Mad Jim Jaspers

Mad Jim Jaspers
Mad Jim Jaspers. Art by Alan Davis.
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics (formerly Marvel UK)
First appearance	Marvel Superheroes #377 (September 1981)
Created by	Dave Thorpe and Alan Davis
In-story information
Alter ego	Sir James Jaspers
Species	Human Mutant
Team affiliations	UK parliament the Hellfire Club The Crazy Gang
Partnerships	The Fury
Notable aliases	The Reality Butcher, The Crooked Man
Abilities	Reality warping

Sir James Jaspers (aka Mad Jim Jaspers) is a fictional character created by Dave Thorpe and Alan Davis for the Captain Britain stories in Marvel UK comics and later developed by Alan Moore.

Jaspers was a British member of Parliament with a mutated brain that enabled him to alter reality; an unfortunate side effect of this power was that it quickly drove him mad once he began to use it on a larger scale. He led an anti-superhuman campaign so that he could play with the world without interference. His character design was based on the English comic actor "Terry-Thomas".

Fictional character biography

Earth-238

Captain Britain first encountered him when he travelled to an alternative temporal reality with Jackdaw. They interrupted a bank robbery being perpetrated by the "Crazy Gang", a criminal group themed around characters from Alice in Wonderland with Jaspers taking the role of The Hatter.

It later emerged that, before indulging in a campaign of mayhem, Jaspers was a member of Parliament who successfully campaigned for the outlawing of superheroes. He then created The Fury, a highly adaptable android created to exterminate superheroes. Within two years all the superhumans of the world (many of them referencing classic British comic characters like Marvelman and the Steel Claw) had been killed by the Fury. The only surviving superhero of this world, Captain UK, had fled to Earth-616 and abandoned her heroic identity. However, the Fury was programmed not to kill Jaspers, who himself had the ability to warp reality to his will at the cost of his own sanity.

The Fury was reactivated by Jaspers and later succeeded in killing both Captain Britain and Jackdaw. Captain Britain was then removed from Earth-238 by Merlyn and revived on Earth-616. The Fury, somehow detecting this, adapted itself to travel between realities.

Saturnyne and her Avant Guard attempted to give Earth-238 "the Push", an evolutionary boost when Jaspers unleashed the Jaspers' Warp, a wave of unreality that affects everything in the continuity. Fearing contamination, Saturnyne's temporary replacement, Mandragon, destroyed the Earth-238 continuity, and presumably Jaspers along with it.

Earth-616

Upon returning to his own reality, Captain Britain found that another Sir James Jaspers was leading an anti-superhero campaign, with the aid of Henry Peter Gyrich and Sebastian Shaw (suggesting that Jaspers is a member of the Hellfire Club). Jaspers later won a landslide general election victory on his anti-superhero platform and became Prime Minister. Events mirrored those of Earth-238 and Jaspers unleashed the Jaspers' Warp upon London. The Fury arrived on Earth-616 and attacked Jaspers after recognising that this Jaspers was not the same man it was forbidden to kill. After a reality-warping battle, The Fury managed to kill him by teleporting the pair outside of the universe, where Jaspers had no reality to control and was thus powerless. The Fury then, in its weakened condition, was destroyed itself by the one hero that had escaped from Earth-238, Captain UK. Although Saturnyne took a sample of Jaspers' DNA with the intention of cloning him, the DNA was secretly destroyed by Merlyn's daughter, Roma.

Sir James Jaspers later appears as an anti-mutant prosecutor during the trial of Magneto. However it's not stated whether this is the revived mutant Jaspers, a clone, or some lasting effect of the reality warp.

Some years later, a large-scale reality warp originating on Earth-616 resulted in the recreation of the exterminated Earth-616 Jaspers and Fury as a single combined being. It is unknown if Mad Jim Jaspers retained his mutant powers after the M-Day.

This return leads to the events of the mini-series, X-Men: Die by the Sword.

A different alternate version of Jim Jaspers appears in Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis.

Powers and abilities

Sir James Jaspers is one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel universe, with the power to warp reality. The less powerful Earth-238 version of Jaspers was able to warp his entire universe beyond recognition to such a degree that it became necessary to destroy the Earth-238 timeline completely just to stop the Jaspers' Warp from spreading to other universes. From what Merlyn hinted during his telepathic alert to Captain Britain, the more powerful Earth-616 Jaspers was an omniversal-scale threat whose power would continue to grow exponentially:

"This version of Jaspers. Is too powerful, too dangerous. His counterpart could at least be halted, even if it meant destroying his entire continuum. This one is not so easily containable. And if he cannot be defeated, then the omniverse shall fall into chaos, and a new and hostile god shall play dice with matter."

Mad Jim Jaspers has vast reality-warping powers. He can restructure matter and energy on an enormous scale and bend and distort space to create tesseract spaces which are far larger than what would otherwise fit into their three-dimensional volume. He can warp and disrupt the laws of physics to make entire universes unsuitable for life if left unchecked. During his battle with the Fury, Jaspers altered his own form to change into completely different lifeforms and even non-living objects while maintaining his own human mind. He reanimated his entire body after having been fried into an empty skeleton by the Fury. He has shown himself capable of resurrecting the dead and creating sentient lifeforms. However, his powers are seen to have limitations. Unlike the Scarlet Witch, Mad Jim Jaspers needs existing reality in order to function his powers, as seen when the Fury took him outside the known universe, rendering him powerless.

See also

• Jaspers' Warp

References

• Mad Jim Jaspers at the Comic Book DB
• Mad Jim Jaspers at the International Catalogue of Superheroes
• Mad Jim Jaspers of Earth-238 at the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe
• Mad Jim Jaspers of Earth-616 at the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe