Nomad

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Background

Powers and Abilities

Nomad has benefited from the Super Soldier Serum, and his raw physical abilities are thus as high as they can be. He’s also a rather skilled, intelligent and pragmatic man, and uses many weapons and gadgets.

History

Jack “Nomad” Monroe was born in 1945, and his parents died shortly after in the war. For his whole life he greatly admired Captain America and Bucky, and this devotion spurred him into action when he discovered one of his high-school teachers shared his boundless admiration for the star-spangled hero.

The teacher knew that the real Cap had disappeared months after Monroe was born, and that other men had taken up the Captain America costume and pretended to be the original, fighting in his name. He managed to discover a formula for the Super-Soldier Serum, and contacted the Pentagon in order to become the new Captain America.

However, as the Korean war ended, a Captain America was no longer needed and he was turned down.

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Bucky

The teacher and Monroe did not want to betray the legend of Cap and Bucky and wear the costume themselves, but the reappearance of the Red Skull (in truth, another impersonator) made them do so. “Cap” and “Bucky” fought during the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Howbeit the reconstituted Super-Soldier serum played havoc with their minds and made them ultra-violent, ultra-conservative, anti-communist vigilantes. They were put in suspended animation.

When Monroe got out of suspended animation, he became an agent of SHIELD, and was treated to become sane again. He sought Captain America, who had came back, and became his sidekick and partner, first as Bucky and then as Nomad (an identity Captain America once held).

After a few months, he went solo and became an adventurer, but teamed back again with Cap when the later disappeared for a time and abandoned his Captain America ID to simply become the Captain. He didn’t fit very well with Cap’s team, however, and left into a fit of jealousy over a woman.

1990s

Nomad then went to Miami, and changed from a spandex, harmless costume to a hard rocker look, complete with long hair, mirror shades and guns. He conducted a long an complex investigation about a big drug dealer and the ultimate firearm, a cybered supermachinegun.

During this adventure, he fought Captain America several times, and got his hands on the machinegun. After killing a score of helpless soldiers to defend himself, he destroyed the weapon, refusing to take lives anymore.

Nomad also adopted during this investigation a baby girl which he took from her mother, a drugged-out prostitute, so she wouldn’t end in an institution like he did. He named the baby “Bucky”. Nomad hitchhiked and hiked around in the whole country, acting as a low-class merc and doing various odd jobs in order to feed Bucky.

His world was the open road, bleak motels, criminal intrigues and underworld. IIRC, he finally chose to go back into suspended animation.

History

This is entirely copied from http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/5655/file.html in case that site ever goes down (sigma.net apparently just went under, further fueling my fears about such data losses). Here goes :

In The Beginning…

Jack Monroe was born in Clutier, Iowa, December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor Day. Jack’s father, Edward Monroe, was a stateside Nazi sympathizer who – much to the dismay of his wife Mary Ellen – severely beat Jack and his older sister Jill whenever they ventured into the basement, which was filled with Nazi paraphernalia.

When Jack was 8, he decided to bring some pieces of his father’s Nazi collection to school for “show and tell,” in hopes of looking like a big shot in front of his friends. Three days later, Jack was accosted by F.B.I. agents who, over the course of several days, won Jack’s trust and began asking questions about Ed Monroe.

Eventually, Jack broke down and told them about the basement and what was there. They took the senior Monroe away in handcuffs and soon after, it was discovered that nearly the entire town was involved.

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 involvement 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.

Bucky

In 1952, Jack’s foster parents – possibly government agents assigned to raise him until he was prepared to be trained as the new Bucky – 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 – canceled 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.

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.

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.

The Nomad identity

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.

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.

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.

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 acquired 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 doppelgänger of the X-men, Gambit.

After fighting for his life in the Rodney King riots, Jack decided to blow out of town. As he traveled 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.

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 villains 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 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.

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 inadvertently 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.

Most recently, after preventing a bank hold-up, Nomad was interviewed concerning his feelings about Captain America’s apparent death.

Description

Nomad wears his hair long (often held by a deep blue scarf), and wears a black leather long coat, a black T-shirt over his vest and black leather pants and motorbike boots. He has an utility belt with a big yellow “N” as the buckle. He normally carries Bucky in a back papoose, along with his shotgun. He shaves infrequently.

Personality

Nomad is a failed super-soldier and a fallen super-hero. He long had Serious Psychological Instability problems such as frustration, excessive violence and general deterioration of his sanity. Between his former insanity and the many years he spent in suspended animation, he has few deep certainties left.

Nomad thus travels to discover what sort of man he truly is, and what happened to what he loves the most, the United States of America and the dream it held. He wants to fight the good fight, and to discover what has gone wrong for his country in order to set it right.

While fighting for truth, justice and the American Way, Nomad is quite cynical and sardonic (he’s king of the sardonic one-liners), and doesn’t fit anywhere. While he’s in his late 20’s, he’s a conservative from the 50’s, and is ill at ease in the 90’s.

While intelligent and resourceful, he makes no attempt at any kind of stable lifestyle. One thing he knows for sure, however, is that blind violence and murder are not his way (he does enjoys fighting, but will not *seriously* hurt anyone – unless he gets overwhelmed or crazed, which happened a few times).

DC Universe History

Nomad can only exists if Captain America does ; while you could have a Nomad-like adventurer in the DCU, the nationalistic theme would loose much of its impact.

Perhaps he could be a former sidekick, but nothing really clinches…

Questions from the list

Q: Mark wrote :
First off, I’d like to say that this is a terrific writeup, particularly the history. I’m curious, was there actually a rabidly anti-communist version of Cap published in the 1950s that was retconned to be an imposter ? Or, was the entire story made up out of whole cloth

A: The various Captain Americas that came after the original entered the continuity in the 70’s (Captain America 150+). Monroe is, technically, Bucky III while his mentor (who legally changed his name to Steve Rogers) was Captain America IV. AFAIK, it was mostly a retcon (like most of what is supposed to have happened in the MU between 1945 and 1963), but still an interesting story.

As some of you may now, Captain America IV later became the Great Director, an agent for Doctor Faustus who led the fascist “National Force” hate militia, and died in tragic circumstances during an assault on Harlem that was thwarted by the Harlem mob, Daredevil and Captain American (Sharon Carter also died during those events). It was quite epic.

JD wrote :
Q: Hell, I thought Nomad was Captain America in a different outfit, without the Shield…

A: That was Nomad I : Captain America when he first got disillusioned (for a short time) about his nation, a theme that was later explored more fully with the Captain ID. The Nomad ID was later used by one Edward Ferbel, a stuntman manipulated by the Red Skull. Monroe (Nomad III) was given the Nomad costume by the SHIELD during a mission against the Viper : Cap had defeated the Viper while in his Nomad phase, and it was hoped that the costume would have some psychological impact.

Monroe revised the costume two or three times, and made the Nomad ID entirely his own when he finally broke away from his childhood hero.

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Helper(s): http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/5655/file.html (defunct), Ethan Roe.

Source of Character: Captain America and his own series (Marvel Universe).