She-Hulk's Mr. Immortal explained: Meet the MCU's latest mutant
She-Hulk episode 6 brings in Mr. Immortal - a unique mutant from Marvel Comics
She-Hulk episode 6 takes Jennifer Walters out of her law offices, but while she's gone, Mallory Book and Nikki Ramos take on the case of one Craig Hollis (played by David Pasquesi), who calls himself Mr. Immortal, because, well, he can't die.
And though the plotline of the show, in which Hollis is a con-man who seduces people before faking his death to get away from them, is a long stretch from his comic book story, Mr. Immortal comes straight from Marvel Comics.
In comics, Mr. Immortal is the leader of the Great Lakes Avengers (also known as the Lightning Rods, the Great Lakes X-Men, and the Great Lakes Champions) - a group of Z-list heroes who keep hitching their team onto more well-known superheroes in an attempt to gain notoriety. The team was introduced in 1989's West Coast Avengers #46.
And what's interesting for the MCU is, he's also a mutant whose power is simply immortality.
Hollis' mutant nature isn't explained in She-Hulk, but his ability to walk away from even the most deadly injuries is on full display. There's a bit more to his ability than just being a mutant in comics, as he's actually considered 'Homo Supreme,' a singular kind of mutant (who are usually categorized as 'Homo Superior' as opposed to humans, 'Homo Sapiens.'). His immortality results from the cosmic embodiment of death known as the Deathurge simply refusing to take him - part of his inborn nature as the one-and-only 'Homo Supreme.'
As for the rest of the Great Lakes Avengers, whose name stems from their desire to be an Avengers team to represent the middle of the US, in the era when the team had a West Coast offshoot, there's Dinah Saur, a mutant dinosaur hybrid (and wordplay on '40s-70s celebrity Dinah Shore; Big Bertha, a supermodel whose body becomes large and rotund when she uses her powers of strength and toughness; Doorman (people can walk through walls using him a portal); Flatman, who is flat, as in 2-dimensional (hence, he can slip under doors); and, for a short time, Squirrel Girl, who has the proportional speed and strength of squirrels.
In fact, Mr. Immortal was actually planned for a previous live-action adaptation in a scrapped New Warriors series that would have also included Squirrel Girl in its cast.
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We're guessing that Mr. Immortal's inclusion in She-Hulk was likely a one-off, a sort of 'cameo of the week' from a semi-obscure Marvel hero. But it's also significant in that it marks the debut of yet another mutant in the MCU, which seems to be inching closer to the X-Men with every new release.
Get to know some of the other obscure Marvel Comics characters who appear in She-Hulk.
I've been Newsarama's resident Marvel Comics expert and general comic book historian since 2011. I've also been the on-site reporter at most major comic conventions such as Comic-Con International: San Diego, New York Comic Con, and C2E2. Outside of comic journalism, I am the artist of many weird pictures, and the guitarist of many heavy riffs. (They/Them)