BIOGRAPHY - Page 2
Despite receiving an enormous electric shock from Voltron, James survived and began to reflect on recent events. With the Invaders believing him dead, he returned to his job at Mercy Hospital and tried to get on with his life again. Repentant over his allegiance with the Nazis, James took up the mantle of Doctor Nemesis once more and turned his attention to hunting down Nazis after the war. Thanks to the serum that slowed his aging process, James remained relatively youthful as the decades passed, giving him the edge when it came to tracking down his Nazi prey. He 
experimented on himself too, altering his eyes so that they functioned like cameras and were able to see things that ordinary humans, and mutants, could not.
Many years later, the number of mutants in the world started to increase sharply. James, however, decided against reaching out to any of them, choosing instead to operate alone. After M-Day, when most of the world’s mutants lost their powers, James still had his and for him it was business as usual. While hunting Nazis in Argentina, he was approached by Beast and Angel from the X-Men, who were looking to recruit him onto their fringe science team. Taking a dim view of their costumed super-heroics, James turned their offer down initially. Beast appealed to his scientific curiosity (as well as his ego) and James relented, joining the newly formed X-Club. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #504]
Doctor Nemesis’ inflated self-importance and cutting remarks quickly started to grate on some of the other team members, but they all nevertheless worked together for their new common goals. With Dr. Kavita Rao, Dr. Yuriko Takiguchi and Madison Jeffries rounding out the ranks, X-Club was ready to begin their quest to solve the problem of M-Day. The team soon devised a plan to travel back in time and take blood samples from parents of some of the first generation of modern mutants. They didn’t need to look any further than Doctor Nemesis himself, as his birth in 1906 was at the beginning of an uptick in mutant births.
After creating some devices that allowed them to travel back in time for thirty-two hours, the team travelled to 1906 to talk to James’ parents. Presented with the opportunity to meet his parents for the first time, James turned it down, instead declaring himself to be in the support role for the mission. Even when things started going wrong and his parents refused to talk to the team, James remained at a distance. As it turned out, Nicola and Catherine Bradley had gotten into trouble with the Hellfire Club, and the X-Club came to their rescue just in time.
When Catherine collapsed, James went back on his non-involvement pledge and tended to his pregnant mother personally. Without telling her that he was her time-travelling adult son, he ordered her to stay in bed for the remainder of her pregnancy, as she had a medical condition that could endanger herself and the child. When the Hellfire Club attacked with their primitive version of a Sentinel, Nicola was fatally injured when it was destroyed.
James was on hand to comfort his father as he passed away, whilst also managing to collect one of the blood samples they travelled to the past for. With their goal complete, the X-Club travelled to the future again to reflect on their experiences. Without the others knowing, James returned to 1906 sometime later and assisted his mother in giving birth to himself. Despite his best efforts, Catherine still died in childbirth. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #509, 512]
It wasn’t just the effects of M-Day that the X-Club worked on. They also came in handy when the X-Men were put under a lot of political pressure from Norman Osborn. Knowing the group’s time in San Francisco was numbered, Cyclops had Doctor Nemesis and the rest of X-Club raise one of Magneto’s downed asteroid bases from the ocean floor. Using the floating rock as an island, all the mutants relocated there and set up their new home of Utopia. [Utopia crossover]
The work didn’t stop there, though. James and the others worked around the clock to make the island inhabitable, as well as make sure it didn’t sink back into the ocean again. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #518-522] On top of that, there were other missions and projects that needed James’ urgent attention, such as repelling an attack by Emplate, as well as Selene and her army of techno-organic zombies. [X-Men: Legacy (1st series) #228-230, Necrosha crossover]
Doctor Nemesis and the rest of X-Club found themselves being drawn more and more into the central workings of X-Men and Utopia as a whole. This wasn’t always a positive thing, as the team found themselves being personally targeted by Bastion when the robot attacked the X-Men. Hope Summers, the first mutant baby born after M-Day, had been sent to the future for safety. After spending years traveling in time, she eventually returned to the present day a young woman. Bastion had been planning for this moment and initiated his plan to wipe out Hope and the entire mutant race.
Knowing that Doctor Nemesis and X-Club’s scientific expertise were the greatest threat to his plans, Bastion laid a trap for them. After intel pointed to suspicious activity on board an oil rig, James and the others travelled to it to investigate. Once they boarded the rig, they discovered it empty except for a bomb, which had a timer counting down on it. When it reached zero, Nemesis and the others were surprised when they were seemingly transported to a dystopian future.
In this future, they met up with an aged version of Beast, who explained that Hope had lost control of her powers and inflicted massive destruction on the planet. He asked X-Club to synthesize a version of Kavita Rao’s cure serum, which would be used to depower Hope and any other mutant. Doctor Nemesis agreed with the course of action and came to blows with Kavita, who felt incredibly guilty over making the serum in the first place. Kavita eventually relented and made the serum but, when the X-Club went to use it, they discovered that the whole event had been an elaborate trick. The whole dystopian future had been a holographic scenario created by Graydon Creed, one of Bastion’s minions, in a bid to manipulate Kavita into recreating her serum. Doctor Nemesis figured it all out soon enough but Kavita revealed she was one step ahead the whole time and had set her own trap for Graydon. The serum she created was explosive, 
repelling Graydon and his team, as well as causing the oil rig to set on fire. Nemesis and the others jumped into the ocean before the whole rig exploded. However, when they looked to Utopia for help, they were shocked to see it was enclosed in a giant forcefield. Despite their best efforts, Nemesis and the rest of X-Club were unable to destroy it or even get inside. Fortunately, Hope Summers managed to destroy Bastion from inside the force field, putting an end to his plan. [X-Men: Blind Science #1, Second Coming crossover]
It wasn’t long before Doctor Nemesis’ scientific genius was needed again when vampires decided to attack the X-Men, looking to add the mutants to their supernatural ranks. When several people were infected, Nemesis and the X-Club studied them, as well as a vampire whom the team had taken hostage. Naturally, things went wrong quite quickly, with the vampire escaping from its containment and going after the other patients. Nemesis willingly locked himself and the vampire in the science labs, so it couldn’t escape to the rest of Utopia. It was a gamble that nearly cost him his life, but James’ genius triumphed again and he figured out how to beat the creature. [X-Men (3rd series) #1-6, X-Men: Curse of the Mutants – Smoke and Blood #1]
Doctor Nemesis would get a chance to flex his scientific genius once more when he, along with Cyclops, Namor and Hope, were accidentally sent to the Negative Zone. With their own way back destroyed, the team split up to try to figure out an alternative route home, with Nemesis pairing up with Namor. It became apparent quite quickly that Namor was suffering from water withdrawal, as he angrily lashed out at James when the scientist saved him from one of the many monsters in the Negative Zone. Namor stormed off, leaving Doctor Nemesis to go it alone. After finding a base used by some of the inhabitants of the Negative Zone, James took a number of their scientists hostage and forced them to build a new device that could open a portal back to Earth. His threats of violence paid off, as the scientists managed to use some technology Nemesis brought with him to fashion a new portal device.
Escaping from the enemy base with the device, Nemesis made his way to Prison 42, a leftover from the Superhuman Civil War and one of the only other structures in the Negative Zone, serving as the throne of the dimension’s ruler, Blastaar. Luring some of the zone’s monsters to him, Nemesis used them to create a distraction, allowing him to get into Prison 42 and meet up with the rest of his group. Once there, he discovered that Steve Rogers had been sent to rescue them, but his plan had gone wrong and he was now trapped with them. Fortunately for all of them, Nemesis’ portal device allowed them all to escape the Negative Zone and return to Earth. [Escape from the Negative Zone crossover]