Biography - Page 3
Shaw worked with Senator Kelly to draft a list of recommendations for the government to take to deal with the so-called mutant threat. Together, they met with the president of the United States to present their proposal. Although the President deemed their proposal unconstitutional and possibly even criminal, he nevertheless agreed there was a problem and consented to enacting it. They called this top-secret, covert initiative Project: Wideawake, and appointed Special Agent Henry Peter Gyrich to oversee it. Their first point of order was to develop with Shaw Industries a new line of Sentinels. Obviously, things were going Shaw's way: after exuding just minimal effort, he had managed to procure a lucrative government defense contract far more profitable than any he was getting in the private sector. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #142]
In order to bolster the profit potential of the mutant-defense complex, Shaw fed into Gyrich’s anti-mutant hysteria, which helped him secure additional government contracts for new Sentinels. To further this end, he personally financed Sir James Jaspers’ international speech on the danger of superhumans. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #142, Daredevils #9]
Because of the work he put into making his defense contract viable, Shaw understandably grew quite defensive about preserving the arrangement. When he learned that some of the employees of his weapons company Interdefense sent Sentinels across the national border to retrieve an escaped mutant, thus risking an international incident that possibly warranted criminal penalties, Shaw paid them a personal visit. He scolded the reckless employees for risking his carefully nurtured relationship with the Department of Defense—and subtly threatened their lives if the situation worsened. [Alpha Flight (1st series) #43] His threat could hardly be disregarded as a bluff: Shaw had personally murdered business associates who failed him in the past, such as the arms dealer who tried to double-cross him on a weapons sale. [Marvel Super-Heroes (2nd series) #11]
Meanwhile, now armed with a better understanding of the severity of the threat the X-Men represented, Shaw once again tried to eliminate them—this time using his newly developed toys, the Sentinels. After the White Queen had recovered from her injuries, Shaw instructed her to infiltrate Xavier’s School by swapping her mind with Storm’s. With his mole Emma safely inhabiting Storm’s body, Shaw ordered the Sentinels to attack the X-Men on their grounds. The plan succeeded, and the sleeper agent Storm turned on the X-Men at a crucial juncture, making them the Hellfire Club’s captives. The plan might have worked, had not Storm—now inside Emma’s body—escaped and freed the X-Men. Shaw was unprepared for this, and he and his Hellfire Club faced yet another humiliating defeat. This time, it was not Harry who nearly died in the fighting, but Shaw. While he was unconscious, the Lords Cardinal reached a truce with the X-Men, as neither party wanted to alert the authorities and risk being exposed. Shaw was taken home to recover. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #151-152]
Not too long after recovering, Shaw and his assistant Tessa were betrayed by Donald Pierce, who, it turned out, rabidly hated mutants. Tessa was taken captive, along with Professor X, although they were eventually freed by Xavier’s protégés. After they were freed, Tessa pledged to Xavier that the Hellfire Club would personally deal with Pierce. She and Shaw honored their pledge and imprisoned Pierce in one of Shaw’s private prisons in Kentucky. [Marvel Graphic Novel #4]
With Pierce gone, Shaw continued overseeing his company’s work on the new Sentinels. Despite his willingness to create weapons specifically for apprehending mutants, Shaw drew the line at using the Sentinels to kill, however. He only wanted the Sentinels to go as far as procuring mutants for him to exploit. When he suspected that Henry Peter Gyrich intended to unleash his new model of lethal Sentinels against the recently formed New Mutants, Shaw was outraged. [New Mutants (1st series) #2]
Later, Sebastian’s trusted White Queen was struck down by a mysterious psychic attack that rendered her comatose. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #169] With its ranks dwindling, Shaw continued his search for new recruits to the Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle. One of the club’s more peripheral members, Emmanuel da Costa, caught his attention, so Shaw began courting him for membership within the elite Inner Circle. Like Shaw, the elder da Costa was a smart, self-made industrialist with a business empire valued in millions. Shaw knew fully well that Emmanuel was also the father to Roberto da Costa, a teenage mutant currently attending Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Shaw approached the elder da Costa and extended the invitation to join the Inner Circle. Emmanuel considered the offer, but with reticence.
Emmanuel did ask a favor of Shaw in return for his consideration: worried that his archeologist wife Nina’s upcoming expedition into the Amazon rainforest threatened his business interests in the Maderia, a potential mother lode of valuable minerals, da Costa requested that the Hellfire Club kidnap her before the voyage—without harming either her or their son, Roberto. Shaw agreed. However, the minions they tasked with the job failed, and the expedition proceeded as planned. Additional attempts at sabotage failed as well. Shaw blamed not the incompetence of his men, but da Costa’s restrictive provision that neither Nina nor Roberto be hurt in the attempt.
Nina and the New Mutants soon returned home from a voyage successful beyond their wildest expectations: not only had they discovered a lost Roman civilization called Nova Roma, but they had made a new friend and thwarted the ancient mutant sorceress Selene. However, they also learned that Emmanuel was an inciting factor in the turmoil they endured. When Sunspot returned home, he confronted his father and renounced his ties to the da Costa family. This was the act that finally convinced Emmanuel to phone Shaw and accept his offer to join the Inner Circle. [New Mutants (1st series) #7-8, 12]
Through the success of the New Mutants, Shaw began to see that he needed to recruit young mutants to his cause. So far, however, Professor X had succeeded in convincing all their potential new recruits to siding with him by inviting them to share in his dream of mutant-human harmony. To this end, Shaw and Emma Frost opened a school for gifted youngsters called the Massachusetts Academy, which was modeled after Xavier’s School, but run by the Hellfire Club. The White Queen crafted her first class of mutants into a team called the Hellions. She succeeded later in capturing most of the New Mutants and forcing them to join her ranks. Emma was eager to present this new class of mutants to Shaw as proof of their program’s viability. Unfortunately, Shaw arrived to observe them just as the New Mutants were breaking free from captivity. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #182, New Mutants (1st series) #16-17]
Incidentally, Shaw’s cohort Freidrich von Roehm brought to Shaw’s attention a candidate for the Black Queen of the Inner Circle: Selene, the mutant sorceress the New Mutants had encountered in Nova Roma. When Shaw asked for Selene’s credentials, she casually used her mutant power of inorganic matter control to ensnare Sebastian in a fist of concrete. The attack would have crushed him had he not previously accumulated enough kinetic energy to break free of the stone grip. The nature of the attack led Shaw to suspect Selene knew the weaknesses of his mutant power in advance, and would have killed him given the opportunity. Instantly terrified of Selene’s immense power and what might happen if he crossed her, Shaw had little choice but to accept her into the Inner Circle.
As offerings, Selene presented Shaw with two brainwashed mutant girls: Rachel Summers and Amara Aquilla, both of whom had crossed Selene in the past. Shaw accepted Selene’s gifts, although only at Tessa’s urging to use them as tools to eliminate their giver. The girls proved uncontrollable, though, and only the timely intervention of the X-Men prevented blood from being shed. Shaw explained to the X-Men that their capture was Selene’s doing and allowed them to take the girls back home. Although Shaw and the Hellfire Club succeeded in maintaining their truce with the X-Men, Shaw was not free of the problem of Selene. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #189]
In time, both Selene and Emmanuel da Costa were approved for membership in the Inner Circle. Shaw personally officiated the ages-old induction ceremony for the two of them, welcoming them and the prosperity they would bring. Afterward, Selene openly mocked the ceremony to Shaw’s face, which he accurately interpreted as a challenge to his authority. He realized Selene was just as ambitious and powerful as him, and dared not let his guard down around her. He was quite comfortable around Emmanuel, though, and told him he hoped his son would one day join the Hellfire Club as well. [New Mutants (1st series) #23]
After becoming the Black Queen, Selene continued to challenge Shaw’s authority in subtle ways, such as openly eavesdropping on him during private conversations. Considering it only a matter of time before Selene made her move, Shaw worked with Emma to mold their new, young mutant recruit Firestar into their personal assassin. They conditioned her to revere them and ruthlessly strike when needed. When she was ready, her first target was to be Selene. However, their plan unraveled when Firestar learned the extent to which she had been manipulated. She struck back at the White Queen and destroyed her facility beneath the Massachusetts Academy. Although the White Queen wanted revenge, Shaw told her they had wasted enough resources on Firestar already, and encouraged her to focus on rebuilding—and no doubt finding other ways to eliminate Selene. [Firestar #3-4]
Shaw’s Selene problem escalated even further when a vengeful Rachel Summers, now empowered by the Phoenix Force, infiltrated the mansion with the intent to murder every member of the Inner Circle. Finding only Selene, Rachel settled with murdering her, as she was her primary target anyway. Wolverine intervened and saved Selene’s life—surely to Shaw’s chagrin—at the cost of critically injuring Rachel, who fled in fear. Although Shaw was content to let the incident slide because the X-Men had controlled their renegade member, Selene shamed him in front of the Inner Circle into taking action.
Along with Selene, Freidrich von Roehm, Tessa and Harry Leland, Shaw pursued Rachel into New York City’s Central Park. There, they encountered the X-Men, who were also in pursuit of their injured teammate. With their unstable truce seemingly shattered, the two groups soon came to blows. As chance would have it, it was at this moment that Shaw’s financing of the Sentinels happened to backfire on him. An advanced Sentinel unit from the future—a future Shaw’s Sentinel program helped create—had come back to Shaw’s era in search of Rachel Summers, a refugee from its same timeline. This Sentinel, a Nimrod unit, ascertained her location to be in Central Park, but it stumbled upon the Inner Circle and the X-Men before finding her. The two mutant groups temporarily set aside their differences and united against the Sentinel after it incinerated the Hellfire Club’s Freidrich von Roehm. During the fracas, the Nimrod unit propelled Shaw straight upward and into the atmosphere, where, to Selene's delight, he was doomed to die in orbit. The only thing that saved Shaw from certain death was his colleague Harry Leland, who used his mutant power to pull the Black King back down to Earth—only to suffer a fatal heart attack in the process. Sebastian, meanwhile, returned to Earth at a meteoric speed and smashed into Nimrod, obliterating it. His mutant power to absorb the kinetic energy of the impact saved his life, but barely. Upon neutralizing Nimrod, both the Inner Circle and the X-Men took their wounded back to the Hellfire Club mansion for temporary sanctuary. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #207-209]
