Opening Gambit

Little did he know what he'd start. Two days ago, my brother sent this picture of a portion of his daughter's T-shirt. His family had been able to identify all the Marvel characters on the shirt, save one: the one in this picture. As the picture was taken with a cell phone and received by a cell phone, I couldn't tell much. Eventually, I sent the picture to myself via e-mail. I studied it, saved it, enlarged it, printed it, and I STILL can't make out the questionable character.

For two days, I've poured over the Marvel website hoping for a clue. I've sent text messages to my brother asking for a description, originally misinterpreting the shot by a mile (seeing what I thought was a silver face a la Doctor Doom). Assured the character was a hero, I was told that the face was flesh, the character wore some sort of a visor, and he sported a trenchcoat. Stymied, I sent this description and the photo to a very comics-savvy friend in Atlanta. His best first guess, from the description I gave, was Gambit, a character who first appeared in 1990 (Uncanny X-Men #266), roughly the time I stopped following comics. No surprise, then, that I wouldn't recognize him.

But is that who it really is? My Atlanta friend was only giving a best guess from limited information. And Gambit does not appear to wear a visor. The search continued, as I became less and less sure I was even looking in the right spot for this guy. At the top, Colossus is decidedly not flesh. Spidey is covered head to toe in his costume. The Hulk is an instantly recognizable green; Beast, to Spidey's right, blue. On the left, Iron Man is decidedly not flesh. And it seems that Captain America is lurking in the lower left. Therefore, the question character has got to be dead center, but all I see there is a swirl of tan and what could easily be the extension of Colossus' arm!

Giving up the search on Marvel's website (which would benefit from a better internal search engine), I spent hours on end in a new search: the one for the T-shirt. If I found the T-shirt, I believed, I would get a better look at this character. I can't tell you how many Marvel composites I sifted through on various T-shirt sites (and toy stores, and ebay...) but the search was fruitless. Gad! Surely my niece didn't find the only one of these shirts in existence!

Finally, I'm giving up completely. With no more information and no confirmation or denial of my early guesses, I'm stumped. If you, however, can read that image more clearly, have seen the shirt before, or have any helpful clue, I'm sure we'd all be more than happy to hear it!