Art by FeydRautha81
- Name: Unknown
- Code Names: Tessa, Sage
- First Appearance: X-Men #132 (April 1980)
- Powers: Telepathy, Compter-like Brain, Ability to Jump Start Mutant Powers
- Teams Affiliation: Hellfire Club, X-Men, Excalibur, Exiles
About
X-Men fans love continuity. It isn’t shocking that one of the most recommended comics podcasts is a couple just trying to X-Plain it (Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men for those who don’t know), it’s a fun challenge that the type of people attracted to the X-Men really love. Tying characters together in little ways or building on old concepts is something the fans dig and writers latch onto. Heck, when Cullen Bunn started his run on Uncanny this year he began it with the reintroduction of villains who hadn’t been seen in twenty years. Just imagine if you could make these concepts real, imagine if your entire life was based on it, and imagine if it was all you were doing for seventeen years. Chris Claremont was an X-Men fan, he took the team from nothing and made it into the group anchoring the best-selling comic ever. He was well known for his ability “to Claremont”, a term used in the X-Offices to define a writer planting the seeds for a story that they may or may not ever get back to. Chris was a master of this but one of his ideas showed his patience better than others when a recurring Hellfire club character was retconned by Claremont into the X-Man with a supercomputer in her brain. Seventeen years after creating Tessa, Claremont turned her into Sage.
Readers were introduced to Tessa in the midst of the Dark Phoenix saga and she was simply set dressing. Another character with Victorian hair and bondage gear. Overtime her character grew, she wasn’t simply the Black King Sebastian Shaw’s personal handmaiden, she was a cold and calculating mutant who often worked to cool tensions between the X-Men and the Hellfire Club. She seemed to work, not for power but to ensure the Club continued operations without issue. When Selene joined, Tessa expressed her concerns to Shaw that Selene may be too unstable for the group to deal with. When the Hellfire Club teamed up with the X-Men to take down the Sentinel Nimrod it was she who the X-Men trusted at keeping the truce. She continued on in the background until she heard news that shook her world. Sebastian Shaw was dead.
Art by John Romita Jr, P. Craig Russell, and Glynis Oliver
Tessa began to slip into the background of the 90’s. She worked for Sebastian’s son Shinobi for a hot seconded before realigning herself with the not-quite-dead elder Shaw. She crossed paths with Madelyne Pryor and used her telepathy to return Maddie’s memories to her. She was more or less forgotten till Chris Claremont returned to the book. When he returned the books took a six month gap and in the meantime big changes happened to the cast including Tessa joining the X-Men in a supporting role. When Storm was assembling a team to search for the prophetic Destiny Diaries she needed someone to keep contact with the mansion. She chose Tessa and the living computer took the name Sage.
Art by Thomas Derenick, Rick Ketcham, Norm Rapmund, and Liquid!
Her time with Storm’s X-Treme X-Men revealed much more about Sages past. Sebastian Shaw learned that his Tessa had aligned herself with the X-Men and enlisted Lady Mastermind to trap her in an illusion that she was still in the Hellfire Club. Lifeguard entered Sage’s mind to rescue her and got glimpses of her past, a young girl in the Balkans being attacked by a militia, a young girl being told by Xavier that she would be his spy, not a soldier like the rest of them, Shaw dancing with his Tessa. Shaw attempted to get his Tessa to kill her Sage personality but Lifeguard was able to intervene and break the spell over Sage.
Art by Salvador Larroca and Liquid!
Sage began working as a close partner to her teammate Bishop and assisted him in his investigations. When Emma Frost was shattered the two came to the Xavier Institute to find the murder. When a student at the institute was accused of murdering his family, Sage Bishop, and headmaster (and former White Queen of the Hellfire Club) Emma Frost investigated to ensure the proper parties came to justice. Their investigation found that the boy had been possessed by someone who even Sage feared, Elias Bogan.
Bogan came for revenge against Sage and more of her past trickled out. She was in Afghanistan when Xavier was crippled by Lucifer and was the first person to find him and get him to help. When Xavier decided to create the X-Men he enlisted Sage but not as a soldier, she would infiltrate the Hellfire Club for him and feed him information about Sebastian Shaw. Shaw loved his new toy and called her Tessa, he would learn to respect her but always controlled her. She came across Bogdan, an elder of the Hellfire Club, playing cards against Shaw and the stakes were the control of Emma Frost. Bogdan was a card shark and had never lost until Tessa used her telepathy to feed him information. Bogdan knew he was cheated and he knew Tessa was responsible. He captured her, tortured her, and scared her. Storm rescued her and brought her into the X-Men but Tessa was disturbed from the experience. Tessa finally confronted Bogan and was able to overcome him.
Art by Igoy Kordy, Greg Adams, and Liquid!
Sage found herself at a crossroad when Sunspot was offered his fathers place as a member of the Hellfire Club. She decided to rejoin the Club to advise them and left the X-Men. This was short lived however and she joined the newest incarnation of Excalibur. To defeat the alternate reality Brian Braddock, Albion, Sage put her spycraft to use and created the persona of Diana Fox to infiltrate his ranks. Sage found herself overwhelmed by her new identity and began to only think and act as Diana, even killing some of Excalibur’s allies but eventually her teammates were able to help the Sage personality to become dominate once again. Excalibur teamed up with the Exiles and Sage was given the entirety of Roma’s cosmic knowledge. Feeling overwhelmed by this expanded mind Sage chose to stay with the Exiles rather than on Earth. When the Exiles realized that their base, The Crystal Palace, had become the source of a multiversal collapse, Sage merged with it stabilize all worlds.
At some point Sage left the Exiles and made her home as the human liason for an army of intergalactic machine warriors. This conflict came to a head when that worlds young Kurt Waggoner returned and was captured by the robot leader Danger. Danger wanted to have the boy executed but Sage believed he should be spared. When Dazzler’s interdimensional X-Treme X-Men came to rescue their teammate Kurt, Sage sided with them and followed out of the dimension. She used her tactical mind to assist the X-Men on their mission to assassinate the ten evil Xaviers. When their team was unable to stop the release of the Exterminators they shifted into the Age of Apocalypse universe and teamed up with William Stryker’s team for the wasteland and the 616 Astonishing X-Men to shut the dimensional rift. With their mission finished Sage returned to the 616 and hasn’t been seen since.
Art by Stephen Segovia, Dennis Crisostomo, and Jessica Kholinne
Must Read
Sage is a character that very few writers have taken under their pen. She was almost entirely written by Claremont with only a handful by anyone else but the story he first let her shine in remains her best. X-Treme X-Men came at a weird time for the X-Men, Claremont had just been removed from his position as the head writer and editor for both Uncanny and Adjectiveless X-Men, he had no desire to craft his own corner of the Marvel Universe with all the editorial mandates that included. They gave him the cast he wanted and he just let his ideas run wild. It was a huge turnaround from his recent work. Claremont was able to dig into new characters and concepts and make characters like Sage and Thunderbird interesting. Artist Salvador Larroca brought a clean stylistic look to the book that kept readers coming back. The whole series is available on Marvel Unlimited or in 9 volumes of trades.
Art by Salvador Larroca and Liquid!
Ranking
Sage seems like a character who is better in concept than in execution. When well written she is an engaging look at a determined character. When written poorly she is just a plot device that Claremont keeps coming back to. She should be a better character than she ends up being, but barley every reaches past overtly bad. I love that she is willing to call out Xavier for being a jerk but I’m not a fan of how she was constantly used to solve all the plot’s problems in her early appearances. I think she is better than Marrow since I have actually sympathized with Sage. I don’t think she can be ranked higher than Omega Sentinel solely because Karima has such a killer design. That leaves Darwin as the breaking point and I think he edges Sage out because he is genuinely more enjoyable to read. Sage and her computer brain can just be taxing to read about and that’s why she is the new number 21 in the Xavier Files.
Sage was requested by /u/lecturemoriarty on reddit Thanks for the request I hope you enjoyed it! If YOU have a character you want me to do, leave a comment and I’ll get it added to the list.
If you liked what you read be sure to subscribe to the tumblr so you never miss an update. You can also follow me on twitter@Xavierfiles where I throw out my thoughts about the X-Books that come out each week. That’s also where I harass Cullen Bunn and Dennis Hopeless about getting Maggott back into the X-Men books, join in on that fun with #BringBackMaggott! Or like the Facebook page!
Next week we dive into Academy X as Mercury joins the list. See you then!
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
