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Jamie Madrox
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Real name James « Jamie » Arthur Madrox, ,
Madrox the Multiple Man, John Maddox, Reverend
James "Jamie" Madrox, also called the Multiple Man, is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Len Wein with script from Chris Claremont and art by John Buscema, he first appeared in Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4 (February 1975).
A mutant with the ability to create instant duplicates of himself was largely a minor or supporting character until his appearance in the 1987 miniseries Fallen Angels. The character underwent greater development under writer Peter David through his appearance in David's run of the monthly series X-Factor (vol. 1) in the 1990s, and in David's second and ongoing run of the title (vol. 3) in the 2000s.
The character has appeared in television, film and video game adaptations, most notably in the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand, in which he was portrayed by Eric Dane.
Biography
YouthJamie Madrox is born to a family living near the Los Alamos research facility in New Mexico; the background radiation may have stimulated his mutation. When Jamie is born, the doctor's slap causes him to multiply into two identical babies. Professor Charles Xavier, a friend of the Madrox family, suggests that they move to Kansas to raise the boy in privacy. Dr. Daniel Madrox, Jamie's father, creates a suit for him to wear which is designed to absorb kinetic energy, the source of the duplication.
Later, Damian Tryp of Singularity Investigations makes his own offer to look after Jamie, claiming that Jamie is not just a normal mutant, but actually a "changeling", a predecessor to mutants who develops its powers at birth. Jamie's parents refuse to give Jamie to Tryp. When Jamie is fifteen years old, his parents are killed by a tornado alleged to have been caused by Tryp, and Jamie begins to run the farm by himself along with his duplicates, or "dupes", until his suit is damaged.
Muir Island
Jamie Madrox goes to New York City for help where he meets Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four. He contacts Professor Xavier, who sends the youth to Muir Island with Moira McTaggert, to work in her laboratory and help her with research. He later helps Moira and fellow mutants Havok and Polaris in searching for the escaped mutant Proteus. Proteus hijacks one of Madrox's duplicates as his own body, although this does not harm Madrox. Following the X-Men's battle with Proteus on Muir Island, Madrox is invited to join the X-Men, but he declines.
One of Jamie's renegade duplicates later searches with Siryn for the runaway New Mutants Sunspot and Warlock. They find Siryn and Jamie joins the Fallen Angels.
X-Factor
Jamie Madrox is then one of the residents of Muir Island who comes under the mental control of the Shadow King. Following the destruction of Muir Island and the defeat of the Shadow King, he becomes a member of the second incarnation of the X-Factor team, which is assembled by Val Cooper as a U.S. government response team. Here, he develops a reputation as a prankster, forming a friendship with teammate Strong Guy. Also on the team is former New Mutant Wolfsbane who later joins his X-Factor Investigations.
In the first day of the team, one of his duplicates is shot and killed, and Madrox learns for the first time that he cannot absorb a deceased duplicate. This makes him realize for the first time how independent his duplicates actually are. This becomes clearer to him when a duplicate, working for Mister Sinister, decides that it wants to absorb the original, which it does for a short time, until Jamie's dominant personality breaks free and reabsorbs the wayward dupe.
After he is exposed to the Legacy Virus while performing CPR on an infected Genoshan mutate, Jamie is forced to kill the Acolyte Mellencamp in self-defense by creating a dupe inside the mutant while his hand is in Mellencamp's mouth. Madrox does not often fight in cosmic battles like most of the other X-Men, but he fought doppelgangers during the Infinity War and, being religious, is taken by the cosmic entity Goddess during the Infinity Crusade.
Jamie's health continues to deteriorate due to the Legacy Virus. An attempted cure by Haven leaves him dead, until it is revealed that it was a duplicate who had been infected and died; the real Madrox was alive and suffering from amnesia.
Jamie is the motivation for the Government-sponsored version of X-Factor to break ties with the government and go underground when the team is tricked into thinking Jamie and his duplicates are actually a squad of super-powered terrorists. Eventually, the team discovers this was a manipulation and the group goes rogue, splitting from the government.
He seeks out Strong Guy, ill after Jamie's alleged death. Unfortunately, this makes Strong Guy even weaker, but Jamie's mistake is fixed by the genius of new team leader Forge.
He then serves as majority staff for Banshee's X-Corps. Banshee hires ex-criminals to police other mutants but things get bad when Mystique goes on a murderous rampage and has Mastermind's daughter mind control them. The X-Men manage to defeat the renegade X-Corps members, he transfers to one of Xavier's official "non X-Men" mutant teams in Paris's X-Corporation, fighting Weapon XII in the Channel which results in the death of teammate Darkstar.
Mutant Town
After the fall of the X-Corporation, Jamie Madrox begins working as a private detective in the "Mutant Town" area of New York, along with former X-Factor teammates Wolfsbane and Strong Guy. In the passing time, Madrox has been sending out his duplicates to lead lives of their own. Among these dupes are a Shaolin monk and an Olympic Gymnast. By this point, his powers are developed to such an extent that any dupe who gains sufficient skills can pass its knowledge on to Jamie, giving him a wide variety of training instantly.
The side effect of excessive withdrawal from absorbing the duplicates leads him to gain their new personalities as well, which gives him a form of multiple personality disorder, in which any new dupes may spontaneously generate any individual personality aspect of Jamie Prime, making them unpredicatable, as they more often than not disobey his orders or manifest as personalities that are too volatile or meek.
It is during this period that he encounters an assassin named Clay who has the same powers as Jamie. Although killed after telling Jamie that the Multiple Man has no idea what he truly is, Clay would come back later.
X-Factor Investigations
Following the elimination of all but a couple of hundred mutants from the face of the Earth in the "House of M" storyline, it is revealed that Jamie Madrox has upgraded his private detective agency to a new building, under the name X-Factor Investigations. He bought the building using money from a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-type show, using a room full of dupes as lifelines.
Still suffering from uncontrollable duplicate personalities, Jamie sends one to talk a de-powered Rictor out of jumping off a building who instead pushes him off. The dupe calls himself "The X-Factor" and threatens Madrox that he will come out whenever dupes are made, and Madrox won't be able to tell before being reabsorbed, and Jamie's new team adds Rictor to the group, along with M, and Siryn. Celebrating a victory after discovering he's not a mutant, but a changeling (see opening biography entry), Jamie has sex with Siryn, and an accidentally forgotten duplicate with M. When Jamie discovers and absorbs the duplicate, both females are furious with him.
Later, Layla Miller, without a home after House of M's reality is shattered, reveals to Jamie that one day they will get married, and Wolfsbane will kill them both on their wedding night.
During "Civil War", a duplicate Jamie had created a few years ago eventually becomes agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.; since he is an enforcer of the Superhuman Registration Act, he registered M and Rictor. However, the true Jamie and X-Factor stand opposed to the legislation, going so far as to make a public statement regarding their position, leading Jamie to go in direct opposition to the neutral stance taken by X-Men leader Cyclops upset at for Jamie withholding the truth about M-Day. Jamie also declares that the empty Mutant Town will be a sanctuary for superheroes being pursued by the government.
Agent Madrox recently met "his" end when he was surprised and re-absorbed by the original Madrox during an investigation of a HYDRA cell. Jamie continues the task of hunting down his stray duplicates and reabsorbing them, but he leaves one, John Maddox, who has carved out a life for himself as an Episcopal priest, husband and father, and Jamie decided not to reabsorb him. Siryn also discovers that she is pregnant by Jamie.
"Messiah Complex"
During the 2007 - 2008 "Messiah Complex" storyline, Cyclops sends Jamie Madrox and Layla Miller to go see Forge having built a machine that allows to monitor alternate timelines. Madrox sends two dupes to find information on two timelines that showed "spikes", after the birth of the Mutant baby, due to two different timelines: one in which the newborn becomes the planet's savior and another where it becomes its dominator. Before anyone can react, Layla jumps into the portal along with one of the dupes, and Madrox collapses into a coma.
Layla and one Madrox duplicate arrive eighty years in the negative future to discover that the mutant race has been severely decimated. Mutants are imprisoned in concentration camps overseen by humans. Layla and the dupe are captured and tattooed with an "M" for mutant over their eyes. There, they encounter a youthful Lucas Bishop that would gladly go back in time to kill the mutant baby responsible for the way this timeline has turned out. Layla straps a stolen grenade to the duplicate, killing him and sending his memories of the event back to Jamie so he can tell of Bishop's treachery. When Jamie awakens, he develops an M tattoo because his body takes on scarring from duplicates. Jamie leaves and returns to X-Factor Investigations, disillusioned due to Layla's loss.
The other duplicate later returns as the character Cortex.
Sean
Siryn goes into labor and proposes to Jamie Madrox, and accepts. Siryn gives birth to a boy named Sean after her own father. Just hours after his birth, however, Sean, much to the horror of Jamie, Theresa and X-Factor, is absorbed into Jamie's body as Jamie holds the boy, completely against Jamie's will. Jamie realizes that the baby must have been fathered by a dupe rather than by him, and that "the offspring of a dupe isn't really anything more than a dupe". Siryn, filled with rage toward Jamie, breaks his finger and tells him to leave.
Jamie goes to see his preacher dupe John Maddox. Jamie realizes that if the child of a dupe is merely an "infant dupe", then John's son should have been absorbed either by John himself, or when Jamie ruffled the boys hair; therefore John's son must not be his. John admits that he already knows his wife had an affair. Jamie reveals that he plans to kill himself over the grief caused by Sean, but is prevented by a holographic projection of an adult Layla Miller who takes him into the future.
Summers Rebellion
Jamie Madrox is transported to the future in the midst of the Summers Rebellion, where mutants rise up against Sentinel and human oppressors, which is led by Ruby Summers, the daughter of Cyclops and Emma Frost, with Cyclops's optic blasts and Emma's organic mineral body, Layla Miller, and a cyborg Cyclops whose predicament is Jamie's fault.
After kissing Layla (now an adult) out of happiness at seeing her, Cyclops wants Jamie to find out why some mutants are winking out of existence. The group visit an aging senile Doctor Doom who says Layla told him in the past that he'd have to instruct Jamie and her on something in the future, and it is now.
In the present, a former mutant named Lenore ask assistance to X-Factor, claiming that someone was trying to kill her. She felt she was being followed, but every time she looked, it was a different person doing it. Her best friend Candy, another former mutant, was found dead of a gunshot wound which the police ruled a suicide. Lenore didn't believe it, because Candy had a pathological fear of guns. Before Candy died, she told Lenore that she thought she was being followed. Later, Lenore's mother showed up at Lenore's apartment and attempted to shoot her, but was foiled by Longshot. Escaping, Lenore's mother took Darwin hostage. At the last minute, she turned the gun on herself, but it backfired due to Longshot's luck powers. At the hospital, Monet St. Croix attempted to read Lenore's mother's mind, but was overpowered and collapsed. When she woke up, she grabbed Longshot's throat and said "Cortex".
While Strong Guy and Rictor were visiting John Maddox in Vermont, Shatterstar busted through the window and tried to stab Rictor, saying only "Cortex". Once freed of Cortex' control, Shatterstar and Rictor shared a passionate kiss. When Cortex tried to bring Longshot under his mental and physical control, he noted that Longshot and Shatterstar were in many ways identical.
Once she calmed down, Monet told the group that her violent outburst was because of psychic feedback that occurred after she had broken through a psychic barrier in Lenore's mother's mind, but that whatever was controlling her had fled. She then manipulated the group into moving Lenore out of her apartment and hiding her in a penthouse suite in an expensive hotel. There she tried to seduce Darwin, but he figured out that she was acting out of character only to try to get Lenore alone, and so resisted. Monet's body turned bright purple and became covered in tint lights and circuitry. She said that she would then have to kill Darwin, even though he wasn't on Cortex's list. This suggests that whatever Monet had become, she was acting somewhat independently of Cortex himself while receiving instructions from him.
When Cortex loses control over Monet, he is attacked and his hood falls back revealing that he is a duplicate of Madrox. Having his identity uncovered Cortex reveals himself as the second duplicate sent to one of the two "remaining" futures for mutantkind during the "Messiah Complex", to search for a cure for the depowering of 98% of the world's mutants following M-Day, then die in some fashion so that his memories would be transferred back to Madrox.
How this duplicate travelled from the alternative future he was sent to Earth-1191 remains a mystery; the only thing known is that under the direction of Anthony Falcone who in turn was under the guidance of Damian Tryp from Earth-616, this duplicate was turned into a "doomlock", a chronal variance inhibitor which stops the creation of divergent timelines, which required massive cybernetic modification of his body. He was then sent back in time from Earth-1191 to Earth-616 to kill a list of specific individuals, including Multiple Man, for fear how they might affect the future. As Cortex, Madrox's duplicate apparently has the power to mentally control several people at once.
Meanwhile, on Earth-1191, the Multiple Man was tasked by Cyclops with discovering why certain people seemed to be blinking out and then back into existence. Multiple Man theorized that someone might be altering the past to affect the future. Cortex was attempting to kill Lenore to prevent Hecat'e (of the Summers Rebellion) from being born.
"Chaos War"
During the "Chaos War" storyline, the Multiple Man is among the heroes that Hercules assembles to help combat the forces of Amatsu-Mikaboshi. Because of what happened in the death realms, the Multiple Man dupes that fell in battle return from the dead alongside the other X-Men that died in battle.
"They Keep Killing Madrox"
In the 2012 "They Keep Killing Madrox" storyline, Jamie Madrox is fatally impaled by a demon named Bloodbath, and finds himself being repeatedly transported to a series of alternate Earths, including one in which Layla Miller was murdered on the night of her marriage to Madrox by Rahne Sinclair's daughter, another in which Captain America has become Deathlok, and another in which Doctor Strange has been killed by the demonic Dormammu. When Madrox returns to his own Earth, the overjoyed Layla Miller passionately confesses feelings to him. The X-Factor team then discover that Deathlok, Rahne's daughter, and Dormammu have been transported to Madrox's home Earth as well. Madrox and Layla later marry in Las Vegas without incident.
Best films
(2006)Played by the actor
Filmography of Jamie Madrox (1 films)
Add to a movie listX-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
, 1h44Directed by Brett Ratner
Origin USA
Genres Science fiction, Thriller, Fantasy, Action, Adventure
Themes Superhero films, Super-héros inspiré de comics, Children's films
Actors Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Kelsey Grammer
Rating65%
Twenty years ago, Professor Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr meet young Jean Grey at her parents' house to invite her to join their school. Ten years later, the industrialist father of Warren Worthington III discovers his son is a mutant as Warren tries to cut off his wings.