Fictional character biography
Jamie is the oldest son of Dr. James and Elisabeth Braddock. Nearly a decade older than his siblings, the twins Brian and Elisabeth ("Betsy"), Jamie had a relatively isolated childhood. [2]
Jamie becomes a financial genius and successful race car driver. He is the head of Braddock Industries, a company that flourishes under his leadership. Eventually, Jamie discovers Brian's secret identity as Captain Britain and assisted him on several occasions. In his spare time, Jamie begins making illegal bets and accumulates debt. Soon, he becomes involves with various illegal activities to pay his debts. Starting out with minor crimes, Jamie eventually becomes involved with robbery, murder, and slave-trading in Africa, resulting in him being kidnapped by Doctor Crocodile, an African scientist and former agent of R.C.X. Crocodile forces Jamie to contact Brian, believing Brian to be his accomplice. Crocodile's witch-doctor creates a hallucination for Brian so that she and Crocodile can observe Brian's reaction to the crimes Jamie had committed. Convinced that Brian is innocent, Crocodile tells Brian the truth about his brother's actions. Shocked and furious, Brian abandons Jamie.
Jamie's treatment at the hands of Doctor Crocodile eventually fractures his mind, leading him to believe that the world around him is merely a dream. The torture and hallucinations forced upon him also awakens his latent mutant ability to warp and restructure reality in his immediate environment. Sat-Yr-9, in the stolen identity of Courtney Ross, learns of Jamie's recently emerged powers and hires the interdimensional mercenaries known as the Technet to free him. When confronted by Technet, Crocodile reveals Jamie's crimes to them. Technet turns on Jamie, attacking him, but he defeats them easily and erases their memories of the events. He then uses his power to transform Doctor Crocodile into a crocodile and departs with Sat-Yr-9. Jamie is taken to his family home, Braddock Manor, where he uses his reality warping powers to change things back to the way they were in his youth, even resurrecting his family's housekeeper Emma Collins.
Sat-Yr-9 uses Jamie's reality warping powers to turn the London criminal Vixen into a fox. Moments afterward, he turns her assistant Nigel Frobisher into a duplicate of Vixen. Frobisher and Jamie ambush Excalibur, a superhero team Brian had joined. During the ambush, Jamie kills Alysande Stuart and captures Excalibur and Betsy Braddock. He is defeated when Brian's girlfriend Meggan managed to override his powers, allowing Betsy to break free and incapacitate him with her psychic blade, rendering him catatonic.
Brian resurrects his sister Betsy one year after she is killed in Spain, giving her to psionic, magic, and reality-warping abilities. Uatu the Watcher also appears inexplicably, implying that something of cosmic significance is about to happen. Jamie mentions a "cosmic threat" known as the Foursaken that has reappeared on Earth. He is pulled through a mysterious portal which the X-Men follow him through. Most of the team is captured, with the exception of Betsy, who was invisible to the Foursaken thanks to Jamie's alterations. During the conflict that follows, Jamie decides that he cannot allow his sister to be used as a pawn again, sacrificing himself instead to save the universe from the First Fallen, the Foursaken's master. [3]
Jamie appears alive once more, alongside his brother and the Captain Britain Corps defending Otherworld from the forces of a powerful sorcerer called the Goat. He offers to "cleanse" Betsy of the changes made to her mind and body over the course of her time with the X-Men, but she refuses. Though he initially appears to be reformed and cured of his insanity, it is eventually revealed that the Goat is a future incarnation of Jamie intent on consuming the multiverse to achieve godhood. As his power grows, Betsy forces Brian to kill Jamie by breaking his neck, erasing the Goat from existence. [4]
Jamie is resurrected by a group of magicians who become his followers. He begins searching for the Space Gem that was under Black Widow's care. Using the dark arts, he twists two young boys to track the Gem. However, Black Widow places a tracker in one of the magicians to find the boys and break Jamie's hold over them. When Black Widow confronts him in his hideout, Brian has an asp from the Sixth Dimension inject her with lethal venom. After Black Widow takes out Jamie's followers, she stabs him several times and severs his legs with a knife, causing more sixth-dimensional asps to emerge from his body. With help from Merlin, Black Widow deals with the asps while Jamie dies from his wounds, freeing the children from his control. Black Widow herself is saved from the asp venom by Merlin. [5]
Jamie is resurrected on Krakoa by the Five and reunited with Betsy. [6] Identified as an omega-level mutant and now known as Monarch, Jamie begins working with Apocalypse to take over Avalon. When Betsy is killed by Saturnyne during a battle with Isca the Unbeaten, Brian and Mister Sinister resurrect her in a clone body. [7]
Powers and abilities
Jamie Braddock is an omega-level mutant possessing the ability to warp reality in his immediate environment. Unlike most mutants, whose powers manifest at puberty or even younger, Jamie's power remained latent well into his adulthood, only emerging as a result of extreme mental duress due to Doctor Crocodile's mystical torture. Jamie's power allows him to perceive the universe as a mass of quantum strings which he can pull and twist to alter the fabric of reality to his whims. [8] Originally, his reality warping was relatively limited; he could only affect dense forms and needed to be close enough to pull on the quantum strings surrounding them. Over time, however, the strength of his power and his control of it have increased substantially; he is no longer limited to dense forms or his immediate surroundings. While not identified, Merlin has described him as a psionicist. [9]
Jamie's reality-warping power is immense in scope, limited only by his imagination and fluctuating sanity. He can create portals out of ordinary objects that can transport him across the planet or into other dimensions instantaneously, transform living beings into entirely different forms, grant various superhuman abilities to others (though they tend to fade over time), and can even resurrect the dead, however this particularity apparently can only be used on his own bloodline, as he only demonstrated this ability with his family.
