WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Marauders #2, by Gerry Duggan, Matteo Lolli, Federico Blee, VC's Cory Petit and Tom Muller, on sale now.
A big part of the premise and the appeal behind Marauders is watching the mutant heroes gallivant about the high seas of the world and getting into swashbuckling adventures. Since team leader Kitty Pryde is incapable of entering the mutant nation Krakoa through the portals that work for the rest of the X-Men, she's resolved to travel the world at save other mutants who've been kept from traveling to the island on their own.
However, all of that could change with the return of a familiar face: Gateway. In Marauders #2, the teleporting mutant takes the team halfway around the world at a moment's notice on the order of Emma Frost, the Marauders' backer.
Gateway may not be one of the most popular X-Men, but in a lot of ways he's been one of the team's most powerful allies since he debuted in Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri's Uncanny X-Men #229. As a near-mute Aboriginal with deeply held religious beliefs the mutant seldom involves himself directly in the affairs of the world. When the X-Men first came to use him as an ally they even needed the mutant Psylocke to help them communicate, but even without the telepath's help, Gateway always knew where the X-Men needed to go.
Combined with an almost intuitive sense of where people want to go, there have never been seemingly any limits to Gateway's ability to teleport. Whether someone needs to go to the other side of the world, an alternate dimension, or a different time altogether Gateway has always been able to oblige without any ceiling on the amount of he can teleport at once or how quickly he can do so.
Gateway was originally conscripted into working for the cybernetic mercenaries of the Reavers, who were based out of the Australian Outback. When the X-Men took the Reavers' base over, Gateway started helping them out and even facilitated Jubilee's introduction to the group. After making sporadic appearances in X-Men titles like Generation X and X-Treme X-Men over the next several years, Gateway survived M-Day with his immense powers intact.
After he survived the original Marauders' attempts to kill him, Gateway survived and went on to mentor Eden Fesi, who went on to serve in the Secret Warriors and Avengers as Manifold, one of Marvel's more noteworthy young heroes. In 2012's Uncanny X-Force #27, by Rick Remender and Phil Noto, Gateway was killed by Ultimaton, a mutant terminator who snapped Gateway's neck and immolated his body in a nuclear blast.
Since the X-Men developed a method to revive fallen mutants by copying their brains into cloned bodies in House of X, Gateway was naturally one of the first mutants who was revived.
However, Gateway's appearance here raises some questions that challenge part of the conflict at the series' heart.
With his powerful teleportation abilities one would think that Kitty Pryde's sailing band of mutants would be redundant, and that Kitty's own difficulty getting onto Krakoa would become a moot point. Gateway should theoretically have no issue teleporting Kitty or any mutants seeking refuge onto Krakoa all from the safety of Krakoa itself.
For the moment, the Marauders' presence on the open seas sends a strong political message to the rest of the world, and that may trump the immediacy of the teleportation option that Gateway presents.
While that can't be for certain, Gateway still represents something of an emergency escape for the Marauders and the rest of the X-Men, and the team likely has its own reasons for not over-using one of its most useful assets.