Robert Edward Kelly is a fictional character in the Marvel Comics universe. He most often appears in Marvel's X-Men and X-Men-related comic books. He is a prominent United States Senator who began his career on an anti-mutant platform, and as the X-Men team is made up entirely of mutants, his role tends to be that of an antagonist. However, towards the latter days of his career, he began to change his views on mutants as a whole. The character was created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne and makes his first appearance in Uncanny X-Men #135 (July 1980).

Biography

Senator Robert Kelly was first seen at a social gathering hosted by the Hellfire Club, where an illusion projected by the mutant villain Mastermind caused him to believe he had witnessed the X-Man Cyclops firing randomly into a crowd. He was the primary backer of the Mutant Control Act and Project: Wideawake, a government program aimed at creating updated Sentinel robots that would help track down and, if necessary, detain or kill violent mutants.

He played a central role in the Days of Future Past storyline that took place in Uncanny X-Men #141-142 (January–February 1981). The entire plot revolved around the X-Men stopping Mystique and her Brotherhood of Mutants from assassinating Senator Kelly and thus inadvertently causing a dystopian future where mutants and other heroes were hunted down by the Sentinels and nearly totally eliminated.

When he appeared in Uncanny X-Men #246 (July 1989), he was married to Sharon, a former maid who worked in the Hellfire Club. Kelly, in a meeting with Sebastian Shaw, was shocked when his wife walked in wearing her old, servant garb as a bit of fun. She was genuinely apologetic, saying she would not have done such a thing if it hadn't been just him and Shaw. Sharon was killed the next issue, in Uncanny X-Men #247 (August 1989), shot by the mutant-hunting robot known as Master Mold during a battle between Master Mold and Rogue. This further incited Robert's stance against mutantkind.

Kelly remained an active anti-mutant activist in the comics through the 1990s, but slowly became more open-minded and tolerant towards the mutant population, promising the X-Men he would work for the rights of mutants during the early 2000s. After his life was saved by the mutant Pyro in an attack (this was when Pyro was infected with the Legacy Virus) from his old teammate Post, Kelly vowed to reconsider his standing on mutants and work towards improving human/mutant relations. Despite being guarded by the X-Man Cable, he was not long afterwards assassinated at a college rally (where he was speaking at the time) by the anti-mutant activist Alan Lewis who felt that Senator Kelly betrayed their anti-mutant cause. He died in Cable's arms where Cable had been too occupied with a "meeting" on the astral plane to realize the danger to Kelly before it was too late.

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