The Hellfire Club
First appearance: (as Council of the Chosen) X-MEN
#100, (first mentioned under the name Hellfire Club)
The Hellfire Club originated in England in the 1760s
as a social organization for the elite of British society.
The Club not only provided its members with pleasures,
often of sorts that violated moral standards of the time,
but also served as a means for the members to
consolidate their influence over British economic and
political matters.
A number of the Club's most important members, led
by the wealthy trading company owner and former
Member of Parliament Sir Patrick Clemens, and his
mistress, the renowned actress Diana Knight, emigrated
to the colony of New York in the 1770s, where they
founded the new American Hellfire Club. Clemens and
Knight served as its first leaders under their Club titles of
Black King and Black Queen. The Club's headquarters
was an abandoned church that stood on the site on the
present day Hellfire Club mansion, located at what is
now Fifth Avenue on Manhattan's East Side, only a few
blocks away from the Avengers Mansion.
Today's Hellfire Club counts among its members the
wealthy, the powerful, and the celebrated from virtually
all over the world. Membership is by invitation only, but
such invitations are rarely turned down, for membership
in the Hellfire Club is universally regarded as the ultimate
status symbol.
As far as the general public and, indeed, most of the
Club's members are concerned, the Hellfire Club is a
thoroughly respectable upper class social organization
principally devoted to giving spectacular parties. It is
also generally known that these parties serve as a means
for members of the social, economic, and political elite
to meet unofficially to discuss matters of mutual interest,
and to strike political or business alliances.
The Club's highest ranking members belong to its
Inner Circle and dress in late Eighteenth Century
costumes for Circle meetings and other formal occasions
involving the Club. Inner Circle members hold positions
named after chess pieces: the leaders are King and
Queens, followed by Bishops, Knights, Rooks, and
Pawns. It is possible for there to be two Kings (a Black
King and a White King) or two Queens (Black and
White) in office simultaneously. However, such situations
almost invariably lead to power struggles, and so there is
usually only one King and one Queen at a time. If a
member of one faction of the Inner Circle displaces a
member of another faction as King or Queen, he or she
usually names his rank after the opposite color to his
predecessor's. Hence, when Sebastian Shaw deposed
the most recent former leader, a White King, he became
a Black King.
Unknown to most of the Club members, the Inner
Circle members are engaged in a conspiracy to
dominate the world through the accumulation of
economic power and political influence. The Inner Circle
commands great financial resources, highly advanced
technology, and a large body of mercenaries (many of
whom wear red and blue uniforms with masks), all of
which are used in their subversive activities.
The previous leader of the Inner Circle, then known
as the Council of the Chosen, was a White King who
threw the Council's financial and technological support
behind Dr. Stephen Lang's attempts to capture
superhuman mutants with Sentinel robots. Lang's
endeavor ended in disaster, and Black Bishop Sebastian
Shaw and White Queen Emma Frost seized the
opportunity to turn the White King out of office. Shaw became the new Black King, leader
of the Council, which he renamed the Inner Circle, and
master of the entire Hellfire Club. As leader, Shaw
worked closely with his ally Frost, the White Queen.
Shaw and Frost are both not only heads of major
corporations but also superhuman mutants. They gave
other superhuman mutants positions of power within the
Inner Circle. Moreover, Frost was also headmistress of
the Massachusetts Academy, a private school in New
England for which she recruited adolescent superhuman
mutants as well as the sons and daughters of the elite so
that she might bring them under the Inner Circle's
influence. It is at the Academy that Frost trained a team
of adolescent superhuman mutants known as the
Hellions.
Shaw's corporation, Shaw Industries, had a secret
contract to build Sentinels for the United States
government's covert Project Wideawake, whose goal
was to hunt down, capture, and study superhuman
mutants. Shaw hoped to use his position with the project
for the Inner Circle's own ends. (None of the Inner
Circle members are known to be mutants either by the
United States government or by the general public.)
Some years ago, the mutant Jason Wyngarde,
otherwise known as Mastermind, sought admission into
the Inner Circle. To prove his value,
Wyngarde mesmerized the first member of the X-Men
to be known as Phoenix into willingly becoming the
Club's Black Queen. Although
Wyngarde believed that Phoenix was Jean Grey, also
known as Marvel Girl, it now appears that Phoenix was
actually an immensely powerful energy being who had
taken on a human guise and persona patterned after
Grey's. Wyngarde's tampering with Phoenix's mind
backfired by triggering her transformation into the
malevolent Dark Phoenix, who rendered him catatonic.
The Inner Circle therefore withdrew its invitation to him
to become a member.
Later, Shaw survived an attempted challenge to his
leadership of the Circle by its renegade White Bishop,
Donald Pierce. Pierce kidnapped a
young woman known only as Tessa, whose
photographic memory enabled her to function as a living
storehouse of information about matters of importance
to the Circle for Shaw. Professor Charles Xavier and
the New Mutants defeated Pierce. Tessa returned to the Inner Circle, which
expelled Pierce from the Club.
Still more recently Friedrich von Roehm, a member of
the Inner Circle, sponsored the superhuman mutant and
sorceress known as Selene for membership in the Circle. Selene has since become the Circle's
Black Queen.
In recent years the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle has
clashed several times with the mutant X-Men, and the
enmity between the two groups persists to this day.
The Hellfire Club's Inner Circle suffered many
setbacks as the group of young mutants known as the
Upstarts began to hunt down and assassinate members
of the Inner Circle. Donald Pierce and his
cyborg Reavers were killed by Sentinels under the
command of Trevor Fitzroy. Fitzroy had also killed most
of the Hellions, and placed the White Queen into a
coma. Shaw was believed to have been killed by his son
Shinobi who had designs on the position of Black King. Selene was captured and tortured
by Fitzroy, but was later freed.
After X-Force and the New Warriors defeated the
Upstarts, the Inner Circle began to reform. Selene, now free, found Fitzroy dying after
his encounter with X-Force and turned him into a
psychic vampire under her control. Selene also found the
resurrected Madelyne Pryor, and cajoled her into joining
the Inner Circle. Shaw survived
the assassination attempt and rebuilt his power base in
Japan. The new Inner Circle consisting of Shaw, Tessa,
Selene, Fitzroy, and Pryor are now based in New York
City.
The original London Hellfire Club continues its
operations today, although now it takes second place to
the New York chapter of the organization. In recent
times the London Hellfire Club had its own Inner Circle
consisting of a Black King and Queen and a Red King
and Queen; the first three were mutants and the fourth
was actually the sorceress Margali Szardos. Unknown
to the royalty of the London Inner Circle, their servant
Scribe had been replaced by the shapeshifting mutant
Mountjoy.
The London Inner Circle conspired with Black Air,
the British intelligence agency charged with investigating
the paranormal, to take control of a demon. The Inner
Circle and Black Air intended to use the demon's
mystical energies to take mental control of the people of
the United Kingdom. However, their plan misfired, and
the demon began spreading insanity through the
population of London. The London Inner Circle's Black
Queen killed its Black King when he went mad. Finally,
the British team of superhuman champions Excalibur
succeeded in defeating Mountjoy and Margali and
entrapping the demon. British legal
authorities apparently brought the London Inner Circle
to justice.
In the alternate future eight decades hence from which
the X-Man Bishop comes, the Hellfire Club still exists
and operates in New York City. Its Inner Circle still
secretly consists of superhuman mutants in search of
power, and it is headed by Sebastian Shaw's heir,
Alexander Shaw.
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