Calvin Rankin arrives with a spectacular shortcut. Stand close enough to the X-Men and he can reproduce their abilities: wings, strength, ice, optic blasts and psychic power all…

Calvin Rankin arrives with a spectacular shortcut. Stand close enough to the X-Men and he can reproduce their abilities: wings, strength, ice, optic blasts and psychic power all collected in one body. His membership in X-Men #27–29 is brief, and the entrance is hardly friendly. He threatens the team's secrets to get himself brought along, and the leadership arrangement suits a man who doesn't want to accept orders from the people whose gifts he is borrowing. That makes the early clashes feel unusually personal. Every X-Man can recognize something of themselves in the person pushing them aside. Calvin takes the visible advantages of being them without having lived through the friendships, mistakes and practice that make the group function. He isn't immune to exploitation himself. The Puppet Master turns him into a weapon, and Warren helps free him. For somebody so determined to prove he needs nobody, owing his safety to one of the people he has been antagonizing is an uncomfortable experience. The Super-Adaptoid confrontation in #29 finally gives him a chance to make a different choice. Another being that duplicates powers threatens the team. Calvin finds a way to make that copying work against it, at the cost of his own abilities. The sacrifice matters because it costs him the very thing he has been using to establish his superiority. Afterward, he has to face the others as Calvin Rankin, without the borrowed collection making the introduction for him. Roy Thomas and Werner Roth give the short membership an actual turn rather than leaving Calvin as a noisy failed recruit. He starts by treating the X-Men as a source of power and ends by acting to protect them. Three issues aren't enough to make him an easy fit, but they are enough to show him learning why fitting in might have been worth the effort.