Real Name: Evan Daniels
Mutant Power: Season 1-3-- Ability
to grow sharp bone protrusions out of his skin at a superhuman rate. He
can use this ability to fire bone spikes at other targets as well. He can
also use a variant of this ability to create bone plates under his skin
for defense purposes.
Season 4-- His bone plates and most of
his spikes are now non-retractable. However, he can actually set his bone-spike
projectiles on fire, or at least heat them up a bit in addition to shooting
them off.
Voice Actor: Neil Denis
First Appearance: "Speed and Spyke"
Back Story: Evan lived with his mom and dad in downtown New York City until soon after he discovered his Mutant powers. After discovering that one of his so-called "friends", Pietro Maximov (aka Quicksilver), was a Mutant too, Spyke tried to take the guy out after Quicksilver stole some of his money from his locker. He failed, though, and ended up in jail as the scapegoat. After his aunt, Storm, asked him to give the X-Men a shot to hone up his Mutant powers, Spyke agreed and moved to the Institute. He soon met up with Pietro, though, and, with the help of Scott and Jean, put a stop to Quicksilver's rampant destructive use of his powers. Quicksilver was arrested by the police, but soon afterwards was "rescued" by Magneto in exchange for joining the Brotherhood. To this day, Spyke and Quicksilver are at odds with one another almost as much as Wolverine and Sabretooth. After the events of "X-Treme Measures", in which Spyke could no longer retract his bone spikes, he joined the Morlocks to "get away from it all", so to speak. More recently, he has become attached to the Morlocks as a protector, and will not leave them.
Personality: Spyke was pretty much a care-free, "no-worries" skateboarder- at least, until "X-Treme Measures", in which he became a lot more dark and hot-tempered because of his now-uncontrollable powers. He also matured immensely in the fourth season. When he was with the X-Men, although he had the potential to be bright, he goofed off and did a lot of stupid things, thus making it hard for him to get by in school. He'd even resorted to skipping class a few times in order to go skateboarding with several of his non-Mutant friends. Out of the X-Men, Spyke remained strangely distant from the others because of their lack of common interests, with the exception of Nightcrawler, because both are known for being jokers. Spyke also has a special tie to Storm, considering that she's his aunt. Besides skateboarding, his other main hobby was basketball.
Final Reflections: I have to admit, I really didn't like Spyke for the first two seasons. He was too... well, stupid, even though he was probably otherwise a realistic character. (Yeah, Spyke, make a videotape of Wolverine and Cyclops doing training exercises! That won't arouse any suspicious, no sir!) However, once his powers started become uncontrollable and he moved in with the Morlocks, he very quickly moved up the ladder to one of my favorite characters. Not only did he look cooler, but his powers were cooler and more original, and he was MUCH more mature of a character. He quickly went from his youthful devil-may-care attitude to realizing just how sad the Mutants' position in the world was, and that his duty was to protect those Mutants who could not protect themselves. It was a wonderful character twist-- in fact, probably the best out of any television series I've watched. It's a pity we didn't get to see more of Spyke 2.0.
(Season 4+ picture courtesy of Matt.)