Although the X-Men began as a single superhero team founded and led by Professor Charles Xavier, as their membership grew, different mutants began starting their own teams, including Cyclops’ X-Factor, Wolverine’s X-Force, and Magneto’s New Mutants. However, when Nightcrawler founded his own team, he dropped the trademark “X” completely, creating the N-Men. It was a fair enough decision – after all, none of his team were actually mutants.
Originally a group of interdimensional alien bounty hunters called the “Technet,” the N-Men first appeared as villains when they were hired to capture Rachel Summers (aka the Phoenix) who had escaped from the alien film mogul Mojo. Rachel’s friends Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler came to her defense and were joined by British superheroes Captain Britain and Meggan. After successfully warding off the Technet, the heroes decided to form a new team – Excalibur – but Nightcrawler wouldn’t gather together the former villains under his own wing until Excalibur #45.
After a failed mission, the Technet were exiled to Earth-616 for their failure. Furious, the majority of the team turned against their leader, the villainous Gatecrasher, and decided to ask Excalibur for asylum. Nightcrawler got his team to let the Technet stay in Excalibur’s lighthouse and they soon became allies of the heroes. Having come from multiple advanced alien races, the Technet proved to be excellent handymen and repaired a lot of the damage they had caused. Even so, their alien ways proved challenging as they loved fighting so much that they would take work breaks just to hit each other.
Who Are The Technet?
As each member of the Technet came from a different alien race, the team was full of powerful beings with exotic abilities. These included Bodybag, a reptilian creature who paralyzes his victims with a narcotic and then stores them in cocoons on his back; China Doll, a serpentine woman who can shrink living beings with her touch; Ferro², a four-armed alien swordmaster with superhuman strength; Joyboy, a giant humanoid baby who can read a person’s greatest desire and turn it into nightmarish reality; Ringtoss, an alien who can shoot energy rings from his hands and entrap an opponent; Scatterbrain, a mute, yellow-skinned woman who can fire a person’s neural synapses, frying their brain; Thug, a green biped with superhuman strength who can draw past and future versions of himself into the present; and Waxworks, a jellyfish-like blob who can make anything his tentacles touch as soft as putty.
Some time later, Nightcrawler suffered a broken leg and was asked to help the British government track down and capture an alien monster. Since Kurt was unable to physically accomplish the task himself, he decided to recruit the Technet, like a next-generation Professor X. Unfortunately, the Technet’s tendency to get into mindless brawls made them a difficult team to train, until Nightcrawler got the idea to give them a group identity similar to how Professor X had created the X-Men.
The N-Men Have Arrived
To that end, Nightcrawler outfitted the Technet in some new costumes with stylized “N” emblems and led them through some training drills designed to coordinate their powers to work in tandem. The training proved useful when “The Unearthly N-Men” faced off against their opponent – an invisible, semi-tangible monster with incredible strength that was stealing items from museums.
To take down the creature, the team used an innovative strategy that emphasized all of their strengths. First, Ringtoss shot the invisible creature with his energy rings, rendering him visible and tangible. Next, Waxworks snagged the monster’s now-solid legs and turned them into putty, keeping their target from escaping. To further immobilize the beast, Ferro² and Thug grabbed his arms and pinned him down.
From here, things got more complicated. Bodybag tried to paralyze the creature with his narcotic, but failed. Scatterbrain then attempted to shut down the creature’s mind but discovered it was merely a vessel that someone else controlled remotely. To aid his teammate, Joyboy used Scatterbrain to connect with the true mastermind and fry his brain. In the final move, China Doll used her power to violently shrink the monster into a brittle, doll-sized figurine. Their enemy defeated, the N-Men celebrated their newfound ability to work as a team – although the true mastermind, a being named Necrom, got away.
End of the N-Men
Nightcrawler continued to lead the N-Men for a few issues, but eventually the former bounty hunters encountered some new interdimensional visitors and negotiated a new contract, teleporting off the Earth when they discovered there was a big chance the planet would be destroyed in a few hours. Nightcrawler stayed behind to combat this threat with Excalibur, bringing his tenure as a superhero team leader to an abrupt end.
However, one of the N-Men – the goofy Joyboy – remained, and wound up doing some good when he bonded with a creature that dreamed only nightmares and used his powers to reverse them, crafting a paradise that others could use as a sanctuary. The rest of the N-Men (as the Technet) reappeared during preparations for Captain Britain and Meggan’s wedding and later popped up in an adventure with the Fantastic Four. Unfortunately, they ended up working for the villainous Gatecrasher again and, as recently as Al Ewing’s 2017 Rocket series, seem to have reverted to their old bounty hunter ways.
Nevertheless, the oddball aliens did give Nightcrawler the chance to exercise his skills as a team leader and trainer of heroes, and revealed that he was capable of far more than being a team’s resident teleporter. Later stories actually showed Nightcrawler exercise his leadership abilities with other groups, while one alternate timeline in the Exiles comic book showed that he eventually replaced Charles Xavier as the leader of his world’s X-Men, although he probably continues to hold a soft spot for the first team he ever trained – those weird and wacky misfits known as the N-Men.
