Mommy Dearest

After his last job, Jack Monroe — aka Nomad — decides to go shopping for a new suit. As he tries on outfits he has a store clerk keep an eye on Bucky for him. While in the change room, the clerk is approached by a woman who asks to see some jeweler in a nearby display case. As the clerk goes in to retrieve the items, the woman suddenly kicks her foot through the display and hits him in the face. She then grabs Bucky and runs off. Jack comes out a moment later to discover that someone has taken Bucky.[1]

Unable to find the woman who took his baby, Jack goes to the Sad Smile bar, hang out of the New Orleans chapter of the Undergrounders. He asks for their help in tracking down Bucky since Jack can’t go to the cops since he doesn’t really have a legal right to have the little girl to begin with. As they try to figure out who took Bucky and why, Giscard Epurer walks through the door. He tells Jack that he can direct him to Bucky’s kidnapper in exchange for favor that Giscard can cash in at a later date. Jack quickly decides that for Bucky, he’s willing to sell his soul.

Elsewhere, Bucky’s mother tries to change her daughter’s diaper but Bucky won’t stop crying. She wants the baby to shut up and eventually collapses to the floor. The woman is flooded with flashbacks from her old childhood: her abusive father who would hit her when she cried, her life as a sex worker where she was beat by pimps and clients alike. Snapping back to reality, she wonders how much patience it will take to raise a baby. She wanted her child back but now that she got her wish she wonders if she can do this and what will happen if she can’t.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Senator Bart Ingrid is delivered the newly manufactured super-soldier gun that the government has been developing for quite some time. He is pleased to finally have the weapon after so many years so he can finally get revenge against Jack Monroe.[2][3]

While at the Shady Rest Nursing Home in Clutier, Iowa, Jill Coltrain visits her mother who is kept on life support in an oxygen tent. She tells her mother how she was recently visited by Giscard Epurer who told her that her brother Jack is still alive and somehow still young. She wonders what he will think when he finds out that his sister and mother are still alive.[4]

By this time, Jack has gone to the address given to him by Giscard Epurer. Looking up at a window he sees that Bucky has been reunited with her biological mother and that she is actually raising her properly. Jack then begins reconsidering his rights to have Bucky at all. When Bucky and her mother go out for a walk, Jack tries to stop them so they can talk. Thinking that Nomad has come to take her baby away, Bucky’s mom attacks him. Jack is surprised by her fighting skill and takes quite a bit of punishment before he can even start fighting back. The two fight into a stand still until Jack convinces her that he has only come to talk. Bucky’s mom refuses to let him take her baby away again and Jack — seeing how she has cleaned up her life — decides that letting Bucky go is the best thing to do and tells her mother that he won’t.

Nomad returns to his apartment alone where the weight of what just happened finally hits him. Having Bucky by his side for so long he now finds himself utterly lost without her and begins crying because he has no idea what to do with himself now.

Recurring Characters

Nomad, Bucky’s mother, Bucky, Giscard Epurer, Bart Ingrid, Jill Coltrain, Mary Ellen Monroe, Undergrounders (Crayfish)

Continuity Notes

1. This woman is Bucky’s mother. This woman is Bucky’s mother. Jack too Bucky away from her in Nomad #3 because he thought that a drug addicted prostitute was unfit to raise a child. She was then found by Giscard Epurer, the favor broker, in Nomad (vol. 2) #9. He got her to kick her addiction and trained her into being an assassin so she could eliminate Jack. She is unnamed here. As of this writing in October, 2022, her name has yet to be revealed.

2. This weapon was originally in development for a while until Nomad screwed up the government’s plans in Nomad #1-4.

3. Bart Ingrid has an axe to grind with Nomad because he and Jack grew up together and both of their families were part of a Nazi sympathizer group in the 1940s. When Jack inadvertedly told this to the federal authorities their parents were all arrested. Bart, who was bullied by Jack as a kid, never gave up his family’s Nazi ideals and rose to power as a politician. See Nomad (vol. 2) #18 and 23-24.

4. Giscard visited Jill Coltrain in Nomad (vol. 2) #15. Per Nomad #2, Jack was born in 1941 however he has maintained relative youth thanks to being put into suspended animation in the mid-50s until he was revived in the present, as explained in Captain America #155. How his mother, Jill, and Bart Ingram could still be alive in the Modern Age will become increasingly impossible due to the Sliding Timescale. As of this writing there has yet to be an explanation for this. I posit a theory in my summary of issue #15.