79 – UPSTARTS

Subject: Upstarts
Roster: Trevor Fitzroy (Team Leader), Shinobi Shaw, Fabian Cortez, Graydon Creed, Siena Blaze
First Appearance: Uncanny X-Men #281, October 1991

And finally, we get to a team none of whose members deserved their own card. Not entirely surprising, Siena Blaze hadn’t even debuted anywhere near the time these cards came out (in Uncanny X-Men Annual #17 , though I remember her most from the otherwise well-written X-Men Unlimited #1, both in 1993).

The Upstarts were actually nicely symptomatic of the direction of 90′s comics in that they were a team of supervillains who had risen to prominence while playing a game of who could kill the most a-level mutants, specifically, other evil mutants: Shinobi Shaw had “killed” his father Sebastian Shaw (there is no mention of Sebastian’s status in the Hellfire Club card, and I can’t remember if they had revealed Shinobi’s failure by this point), Trevor Fitzroy killed Emma Frost’s Hellions as well as Hellfire Club member Donald Pierce, and Fabian Cortez had “killed” Magneto at the end of X-Men #3. Again, the cards make no mention of these killings* despite apparently being essential to one’s induction into the club, so it’s hard to imagine that even Lee and the editors were taking these deaths (and the team) seriously at all.

I actually liked Fabian Cortez’ character as a kid, though probably more as a consequence of his cool costume and duplicitous nature. I never did figure out why he shared the same first name as then-X-Men writer Fabian Nicieza, but the theory has certainly been thrown around that creator Chris Claremont named Cortez after Nicieza as a nod to Nicieza eventually replacing him on writing duties for X-Men (Magneto being one of Claremont’s favorite characters).

Anyway, the card’s art looks like crap, like a fake-gangsta 90′s rap album cover, from the spotlight against the brick wall to the frosted tips to Fitzroy’s shoulder pads. No wonder the concept of the Upstarts was essentially dropped soon after Lee and company left.

*The killing game was moderated by Gamesmaster, an omnipath whose power was the ability to hear the thoughts of every being on the planet. Odd, then, that he would grant victories to Upstart members for killing their adversaries despite the fact that many of them hadn’t died at all.