prison. Consumed with hatred, Jack broke into the prison and killed Faustus.
After several more entanglements involving the Six-Pack, S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Man-thing, Maximillian Zaran, the weapons master, was hired to kill Jack. Zaran failed and when interrogated, claimed his employer to be Giscard Epurer. When Jack tracked him down in Washington D.C., Epurer revealed Zaran's true employer to be Bart Ingrid, who Jack had bullied around as a child in Clutier. Ingrid had risen up through the Senate, was a top-candidate for Ross Perot's running-mate in the 1996 elections and had secretly revived the Nazi movement in Clutier. Epurer sent Jack to Clutier to neutralize the militia camp and rescue his covert operative, Bucky's mother.
During a brief reunion with his sister Jill, who had returned to Clutier as an adult, Jack learned that his mother and father had not been executed and that his mother was still alive, but very ill. Having received directions from his sister, Jack stormed the camp and found Bucky's mother dead, killed at the hands of the super-aryan, "88" who possessed a new super-gun. Jack managed to reprogram this new gun with the disk he used on the first one in Alaska, take control and use it to destroy the camp.
Jack then returned to Washington where he attempted to stop Ingrid's last-ditch attempt to detonate a bomb in the Senate House. With a stripped-down version of the super-gun he killed Ingrid, setting off the case of explosives. Feeling responsible for her after the loss of both her mother and her adopted
father, Epurer took Bucky into his custody. Jack, however, had just barely
survived. Several people had been killed in the explosion and Vernon
Hatchway - the F.B.I. agent given the task of killing Jack - switched him with one of the bodies. Hatch placed Jack in cryogenic freeze once again, so Jack's body could heal and the world could forget.
With Jolt now returned to life, some of the Thunderbolts' questions were answered but too many others had not been. This then led to their pursuit and capture of Scourge. Using a holographic disguise, Jack first led them to believe he was Captain America! But it was quickly discovered who Scourge truly was. Using Mach-2's extensive array of diagnostic scanners, the nanoprobes were discovered and disabled. Now free to tell his story, Jack recounted his ordeal and agreed to fight back against Gyrich alongside the Thunderbolts.
After breaking into the Commission's headquarters, Jack and the Thunderbolts stumbled upon the new Citizen V while he was fleeing Gyrich. Citizen V, alongside his group of "Redeemers," had also attempted to thwart Gyrich's plans, but failed after inadvertantly inhaling more of the same nanoprobes that had imprisoned Jack. Citizen V alone was spared, due to his airtight mask.
The Thunderbolts faced off against the nano-controlled Redeemers, while Jack, Hawkeye and Citizen V went after Gyrich. During their pursuit, the nanoprobes finally worked their way through Citizen V's suit and took control of him. While Hawkeye held him at bay, Jack ran ahead and confronted Gyrich. The Thunderbolts, meanwhile, had freed the Redeemers of the nannites' control and also caught up with Gyrich. Jolt, using her newly augmented bioelectric power, overloaded the nanoprobes and not only disabled the super-human doomsday device, but also discovered Gyrich himself had been controlled by nannites. Hawkeye then threatened to expose the whole scheme to the world, unless both the Thunderbolts and Jack received presidential pardons for their past crimes. A deal was struck, but as a result, Hawkeye himself was arrested for the various crimes committed during his tenure as the Thunderbolts' leader. Jack, however, wasn't interested in all these politics and, using the holographic disguise in the Scourge armor, slipped out during all the confusion to once again wander the roads.
Shortly thereafter Nomad was spotted preventing a bank hold-up, after which he was interviewed concerning his feelings about Captain America's apparent death and has since been linked to the modern anti-terrorist group, the Invaders.
Most recently however, Jack was the target of an unknown assassin under the employ of former Russian General Aleksander Lukin, who appeared to be killing off those imbued with the Super Soldier Serum and desecrating the graves of those who once wore the mantle of Captain America. Jack suffered a point blank shot to the chest and was then stuffed into the back of his car, which the assassin then drove off in. When Jack's fingerprints were discovered on the sniper rifle used to kill the Red Skull, Nick Fury sent Sharon Carter to track him down. Using the primitive GPS tracker (miraculously still active after the nanoprobe invasion), Sharon followed the signal to Philadelphia where she discovered Nomad's seemingly lifeless body in an abandoned tenement. However, before being able to establish whether Jack was dead or simply unconscious, she was blindsided and knocked unconscious herself by the mystery assassin . . .
Rebirth
Eventually, they were roused from their decades-long slumber by someone
whose political realities were as confused as theirs. Still lacking a
cure for the chemically-induced insanity which controlled them, their
first objective was to neutralize the traitor who had besmirched the
good name of Captain America during their years of sleep. Little did
Steve and Jack realize this "traitor" was, in fact, the original
Cap who had been revived from a similar state of suspended animation
years earlier. After they were defeated, the misguided heroes were again placed in suspended animation.On The Road . . .
After a falling out between him and Cap, Jack once again struck out on his own, returning to Miami to combat Umberto Safilios, a local pimp and narcotics trafficker. When Patty Joplin - working as both a prostitute for Safilios and as Jack's informant - was killed, Jack investigated and discovered her parents were southern money. Patty, it turned out, was killed because she knew too much about Safilios' dealings with D.E.A. agent Joseph Kittle, concerning a drugs for weapons trade. Safilios was responsible for her murder, but was also the father of her child, thus stalemating a rivalry between him and Miller Joplin, Patty's father.The Prisoner!
Several years later, Henry Peter Gyrich--head of the Commission on Super-Human Activities--discovered and arranged for the cryogenic chamber containing Jack to be relocated. While still on ice, Jack was suffused with nanoprobes, making him a prisoner in his own body, with complete self-awareness, but no free will. Once again, Jack was brought up to speed on what had transpired during his slumber. It was during reorientation sessions that Gyrich revealed his intention to use Jack as a Scourge of the Underworld to eliminate the former criminals, turned would-be heroes, known as the Thunderbolts, as well as to test the destructive power of the nannites for a doomsday weapon designed to wipe out all super-humans on Earth! Jack was outfitted and briefly trained with literally dozens of weapons and tools confiscated from captured villians over the years and then sent out to systematically assassinate both past and present members of the Thunderbolts, as well as anyone else who posed a threat to Gyrich's plans. Jack appeared to have succeeded in killing both Jolt, Baron Helmut Zemo and Techno. But Techno's last act was to resurrect Jolt from the bio-chamber he had kept her contained within since her apparent "death." At the same time, Atlas, who during a confrontation with Count Nefaria had become ionically unstable, suddenly burst from his own bio-chamber, growing larger and more unstable at an exponential rate. Using the Pym particles he was equipped with to store much of his weapons array, Jack managed to miniaturize Atlas enough to contain the ionic explosion that resulted.The End?
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