Sebastian Shaw (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Sebastian Shaw, a supervillain in Marvel Comics, once escaped a prison cell by hitting himself with a book for eight hours straight. The cell had been built to soak up kinetic energy, so pounding on its walls would have been pointless. Shaw asked for books to pass the time. Then he used one as a weapon against himself. Every blow fed his strength until he broke through and dropped into a storm drain. It is a fitting picture of a man who turns punishment into power. Shaw is a mutant who has clashed with the X-Men again and again. How does his strange gift really work, and what are its limits? How does he gain and lose control of a secret society that wants to rule the world? And why do his schemes keep ending in betrayal, lost memory and defeat?

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• 2. Rise Of A Black King

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  The Uncanny X-Men #129 introduced Sebastian Shaw to readers in January 1980, during the Dark Phoenix Saga. Writer Chris Claremont and artist and co-writer John Byrne created him. Byrne drew Shaw's face after the British actor Robert Shaw, who had died in 1978.

  Inside the stories, Sebastian Hiram Shaw was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His mutant power appeared soon after he won a place at engineering school. Around the same time, his father Jacob Shaw died of an incurable disease. The disease came from genetic tampering by Mister Sinister. Shaw poured himself into his work and built Shaw Industries. He was a millionaire by age 30 and a billionaire by age 40.

  That fortune earned him an invitation to the Hellfire Club, an exclusive secret society of mutants. Warren Worthington II, Howard Stark and Sir James Braddock joined with him. They were the fathers of Warren Worthington III, Tony Stark, and Brian and Betsy Braddock. Ned Buckman, the White King of the club's New York branch, had taken notice of Shaw. Shaw rose onto the Council of the Chosen as its Black Bishop. He had become engaged to Lourdes Chantel, a fellow mutant. She distrusted Buckman and worried that the club would corrupt Shaw's ambition.

  Her fears were soon tested. Sentinels seemingly killed Lourdes in a battle. Shaw then learned that Buckman was backing Steven Lang's Project: Armageddon and its Sentinels, and he moved against his patron. With Emma Frost's telepathy, Shaw forced Buckman to kill the whole Council, including Buckman's White Queen, Paris Seville. Buckman then killed himself. Shaw crowned himself Black King and rebuilt the Council as his Inner Circle. Emma Frost, Harry Leland and the cyborg Donald Pierce became its Lords Cardinal. Pierce was not a mutant. Tessa stood at Shaw's side, and he did not know she was spying for Professor X.

  Shaw's connections reached into corporations and government through the club and through his role as head of Shaw Industries. He became a major builder and supporter of Sentinels. That work put him in touch with Senator Robert Kelly and Henry Peter Gyrich of Project Wideawake, who saw him as a plain anti-mutant bigot. In fact, he funded the mutant-hunting Sentinel program so he could keep it under his control.

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• 3. Absorbing Every Blow

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  Shaw's body drinks in every bit of kinetic and thermal energy that is aimed at him. He turns it into strength, speed, stamina and rapid healing at superhuman levels. Punches, bullets, thrown weapons and concussive blasts all become fuel.

  Speed is the quality that grows the most. With enough stored energy, Shaw can strike before his opponents have time to react. Blades are a murkier matter. He is sometimes shown absorbing the cutting, piercing and thrusting energy of a sword, and he can resist adamantium for a short while.

  The rules of the power have shifted over the years. In the past, Shaw had a fixed capacity, and going past it made him lose consciousness. Later stories show him taking in an unlimited amount without harm. The stored energy still fades with time, and the elements drain it fast.

  Without that charge, Shaw is a strong ordinary human in excellent shape. So he works to keep himself topped up. In one instance, he spent time pounding a wall after waking, to rebuild his reserves before the day began. Enough absorbed energy lets him skip sleep, so he often has his mercenaries beat on him.

  Outside of combat, Shaw has real business skill and access to sophisticated weapons. He takes pride in knowing his enemies and the best way to beat them, in a fight or in a boardroom. He also owns technology that shuts out Professor X's telepathic probing. That shield mattered, because Shaw's own scheming had always leaned on other people's minds.

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• 4. War With The X-Men

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  Warhawk, a superpowered assassin, planted a bug in Cerebro, the X-Men's mutant-detecting machine. Shaw had hired him. The bug let the Hellfire Club learn of newly manifested mutants at the same moment as the X-Men. It also exposed secret details of their powers and fighting methods. Shaw wanted to capture the X-Men and study them, hoping to breed an army of powerful mutants.

  The plan did not go well. The club's operatives were poor at beating the X-Men in the field, and the first two mutants they located slipped away. Once the X-Men knew the club existed, they infiltrated its headquarters. They were defeated and captured, but they escaped before Shaw could use them.

  Trouble then spread inside his own circle. Donald Pierce turned out to be a traitor who hated mutants. A new recruit named Selene set her sights on Shaw's chairmanship. The club and the X-Men were forced to fight side by side against Nimrod, a Sentinel from the future. They won, but two key members of the club died in the fight.

  Afterward the two groups became allies of a sort, with Magneto and Storm each taking a turn as White King. Magneto, Selene and Emma argued that Shaw's Sentinel backing put the Inner Circle in danger, and they voted him out. Months later, the next attack on Shaw came from his own son.

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• 5. Blood And Secrets

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  Shinobi Shaw phased his hand into his father's chest to bring on a heart attack. Shaw was then apparently killed when a bomb exploded in his Swiss mountain chalet. Shinobi quickly became the new Black King. Shaw survived, though a scar now ran across his face and left eye. Madelyne Pryor, who seemed to be a living psionic construct of an X-Man, removed it with her psionic powers during their affair. Shaw then joined a new Inner Circle with Selene, Madelyne and Trevor Fitzroy, a descendant of Sebastian from an alternate future.

  Once he had recovered, Shaw reached out to Holocaust, a mutant from the Age of Apocalypse timeline. Holocaust wanted a new armored containment suit. In return he helped Shaw capture X-Force with ease. Shaw had Tessa brainwash the team to hunt down Cable. Cable used his own emerging telepathy to break the conditioning and free them. The bond between Shaw and Holocaust soured soon afterward.

  A deeper family secret surfaced when a device in the Hellfire Club exploded and drove two club menials insane. Shaw asked his manservant for a file labeled Kronos, because he already knew the cause. Years earlier, Mister Sinister had worked beneath the Alamogordo genetics plant in Las Cruces, New Mexico, disguised as a Dr. Milbury. Jacob Shaw had gathered Brian Xavier, Kurt Marko and Irene Adler for him, since all carried the X-gene. Sinister expected their children to be mutants. He experimented on those children, Sebastian included, and imprinted himself on their DNA.

  Sinister's machine, the Cronus device, was meant to activate after his death and awaken those hidden copies until he could be reborn in one of them. Jacob wanted to protect his son. He built a device inside the club from Sinister's notes, to warn Sebastian about the Cronus device.

  Shaw traveled to New Mexico to check on another of the children. There he met Xavier and Gambit, who were investigating a hit list of the children's names. Mercenaries hired by Amanda Mueller, a former associate of Sinister's, attacked them. Mueller wanted the powers of Sinister, though not his personality, and she was killing the children. Her shot at Xavier let Sinister seize his body. Shaw and Gambit destroyed the Cronus device while Xavier cast Sinister out of his mind. With the threat gone, Shaw left.

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• 6. Erased And Reborn

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  Emma Frost, sent by Shaw to recruit Namor during the Dark Reign storyline, instead began a relationship with the Atlantean king. Shaw assumed she had betrayed him. He sent a reprogrammed Sentinel to Atlantis, which attacked the couple and destroyed the kingdom. Selene then took telepathic hold of Emma and erased her memories of Namor, and Namor swore revenge.

  Emma's memories came back after her first battle with Phoenix. She made a pact with Namor. She seduced Shaw, secretly disabled him with her telepathy, and made Namor believe she had executed him. Then she had Cyclops arrange for the X-Men to capture Shaw for crimes against mutant-kind. Cassandra Nova had used Sentinels that Shaw commissioned to destroy Genosha. Emma used her telepathy to leave him remembering only the faces of the Genoshan victims.

  Later, Selene hunted down everyone who had failed her in her bid to become a god. By then Shaw had apparently had his son Shinobi killed, sometime after M-Day. On Utopia, Emma realized Shaw's survival threatened her deal with Namor, and she decided to kill him. Shadowcat overheard her thoughts and offered a compromise, since she could make Shaw disappear. The three of them, with Fantomex, took him aboard E.V.A.

  Emma asked Shaw to recount the early days of the Hellfire Club. She recalled how Shaw once offered her the rank of Queen, on the condition that one of her two closest friends die. She said she did not care which, and Shaw killed both. Fantomex, bored by her story, dropped the floor out from under Shaw. Shaw absorbed the fall, which Fantomex had not known he could do.

  Shaw said he would rather die than let Emma live another moment. With help from a maimed Fantomex, Emma tricked her way into his mind. She found the safest, most landlocked corner and wiped his memory. She asked him who he was and reminded him that he had always called himself a self-made man. She left him kneeling in the mud.

  After the Schism, Hope Summers and the Lights found him and took him for a new mutant. They brought him back to Utopia, and Cyclops was not pleased. When the Avengers invaded Utopia during Avengers vs. X-Men, Shaw and the young mutants were taken to the Avengers Academy. He had read his own file and said he knew his past, though he claimed to remember none of it. Wolverine distrusted him. Yet X-23 and Finesse read his body language and warned their friends that he meant to help the mutant children escape. Both sides agreed the children should not be held against their will, and they faked a battle to cover the escape on camera.

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• 7. Reinventions And Ruin

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  After Professor X was outed as a mutant, Shaw turned the New York branch of the Hellfire Club into a strip club. It doubled as a haven for mutants of any allegiance. Telepathic dancers read the minds of patrons who came for a decadent night out, and Shaw collected their secrets. Thanks to his staff, he even passed himself off as a telepath.

  A few months later, he went after the post of Lord Imperial of the whole club worldwide. He asked Sage to help him. He also invited Courtney Ross, who was really her evil counterpart Sat-Yr-9, and Sunspot to serve as White Queen and Black King. Sage betrayed him by not warning him that Pierce might try to assassinate him. Shaw told the X-Men he had reformed, somewhat, just before Pierce struck. Wounded, he still had the strength to knock the cyborg's head off. But he was too hurt to hold his position, and Sunspot became Lord Imperial.

  At one point it seemed Shaw had joined another Inner Circle that included Cassandra Nova, Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Emma Frost, now going by Perfection. Each member targeted one of the Astonishing X-Men, and Shaw himself defeated Colossus. The whole Hellfire Club turned out to be a mental illusion. It sprang from Emma's mind, which Cassandra Nova had infected with special programming. Cyclops defeated the Shaw duplicate, and it vanished.

  Then came Krakoa, in the new phase of the X-Men that began with the miniseries House of X and Powers of X. Shaw joined the Quiet Council of Krakoa, a ruling body of 14 mutants. He also belonged to the Hellfire Trading Company, which smuggled Krakoa's new remedies onto the black market, and he appeared among the Marauders.

  Then the anti-mutant group Orchis attacked Krakoa and framed the mutants for sabotaging the drugs they gave to humans. Shaw openly defected to Orchis. He even agreed to give up his mutant powers, believing he could profit from Krakoa's natural resources. But the Kingpin, the new White King, had already expelled him from the Hellfire Club. Shaw held legal authority over Krakoa but could reach none of its resources. When he tried to claim the land, Charles Xavier, still living on the island, drove off his troops.

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• 8. Beyond The Page

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  In 2009, IGN placed Sebastian Shaw at number 55 on a list of 100 comic book villains. His story has also been told many times in other universes. In Age of Apocalypse, he is an aristocrat who serves Apocalypse until Donald Pierce poisons him. In House of M, he directs S.H.I.E.L.D. and repurposes the Sentinels to protect mutants. In the Ultimate Marvel universe, he leads a Hellfire Club that worships the Phoenix God. In X-Men Noir, he is a powerful politician who commands the Brotherhood.

  On television, David Bryant voiced Shaw in the four-part X-Men: The Animated Series episode The Dark Phoenix, where he belongs to the Inner Circle Club. Graham McTavish voiced him in Wolverine and the X-Men. In X-Men '97, Travis Willingham voiced a version who sits on the ruling council of Genosha and dies during a Sentinel invasion.

  Shaw is also a boss in games. He is the final boss of X-Men, and Alan Shearman voiced him in X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse. He appears as a boss in Marvel: Avengers Alliance and in Marvel Snap. In The Legacy Quest, a novel trilogy by Steve Lyons, he reluctantly allies with the X-Men while waiting for a chance to seize a possible cure for the Legacy Virus.

  The best-known screen version is Kevin Bacon's in the 2011 film X-Men: First Class. This Shaw can also use kinetic energy as food, keep himself young and fire energy blasts. He speaks English, German, French and Russian. During World War II he worked as the Nazi scientist Klaus Schmidt, and he tried to experiment on a young Erik Lehnsherr. Later he obtained a Soviet helmet that blocks telepaths and led the Hellfire Club, hoping to use the Cuban Missile Crisis to trigger World War III and speed the rise of mutants. Moira MacTaggert's Division X foils him, and Lehnsherr kills him. Lehnsherr then takes the helmet and unites the Hellfire Club's remnants under his own command.

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