Gomi

Gomi Gomi is one of those characters where explaining the basic idea already takes you into the stranger parts of the X-Men books. He's a young man with cybernetic abilities who travels around with two cybernetically enhanced lobsters, Bill and Don. All three end up with the Fallen Angels. That's the starting point, and somehow it gets stranger from there. The important distinction with Gomi is where his abilities come from. His telekinetic power was produced through cybernetics. Having a power that resembles something a mutant can do doesn't automatically make him a mutant, and that difference actually matters in this story. The X-books have all these different ways of arriving at superhuman abilities, but the characters standing together aren't always going to explain those differences to whoever is looking at them. His background also has this very uncomfortable joke running through it. He worked with his cousin Ramon and Ramon's fellow researcher Tadashi. The research was supposed to enhance living creatures through technology. Gomi and the lobsters became the living results of that work, then were left behind when the researchers fled. Even his nickname has an ugly meaning underneath it: Gomi means garbage. He ends up carrying around a name given to him by people who didn't treat him particularly well. Then you see how he treats Bill and Don. He talks to them, listens to them and includes them in decisions. They're his companions. He doesn't regard their lives as disposable because they're small or because most people see lobsters and immediately think of food. There's a whole little relationship already happening between the three of them before most of the other characters understand it. That makes Gomi's place in the Fallen Angels more substantial than just being the unusual-looking kid with an unusual power. This is a group full of people who are running away, hiding something or trying to find somewhere they can stay. Gomi arrives with a tiny family of his own. Getting the three of them into the same group means accepting those relationships too. And when the adventure becomes dangerous, that difference in his powers gives him a practical role. The group's captors are prepared to deal with mutants. Gomi's cybernetic abilities don't fit neatly into the same category, and his contribution helps the others get out. A detail that could have stayed in an origin explanation becomes part of the actual solution. Don's death also brings out a much more vulnerable side of him. Under the formal way he speaks and the bizarre circumstances around him, Gomi is grieving a friend. The other characters have to decide how seriously they're going to take that. His story spends a surprising amount of time on how people treat someone whose friendships and abilities don't look like theirs.