Posted in: Comics | Tagged: bastion, Comics, entertainment, x-men

The Nineties Are Back, Stronger, Harder, Faster, In X-Men Blue #3 (SPOILERS)

Published Wed, 10 May 2017 06:30:24 -0500

Last updated Wed, 10 May 2017 11:33:41 -0500

When asked about his favourite Sentinels stories, Cullen Bunn told Marvel.com,

The Nimrod stories in UNCANNY X-MEN #194, #209, and #210:

"Nimrod—and later Bastion—has always been a favorite character of mine. He had all the cold mercilessness of the Sentinels, but he also had a bit of personality, too. And I loved that he had these automatic countermeasures for anything his mutant prey [threw] at him."

I seem to recall those later Nimrod stories he refers to were originally intended to be with Alan Moore and Alan Davis' Captain Britain character The Fury, after Sir James Jaspers' appearance in X-Men #200. But lawyers got in the way…

Well, with today' Sentinels story in X-Men Blue #3, he only goes and does it. With Bastion in charge of the seeming-mutant Sentinels, and seeming a lot more benevolent towards mutants.

Bastion was "born" when the giant robotic Sentinel, Master Mold, having absorbed the advanced Sentinel prototype Nimrod into its systems, fought the X-Men who saw no other way to stop the virtually indestructible amalgam except to force it through the Siege Perilous, a pan-dimensional portal which subjects those who pass through to the judgment of the universe's higher powers, courtesy of Roma, the daughter of Merlin from those Captain Britain stories.

Re-emerging from the portal as an amnesiac human/Sentinel hybrid with a seemingly immortal essence, he was taken in by a woman named Rose Gilberti. Living with Rose, she adopted him as a surrogate son and gave him the name Sebastion Gilberti. He began to hear about America's mutant problem. At some point, Bastion fell in with anti-mutant groups, like Graydon Creed's Friends of Humanity.

This all happened in Machine Man And Bastion 1998 Annual and, yes, they really published a comic called that, explaining who Bastion was, who first appeared in X-Men Vol 2 #58 in 1996.

Bastion's prime directives were soon reawakened, and he began assembling the international anti-mutant strike force Operation: Zero Tolerance (OZT). They attempted to reconfigure the Sentinel force assembled by Project: Wideawake, but Bastion deemed most of them outdated. Instead, he had a number of humans secretly outfitted with nano-technology to be Prime Sentinels.

There was a lot of fighting. A lot of high collars. A lot of people standing around with their mouth open and too many teeth. Bastion was the ninetiest of nineties characters.

The character died. But now… he's back. Happens to X-Men characters a lot.