Written by 12:46 pm Comics

The Hard-Boiled History of NANNY & ORPHAN MAKER!

The Hard-Boiled History of NANNY & ORPHAN MAKER!

Nanny & Orphan Maker were the breakout stars of Hellions, on of the best new X-Men comics to come out of the Krakoan era. The series wrapped up with the two of them being sent into the pit for crimes against humanity, and what a whirl-ride it was to get them there!

It was a tragic day for comic books fans everywhere when we learned that issue number 18 of Hellions was going to be its last. 



Not only was the team going to be broken up, but two of its founding members – NANNY & ORPHAN MAKER – the two breakout stars of the entire series (if you ask me), were both being sent into the pit for crimes against humanity.


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Orphan Maker committed the worst crime a Krakoan citizen can commit when he killed a bunch of humans on his quest to seek absolution in the eyes of Nanny.

Because of this, he was sentenced to exile by the quiet council, and Nanny being the ever-responsible Nanny that she is, opted to tag along with him in the banishment.


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It was a heartbreaking send-off that was mired in ethical concern, and it sparked some debate amongst the quiet council as to whether or not Orphan Maker was really of sound mind to know what he was doing.

As a SUPER-FAN of Nanny, my little heart cried at seeing her sacrifice herself for Peter and disappearing from the books, but from a storytelling perspective I really thought it was all so great.


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This makes Orphan Maker the second person that we know of to be sent to Krakoan jail, and Nanny the third, though hers is more of a self-imposed sentencing. 

They both join Sabretooth who has been down there in the pit since the beginning days of Krakoa, and as the cast of exiled mutants finally starts to grow, I can’t help but wonder when we’re gonna get a peek at what these bad boys and girls have been up to ever since doing down under?


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Hopefully the Sabretooth mini-series that’s due out this winter will shed some light on the dank and dark happenings that’s going on in the underbelly of Krakoa.

IMPACT IN HELLIONS

We’ve been living in a blessed golden age of X-Men thanks to the new Krakoan era, and though our cups runneth over with almost too many books on store shelves, by and far Hellions was undoubtedly one of the best.

Hellions was basically X-Men’s answer to the Thunderbolts, where a bunch of kind-of reformed (but not really reformed) villains go out on X-Men missions to prove they can play nice, but really the true glory of the series was in the grit caused by the intra-team dynamics of this wildly diverse the group.


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The odd-ball casting choices is what really piqued my personal interest in this series, and even though X-Men mainstays like Havok and Psylocke aren’t weird choices at all to have on a team, pretty much everyone else was. It was basically a team of like B & C-list characters who were somehow conscripted into headlining their own book – which I LOVE.



Hands down, I was most looking forward to Nanny & Orphan Maker. I am HUGE fans of those two, ever since I splurged $25 dollars in my youth at a flea market for what became my favorite issue of all time, Uncanny X-Men #248, where Nanny and Orphan Maker almost take out the entire X-team by themselves. I just think that Nanny is so funny and unique, and I love the bizarre little nursery rhymes that she makes up.


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These two twisted souls haven’t really made a TON of appearances in X-Men comics, so plucking them out of obscurity and putting them on this team was quite the gamble, since not a lot of casual fans would even know who they were.

The hard part in really delivering on a team like the Hellions is making sure to write each character’s distinct voice correctly so that they don’t just all blend together like a bunch of murderous evildoers. Nanny & Orphan Maker both have very specific points of view, and nailing their sentence structure and tone and delivery is really what makes them so appealing and different when compared to most other characters out there.


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As the Nanny super-fan that I am, you can be sure that her characterization was under my microscope for the entire Hellions series, and I was very happy that in 18 issues I definitely felt that her essence was represented and channeled properly, and that I was getting the Nanny that I loved while also seeing some new growth and development from her.

ORIGIN: THE RIGHT & X-FACTOR

Nanny’s real name is Eleanor Mulch, and she was a brilliant cyborg technologist who used to work for The Right. The Right is an anti-mutant hate group that was founded by the X-Men’s friend-turned-foe Cameron Hodge, and it’s an organization with one mission and one mission only: to destroy all mutants. In order to accomplish that, it uses smiley-faced robots which – presumably – Nanny helped to create. 


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Eleanor didn’t know that The Right was a terrorist organization, though, and being a mutant herself, she sought to stop them after she discovered the truth. She was overpowered, though, and The Right ended up trapping her inside her iconic egg-shaped armor, which apparently also drove her a little bit insane.


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From there, Nanny began her crusade of saving mutant children from their adult oppressors (whether the children needed saving or not). She refused to let organizations like The Right harm mutant children, and it became her personal mission to see to their safety – or at least, whatever she saw as their safety. 

In her first successful conquest she recruited Peter and he became her Orphan Maker, and like his name suggests, his job would be to go around killing mutant children’s parents, effectively making them orphans, and thus making them eligible for Nanny’s help. 


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The whole thing is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy for Nanny, where she creates the situation in order to necessitate her involvement.

She and Orphan Maker flew around in her weird-looking ship during the early X-Factor days, and killed and kidnapped lots of people in order for Nanny to make her own little supergroup of Lost Boys (And Girls). They got involved in the Inferno storyline, and Nanny managed to hijack a list of babies that The Right & N’astirh were planning on sacrificing, making it her mission to get to them first.


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She succeeded, for the most part, and N’astirh’s plan was being confounded by her meddling even though the demons didn’t even know it was Nanny who was involved at all. It feels like Nanny was doing a good thing here by intercepting N’astirh’s plan, but she was still instructing Orphan Maker to kill the babies’ parents, so…not exactly as altruistic as it all seems. 


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Nanny’s quest eventually took her to the very orphanage where Cyclops grew up, and where he and Jean were currently looking for his lost son, Nathan Christopher aka the boy who would become the man Cable. They found him below in Mr Sinister’s secret lab full of other mutant children, just as Nanny and her team of Lost Boys & Girls broke in ready to enact her own form of rescue.


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Chaos broke out, as both Nanny & X-Factor wanted to rescue the kids for themselves, and through their mutual distractions, N’astirh’s Inferno demons slinked in and kidnapped a bunch of the babies, Nathan Chistropher included (talk about a messiah complex!).

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Nanny was furious and made a quick retreat with her team, vowing to rescue the babies from the demons. Along the way she came across Franklin Richards’ mutant signature, and she sent Orphan Maker to capture him. 

He was unable to kill Franklin’s parents though (them being Mr Fantastic & Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four), and when they discovered that Franklin had been kidnapped, they locked onto Nanny’s ship and chased after it.


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Nanny was super cross at Peter for not having killed the parents, as this is just the kind of problem that can arise when the kids aren’t orphaned, and she sent him back out to fight them and finish the job. He did alright against the super heroes, but inevitably the tide turned in their favour, until Nanny’s latest recruit joined the fracas – namely Franklin Richards himself.


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Franklin was trapped inside some of Nanny’s weird armor and was under her enchantment, so he fought his parents with all his might, but still it wasn’t enough, and they defeated him while Nanny & Orphan Maker made their getaway.

After Inferno ended and the Inferno Babies weren’t sacrificed after all, Nanny resumed her quest to save them, and she broke into an X-Factor ship where they were being held, hoping to finally rid herself of X-Factor and get these babies into her care!


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Nanny and X-Factor fought, but it was a pretty short-lived battle, and X-Factor overpowered the child-specialist duo, thus the Inferno babies were saved yet again from Nanny’s dreadful daycare.

OUTBACK X-MEN & STORM

The next time Nanny showed up was to save the X-Men from the impending attack by the Reavers. She had been spying on Donald Pierce and she knew that he and his cybernetic gang had it out for the X-Men. Even though the X-Men weren’t babies, she still considered them orphans of society, so it was her duty to adopt them in order to save them from certain death.


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The X-Men had just lost Rogue after a battle with Master Mold, and they were licking their wounds in their Australian Outback HQ when Nanny showed up and started capturing them one by one.

First she bewitched Psylocke with her pixie dust, then Orphan Maker trapped Dazzler & Havok while they were out for a sexy run, and then Nanny armored them all up and had them hunt for Colossus. She almost got her hands on Jubilee too, who was hiding out in the X-Men’s headquarters (unbeknownst to them), but Jubes managed to get the best of her and escape.


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Luckily Storm showed up and started taking out the mind-controlled X-Men and restoring them to their senses. Nanny & Orphan Maker realized their plan was foiled, so they tried to escape via Nanny’s ship, but Storm pursued them. Then in a moment of woozy panic, Havok lashed out with a plasma burst hoping to keep Nanny from flying away. It looked like he succeeded a bit too well, though, having destroyed the ship and killing Storm in the process.

But of course that wasn’t the case at all, as the Storm corpse the X-Men saw was actually just a life model decoy-mannequin that Nanny had procured from SHIELD, as were the ship remains, and Nanny & Peter had made a successful getaway with the real Storm in tow.

Safely away from the X-Men, they began the process of de-aging her, turning her from an adult into a child, and wiping her memories so that she could join Nanny’s Orphan Making brigade to be shaped and molded by Nanny’s values.


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Storm is a resilient one though, and even though she couldn’t remember her time with the X-Men, she knew that something wasn’t right about Nanny. She kept having flashes of her time as a super-hero, which didn’t make sense to her, and nightmares about Nanny, which was basically her innermost self trying to guide her back to her real life, and she knew she had to trust her instincts so she ran away.


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Nanny chased after her, becoming more and more worried about Storm’s safety after seeing her team up with Gambit and becoming prey to the Shadow King. While the Shadow King & his Hounds pursued Gambit & Storm, Nanny finally tracked them down too, and she managed to kidnap Gambit and bring him inside her ship in order to de-age him, too, and hopefully use his charm in helping them to finally find and ‘rescue’ Storm.


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Inside Nanny’s ship all of Storm’s memories about her transformation came back to her. She put on some of Nanny’s special Orphan Maker-armor in order to enact a rescue mission of her own and stop Nanny from doing the same de-aging process on Gambit as she had done to her. 

Together Gambit & Storm overpowered Nanny and they sent her ship crashing down while the two of them made their escape.


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GENERATION X


The next time Nanny & Orphan Maker showed up was many years later to trouble the Generation X kids. A young mutant named Eliot was holding his school hostage out of revenge for being expelled, and the Gen X kids were on the scene hoping to keep the peace while everything got sorted out.

That’s when Orphan Maker burst out of his & Nanny’s latest ride, which was an Ice Cream Truck, and he began demanding that Eliot come with him.



Orphan Maker had begun to grow out of his previous armor, so Nanny built him a new containment suit, but it wasn’t enough to best the next generation of mutants, and he and Nanny were forced to make a retreat before even making contact with Eliot.


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They soon got their revenge on Gen X, though, as Orphan Maker ambushed a bunch of them in the mall one Christmas Eve and managed to subdue pretty much all of them in one fell swoop.

He brought them back to Nanny’s creepy ship to be held hostage, and then set out to make an orphan of the latest mutant child Nanny had discovered. Luckily Jubilee interrupted him and saved the parents before Orphan Maker could kill them, but he did manage to escape with the child.


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Turns out it was the wrong child he nabbed, and when Nanny sent him back to get the correct child, he was surprised to see Santa Claus there!

Santa told Peter he’d been a bad boy this year because of all the people he had killed, which put him at odds with his mission – if he completed it he would disappoint Santa, but if he didn’t complete it then he would disappoint Nanny. Since Orphan Maker is basically just a child inside his armor, he didn’t know what to do.


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Luckily Nanny ran into some trouble of her own and summoned him back, and when he got back to the ship he found the Gen Xers that he had kidnapped were gone and Nanny was wrapped up like a present!


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SLINGERS

Nanny & Orphan Maker then showed up in the oddball 90s comic Slingers, which was a book that was basically about a bunch of teched-up New Warriors-esque teen heroes.

Ricochet was the mutant of the team, and he had been on Nanny’s radar for a while, as it showed that she and Orphan Maker were the ones responsible for brutally killing his mother back when he was younger in hopes of making an orphan out of him.


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They didn’t get Ricochet then, so Nanny wanted to tie up loose ends and recruit him as one of her Lost Boys now. 

She sent Orphan Maker to kidnap him and bring him back to her ship, where she revealed that she was the one who killed his mother. That didn’t go over well, and Ricochet managed to escape and crash Nanny’s ship just in time, as Orphan Maker was about to make short work of Ricochet’s father in hopes of finally making him a true orphan. 


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Ricochet defeated Orphan Maker, but as usual, he and Nanny hightailed it before any proper authorities could do anything with them.

NEW X-MEN

The last time Nanny vexed the X-Men was whenever she and Orphan Maker kidnapped Trance from the New X-Men team.

Even though it looked like they might have been doing her a favour since her family really wasn’t into her being a mutant in the first place, Trance didn’t see it that way – and neither did Wolverine, who was luckily staking the place out thanks to a head’s up from Blindfold.


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Orphan Maker destroyed Trance’s parents house, but didn’t get a chance to kill her actual folks thanks to Wolvie’s intervention. He did manage to subdue both Logan and Trance, though, and he brought them both back to Nanny’s ship.

Nanny planned to de-age Wolverine so that he and Trance could both join her Orphan Making squad, but Trance lashed out with her astral form, and together she and Wolverine immobilized the villains until they could make a getaway.


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The duo also made a brief appearance during the Uncanny X-Men Disassembled era, when Cyclops’ team was hunting down all the threats that ever ailed the X-Men over the years. They located Nanny & Orphan Maker stationed out in a log cabin in the woods, and attacked and managed to subdue both of them without too much of a struggle.


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After that, all was quiet on the Nanny & Orphan Maker front until they were recruited to be starring members of the Hellions series!

HELLIONS

The Quiet Council decreed that it was necessary to form a team of people who were having a hard time adjusting to Krakao, in hopes that working together could help socialize them and help them work through their ‘issues’, and Nanny & Orphan Maker were both picked due to their unhealthy co-dependence on each other.


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Psylocke was selected as the team’s leader, and under Mr Sinister’s orders they went on various missions, like destroying Sinister’s clone farm at the very orphanage where Nanny & Orphan Maker once battled Cyclops & Marvel Girl for baby Cable and the Inferno children.


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The Hellions had to battle some zombified Marauders and Madelyne Pryor who was aptly in her Goblin Queen guise, but they did the job and the clone farm was destroyed.

The Hellions were then charged by the Krakoan Quiet Council to enter Arakko through the backdoor of Otherworld during the X of Swords event to try to steal the ten swords Arakko needed in order to compete in Saturnyne’s tournament, thereby ending the event before it could even start.


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The whole thing was a ruse by Sinister just to get genetic sampling of Arakko mutants, and they ran afoul of Tarn and his Locus Vile team, where Nanny and Orphan Maker were both killed during battle. Nanny was expedited through the resurrection protocols, but because she died in Arakko, she came back a bit differently and was a much more ‘focused’ and heightened version of herself.


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Orphan Maker was put on the resurrection fast track as well, but they required a new containment suit for him first in order to keep his x-gene in check, so the Hellions were dispatched to get one from Nanny’s old ship that was currently being held by her former employer, The Right!

While the Hellions fought a seemingly-resurrected Cameron Hodge and his smiley robots, Nanny and Wild Child went to go repossess the ship, and in the process, Nanny found a brand new orphan to take care of in the form of a smiley robot baby, which she tucked away in secret. 


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With Nanny’s Nanny-tech back in her possession, Orphan Maker was finally resurrected. Like Nanny, he too was killed in Arakko, so his genetic structure was also re-focused, making him a much more grown boy than he was before, although still with the mind of a child.


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This is when the cracks in their relationship began to form. Peter was finally “growing up”, or at least acting out and asserting some independence against Nanny, and Nanny would play some psychological games against him where she favoured the little baby robot instead of him, which of course would make Peter jealous.



When the Hellions were kidnapped by Arcade & Mastermind, Nanny’s illusion saw her adopting ALL the mutant orphans she possibly could, while Orphan Maker’s illusion was him being the center of Nanny’s attention again. When the illusions turned sour, Nanny & Peter were running for their lives from the suddenly-turned-bloodthirsty orphans who were chasing them down with knives and swords.


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That adventure ended with Orphan Maker supposedly shooting Arcade, and with the revelation that the entire kidnapping event had been orchestrated by Mr Sinister to begin with so that he could set-up a new clone farm and keep it super secret from everyone.  

A highlight of Nanny’s characterization for a lot of people was at the Hellfire Gala, when the Hellions crashed the party and both she and Orphan Maker got super wasted and started telling everybody off.



At the time, I wasn’t too fond of this depiction because it was such a departure from the humor I usually love in her…but I’ve warmed up to it more now after the fact, and I can acquiesce that it is kind of funny seeing Nanny be so foul-mouthed and out-of-character, because I guess that was the point of it! And who hasn’t gotten a little messy after some drinks?


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Nanny’s big, active throughline throughout the Hellions series was about the little baby robot that she adopted, and Orphan Maker’s growing jealousy of the attention that she was giving to it instead of to him.



It looked like Nanny was rejecting him, so Peter actually managed to branch out a bit and find friends on the team in his twisted way. This sort of social-development was pretty much the reason why the Krakoan Council formed the team in the first place, so I guess mission accomplished there…

When Tarn & The Locus Vile came seeking revenge on SInister for him having stolen genetic samples, Nanny showed a very uncharacteristically ruthless violent side.

She and Orphan Maker attacked the intruders viciously, which was said to be due to a new “fight” response they have in their resurrected DnA, where any time they are placed in a situation in which they might die again in a similar manner as before, their body’s instinctively react to fight against it. So since it was the Locus Vile who killed them before, it was now the Locus Vile who were the subject of their wraths.



After the fight, the truth about Sinister orchestrating the whole Murderworld-kidnapping to create his own secret clone-farm came out, and it was revealed that he’s been splicing Tarn’s DnA with his own. Under secret orders from Emma Frost, Empath used his powers on Havok and had Alex blow the farm up, destroying all of Sinister’s work along with all of Psylocke’s daughter’s DnA.


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Not sure if it was Sinister’s betrayal or the loss of a child’s genome or just the culmination of her hatred for him that caused Nanny to crack, but it looked like she was finally going to slit Sinister’s throat and be done with him forever, until the X-Men showed up and diffused the situation. 



This was basically the end of the Hellions, and Nanny was ready to move on from Peter and care for the robot baby full time, much to Orphan Maker’s dismay. But little did Nanny know that The Right had been tracking her ship all this time, and as she was nursing the baby, they finally managed to hijack into her ship’s computer and take control of it in order to subdue her.


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Turns out it wasn’t just any old scientists from The Right, but it was her former husband Harold who was out for revenge against her and wanted to frame her as a traitor to her race. 

First he ejected the robot baby and sent it flying back to The Right’s compound, then he programmed Nanny’s ship to collide into Krakoa’s Bowery and kill all the mutant babies who were being born and nursed there. The goal was to make Nanny look like a monster in the eyes of her peers, but he failed to consider the ferocity with which Nanny assumes her position as caregiver to little babies, so she initiated a self-destruction of her ship before Harold’s programming could complete its mission.


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Nanny somehow survived the explosion, and even though Orphan Maker came to her rescue, she ultimately rejected him, upset that her new baby was taken from her. Looking to get back into Nanny’s good graces, Orphan Maker went on a solo mission to The Right’s headquarters where he hoped to rescue the robot baby and bring it back to Krakoa. 


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Of course he was in WAY over his head, so Nanny recruited her other Hellions for one final mission and together they stormed the compound to fight the evil Right soldiers, as Orphan Maker makes his way to where the scientists are holding and experimenting on the baby.


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Peter’s intimidating presence was enough for Harold to yield and hand over the baby, and it’s a happy reunion between Nanny and child until the big SHOCK OF THE SERIES is revealed, as the baby – though seemingly having been so cute and amiable toward Nanny all this time – suddenly calls her a mutie scum thanks to its programming and detonates, killing her instantly 


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Peter is shooketh by this, and in his grief he goes on a killing rampage. He snaps Harold’s neck, and shoots the other scientists & anybody else in his way, including soldiers and harmless park rangers.


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He’s brought to the Quiet Council to answer for his actions, and there’s little debate in what the final result will be for him, even as the other Hellions protest.


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Resurrected-Nanny interrupts his sentencing and demands to be sent down into the pit with him, telling the council that if they should refuse her then she will go on a killing rampage of her own, starting with Kitty’s mother, whose exact street address she suspiciously already knows. 


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The council begrudgingly agrees to Nanny’s terms, and the two of them get dragged down by Krakoa into exile, as Nanny sings to Orphan Maker one of her creepy Nanny songs.

It’s a very sad fate for two somewhat-complex characters, and I really hope it’s not the end of them. They were a surprising force to be reckoned with given that their appearances are somewhat used for comedic-purposes, at least in the case of Nanny.

POWERS & TECH

A big part of why Nanny & Peter are so formidable is because of their powers and tech. Nanny’s mutant power is a low-level telepathy, which she uses in conjunction with her home-brewed Pixie Dust in order to sway her victims into her persuasion.


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The Pixie Dust is some sort of hallucinogenic sensory inhibitor, and it’s potent enough to be used on its own even without Nanny’s telepathy, as Orphan Maker uses himself sometimes when he’s recruiting new kids for the Lost Boys & Girls club.


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It might be that Nanny’s telepathy is only strong enough to be used on kids so that’s why she doesn’t employ it very often on adults the way that other telepaths like Jean Grey & Emma do, but it has been shown that she can use it to nudge people in the direction she wants them to go in, like when she psychically influenced Havok to blow up her plane after they captured Storm.


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With or without her telepathy, though, Nanny’s most fearsome advantage is her high-level intellect. She’s a cyborgist, so she’s super good with machines, and some of the things she’s invented have even baffled other brilliant minds such as Reed Richards.

She’s a skilled inventor and is the brains behind the Orphan Maker containment suits, which have encased everybody from her own Orphan Maker, to a few of the X-Men like Havok and Dazzler and Psylocke, to omega-powered non-mutant Franklin Richards.


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She developed the suits to be super strong and durable, as they’ve withstood beatings from all kinds of superheroes, though they aren’t totally indestructible, since Wolverine’s adamantium claws have previously sliced through them. 

Whatever the material is that she uses for the suits, it creates like a ‘ricochet’ effect on them which causes things to bounce right off their surface, like when Cyclops’ optic blast kept bouncing off Peter’s suit when they were fighting in Sinister’s Orphanage lab. 



Nanny can also generate a similar type of repulsor field around her own armor, which she used once against the Beast to slide him off of her, and her armour is also equipped with extendable arms so she can grab or punch things from afar, as well as holographic projectors that shoot out from her eyes. 


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I don’t think she was the initial creator of her egg-shell suit since it was forced onto her by The Right, but I assume that she at least improved on it with these new designs and modifications to suit her needs since it became her prison.

She has very rarely been seen in the comics without the armor, and I think the only instances we have seen of her actual body are in the shadowy silhouettes of when she worked at The Right, or for a while when Orphan Maker was bothering Generation X and she was communicating with him from afar without the shell armor on. I for one am dying to know what she really looks like, and I can’t help but feel like it’s a hunched over old woman or something like that, which just adds to the appeal of her even more.



Even when she was resurrected, she refused to come out of her resurrection pod, instead punching her arms and legs through and wearing it just like her Egg Armor, so clearly she’s become very attached to the look. Harold suggested as much, that she wears it by choice now instead of as a prison since he was also shocked to see her still in it after he confronted her on Krakoa.


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Probably the scariest part of Nanny’s tech (that we know about) is her de-ager, which she uses on her victims in order to regress them into childhood and make them more susceptible to her wiles. 

This is the device she used on Storm in order to turn her into a child and strip her of her adult memories. She was going to use it on Wolverine as well, back when she kidnapped him and Trance, and I assume she was also planning on using it on the entire Australian Outback X-Men team, as Nanny & Orphan Maker can be seen watching holo-images of the team getting progressively younger and younger as they formulate their plan of attack. 


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In terms of weapons for these two, it’s usually guns guns and more guns. Orphan Maker’s suit comes equipped with all kinds of projectiles, and he’s been seen blasting everything from lazers to bazookas. Nanny isn’t quite as trigger happy as he is, and the most I’ve seen her use was an electrically-charged riding crop thing that she really only ever used to punish Orphan Maker when he was getting out of line.


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After Peter outgrew his original Orphan-Maker armor, Nanny upgraded him with some sort of bio-armor which could generate its own guns right out of its arms and use bullets made of like…bio-matter, or something.

It kind of reminded me of the way Random can turn his hands into guns or, for a recent example, how Domino can use her Krakoan Tech Arm to change it into like anything she wants. The same principle seems to apply to Orphan Maker, albeit it’s all in that specific suit of armor, and none of it is mutant ability based for him.



FUTURE

Speaking of his mutant power, Orphan Maker’s x-gene remains a mystery to this very day. Shortly after they debuted, Nanny indicated that she had rescued him from Sinister who was planning on killing him because his mutant potential was too terrifying. Charles Xavier asserted as much after they put him into the resurrection queue, calling his mutant gift a curse, and agreeing that his x-gene should never be activated. 


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The mystery surrounding Peter’s ability is one of the most interesting unanswered questions of his character, and I hope to god that him being sentenced to the pit doesn’t mean that we won’t eventually have an answer as to what it is. If it really is as devastating as everybody says, then it’s just like a tease for them to give us that information and not deliver on it!

Another thing that I’d like some closure on with these characters is Nanny’s vengeance against Sinister. Her animosity toward him all series long was a subtle undercurrent of joy for me, and she would pop up beside him every now and again, reminding him that she was watching him with her big eggy eyes.


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Right from the very moment she was first recruited for the team, Nanny wasn’t going to take any BS from Sinister, and she let him know it in a very polite but chilling Nanny-esque way

Since it’s Sinister whom she rescued Peter from way back in the day, it figures that she would be distrusting of him as the Hellions’ leader, and also that she would take any excuse to end his life for the violence he has done against children in the past, which she almost did a few times throughout the series.


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Some of Nanny’s creepiest moments was when she was politely insulting and threatening Sinister, like when they returned from destroying SInister’s first lab and she basically told him she was coming for him, and then again at the Hellfire Gala when she toasted to his years of murder and abuse of children.


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She almost killed him at the gala, too, so I mean, Nanny obviously has unresolved feelings of hatred that she needs to take out on Sinister, and I for one am totally hoping that we still someday will get to see that.

There’s also an unresolved story of how Nanny knows the Shadow King from some time in the past. Maybe they met along the astral plane one day, as Nanny was very aware of who he was when he was chasing baby Storm, and she knew all about his evil powers and his ability to turn people into his hounds. I think we’re less likely to get that story over a Nanny vs Sinister story, but I mean, I’m totally here for whatever Nanny stories we can get!


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So that’s it for my epic Nanny & Orphan Maker saga! As you can tell, I totally love these characters, and even though they met a beautifully tragic end in the Hellions swan song issue, my one hope is that through all of the misadventures they went through on Krakoa what they now have a whole new horde of readers they can call their fans. 

If Sabretooth can have his own mini about jailbreaking from the Pit, then maybe Nanny & Orphan Maker can get their own, too, and I will be first in line to buy it!

Information shared from: Greatxmentations.com

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