- Name: Neena Thurman
- Code Names: Domino
- First Appearance: New Mutants #98 (Feb ‘91) Though it is a bit more complicated than that
- Powers: Luck
- Teams Affiliation: X-Force, X-Men, Six Pack, Merc$ for Money
About
There is a beauty in coincidence. Domino Harvey was the daughter of Academy Award winning actor Laurence Harvey and, if she wanted, she wouldn’t have ever had a care in her life. She bounced around jobs for a while, looking for a thrill. One she found in 1993 when she decided to become a bounty hunter. It was a gripping story. What made this rich girl from London want to chase people in SoCal who thought skipping their court date was a good idea? Her story inspired director Tony Scott to make a movie loosely based on her life. That hard living life style caught up with her and at the age of 35 she overdosed on fentanyl. Her luck ran out. The X-Men character Domino was in no way inspired by the real Ms. Harvey, but it is funny the way things work out sometimes. If you are lucky enough, things line up and you are left with an exciting story.
Neena was a spy first and foremost. She was recruited out of the church she was raised in at a young age by the NSA and assigned to protect Dr. Milo Thurman, a man who developed the same abilities that the forgettable Inhuman from Civil War II had. While she initially hated the man, Domino fell in love with him and the two were wed. Like the great spies before her, Domino’s love wasn’t to last. AIM attacked and in the fray, Milo believed his love to be dead. A fact Domino never cared to correct.
She soon left the NSA and joined a new mercenary group led by a grizzled veteran named Cable. Their team, Six Pack, often worked for the morally dubious Mr. Tolliver but Domino lived for the thrill of it all. She stayed close with Cable and the two often used each other to release steam between missions. Cable did his famous disappearing act after a meeting with the mysterious Strife and the Six Pack soon split up.
Domino was captured by Tolliver and the mutant shape-shifter Copycat was sent to infiltrate Cable’s new team, X-Force, in her place. Tolliver tortured her but Domino stayed strong and resourceful. When X-Force attacked Tolliver’s base, Domino used the opportunity to escape and reveal what happened to her. Cable had unfinished business he had to attend to shortly afterward and handed the reins of X-Force to his most trusted Lieutenant, Domino. She led the team while he was away and became further integrated with the mutant world.
After X-Force disbanded, Domino returned to the life of a gun for hire. Over the years, Domino wondered about the mother she never knew and took jobs for intelligence contacts in return for the mysteriously classified information. She found reference to a Project Armageddon and decided to track the military installation down. She broke in and snuck her way towards the most secure room in the building. She readied her pistol and opened the door, only to be confronted by a five-year-old boy who looked just like her.
Regardless of whether this child was the world ending Project Armageddon or not, Dom couldn’t kill him. He had been tortured, experimented on, he was a victim too. The guards quickly closed in on the room and Domino fought to bring the child to safety. As they made their escape they were confronted by the Armajesuits, a militant branch of Catholic ninjas, led by Domino’s mother. She revealed that Domino and the boy were both her children. She had been artificially inseminated to produce mutant children for the government to use as genetic weapons. The boy, Lazarus, was deemed a success and put into cryostasis. Neena’s mother had a change of heart and spirited the wee baby Dom away to be raised by a priest. She had returned to prevent Lazarus from becoming the ultimate weapon he was made to be, by any means necessary. Domino had done some bad things in her life, but she wasn’t on board with child murder. She gunned her own mother down and escaped with the boy, leaving him in the same chapel she was raised in.
Dom bounced around mercenary groups for a while until she ran into Wolverine’s secret X-Force. Wolverine wasn’t aware of the extra baggage she had brought with him. Domino was lucky enough to upset both the Hand and the Assassins Guild by stopping a black market sexual slavery ring the Hand was running and stealing a quarter million in cash from the Assassins Guild. Both groups understandably wanted her eliminated. She enlisted Wolverine to help her by appealing to the sexual tension that had built up between the two and soon all of X-Force was mixed up between the warring factions. X-Force fought the group to a standstill and Wolverine convinced Domino to send all the money to a Japanese orphanage as penance for what she did. She sent most of it.
After this iteration of X-Force was made public and disbanded, Domino stayed with the X-Men in Utopia. She joined Storm’s security team and helped defend the island from any threats. When Cable finally reformed X-Force, she was among the first people he called. They fought bravely together, but after the Alexandria Incident, he needed her talents elsewhere. She infiltrated Yellow Eye’s mutant surveillance facility and was key in revealing that he was actually Mojo. After some nastiness with Fantomex, she remained on Hope Summers reformed team to protect the mutant world from the shadows.
The only problem was, Domino liked getting paid and she returned to the mercenary world for an interesting project. Deadpool’s Merc$ for the Money had all but abandoned him, leaving the young mutant Negasonic Teenage Warhead imprisoned by the evil organization Deadpool had recently turned her over to. Neena wasn’t keen on that. She let Pool known what her new team of Merc$ (including Machine Man, Hit Monkey, Massacre, and Gorilla Man) would be taking over from here. There was some tension between Dom and Deadpool and the team broke up about the same time Deadpool’s marriage did. Recently, she was targeted by the newest version of Weapon X who wanted to use her mutant power to apparently make a very lucky Hulk with Wolverine claws and that is all I wish to say about that.
Must Read
I was struggling over this one until I discovered a hidden gem over the weekend. The 2003 Domino mini-series by Joe Pruit and Brian Stelfreeze is fantastic. It combines the pacing and world class action sequences of Samnee and Waid’s Black Window with the page turning writing and moral ambiguity of Uncanny X-Force. It contains a pitch perfect Domino doing exciting spy stuff and it is a crying shame it has never been collected. You can pick up the issue digitally at the link below, and for $1.99 it is well worth it.
Rankings
Domino is a character I always like seeing but I never particularly love. Creators can do neat things with her powers, but she often falls into the role of the girl with guns. Like Longshot, they have struggled to build the right tension around stories with Domino. I like her a ton more than super spy Pete Wisdom but I get more excited to see Glob Herman in books (I really love that guy). I do think she is better than Rockslide so that put Domino in as the new #38 in the Xavier Files.
Domino was requested by a Reddit user with a name I won’t repeat on this site. Thank you for the request. If you have a request for how about you send it below? If you want to cut to the front of the two-year long line, we have a Patreon you can support Xavier Files for just $1 to get a line cutting reward.
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Next week we will talk about a guy cursed with one of the worst mutant powers ever. We got us a Beak!
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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.
