Triple Nerd Score - INTERACTIVE EDITION! - Marvel Asks

This one's for everyone! (from Tumblr)

Answer as many of these as you like, as honestly as you like, in the comments.

Spider-Man: How have you dealt with some of the tragedies in your life?

Captain America: What are some things you believe in?

Iron Man: Ever had any epiphanies?

Thor: Talk about your relationship with your family.

Hawkeye: Talk about a time you got a second chance Black Widow: Tell a secret?

Captain Marvel: Are you the recipient of a legacy?

Ms. Marvel: Talk about something new you're doing.

She-Hulk: What keeps you busy?

Hulk: How do you feel about being alone?

Luke Cage: Talk about when you've been treated unfairly, on a small or large scale.

Black Panther: How do you feel about your country?

Black Cat: Do you have a code of ethics?

Daredevil: What is something others see as a weakness, but you know to be a strength?

Doctor Strange: Talk about a moment your life changed paths.

Cyclops: What do you worry about?

Jean Grey: What is something about yourself you can't control?

Storm: What do people look up to you for?

Psylocke: (How?) has your sense of self been challenged?

Rogue: What makes it hard for people to get close to you?

Shadowcat: Talk about growing up.

Beast: Favorite book?

Nightcrawler: Religious beliefs?

Scarlet Witch: What things have you broken?

Quicksilver: Who do you feel protective toward?

Wolverine: What are things you regret?

Mr. Fantastic: How controlling can you be?

Invisible Woman: Talk about a process of finding your identity.

Human Torch: Can people take you seriously?

Thing: Your body-- what are you insecure about? What do you love?

Black Bolt: What don't you ever do?

Silver Surfer: (Where?) do you want to wander?

Why 'The Amazing Spider-Man 2' Lived Up To Its Name

I may have alienated half the people here on the title of this blog post alone. *flinch* Sorry guys.

...

On second thought, you know what? I'm NOT sorry. I think the 'Amazing Spider-Man' movies are fantastic, and I don't feel like I should apologize for that sentiment at all.




There's a lot I like about Amazing Spider-Man 2, but I think first and foremost is the cast.




Andrew Garfield made a terrific Peter Parker in this movie. As a high school graduate on his own for the first time (except for the fact that he's still living with Aunt May, which makes a lot more sense in today's economy than it did in previous years), he's cute, nerdy, relatable, and provides what I feel to be a perfect balance of humor, pathos, snark, and drive. He makes Peter the nerdy, lost teen we've all been at some point in our lives, rather than the kind we'd like to be. (This, in my opinion, is a big improvement from the previous film)
He has a sense of humor about him that Tobey Maguire never had, except unintentionally. While he could still carry emotions like rage, angst, and guilt, they were better balanced in his Spider-Man and Peter Parker than in Tobey's. I appreciated that quite a lot.



Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy was another inspired bit of casting in the first film. She's as smart as he is, and much more willful and independent than her comic-book counterpart, whom I consider one of the most annoying characters in all of comicdom. Here, though, she's got a really moving story arc about whether to continue being the "superhero's girlfriend who knows his identity" or giving up her relationship with Peter and moving on with her life. The chemistry between Stone and Garfield (a real-life couple) shines on screen, and makes every scene between them stand out as meaningful and bittersweet.




Jamie Foxx as Electro was quite possibly the most controversial move the film made, but in a shocking twist (no pun intended), he proved to be my favorite part of this film. His civilian characterization as Max Dillon was reminiscent of Jim Carrey's Edward Nygma in Batman Forever, but what Carrey had played as a comedic role was handled in a much more serious matter. We already sympathize with nerdy, put-upon Max and his hero-worship of Spider-Man, and Foxx's ethnicity plays a part in that sympathy, bringing an undertone of racism to his treatment at Oscorp, as nearly all his higher-ups are rich white guys. People may roll their eyes at this and call it outdated, but I think it's still all too believable. His being driven to the breaking point by the circumstances surrounding his transformation is made much more credible by his constant trashy treatment as Max, despite the fact that literally the entirety of Oscorp facility depends on him to keep it runnning. Max Dillon is as much victim as villain in this film, and watching his tragedy unfold was extremely compelling.




Also, just LISTEN to his theme. Seriously, you can feel the slipping of his sanity as he is literally persecuted into madness.


There are other incredible casting choices (Sally Field as Aunt May gets one particularly moving scene that made me cry almost as much as the end of the film), but these three were really what sold the film.


I'll get into other things I love about the movie in the future if people are interested (if anyone even wants to associate with me after admitting my love for this allegedly terrible film).

The Truth About A Beauty, A Beast, and Stockholm Syndrome

Beauty and the Beast is my favorite movie.

It's widely considered one of the greatest animated pictures of all time, even by Disney standards. This is the movie that, for most people, codified the modern fairy tale romance structure and in 1991, showed the world that Disney had well and truly hit its second animation Renaissance. Millions praise it, men and women alike, to this day.

So why do I also hear so many complaints about it? Specifically, about its protagonist, Belle?



The answer, the film's detractors say, is simple: Belle has Stockholm syndrome.

For those who don't know, Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which a person, taken hostage, will develop feelings for their captor, to the point of defending their abductor's actions despite everything their abductor put them through, in large part thanks to perceiving a lack of abuse during the crisis situation as kindness. Real-world examples include battered-person syndrome, military basic training, and fraternity hazing.

Obviously, as with any Disney movie, there are people who will criticize and deconstruct every flaw; it's the cool thing to do. But this time, I think the joke's run its course.

Yes, Belle is technically a captive who falls in love with her captor. But there is so much more going on in Beauty and the Beast that that gross oversimplification stops just shy of being an outright insult to the intent of the film.

(Note that I'm going by the original film only for this argument. Because the midquels contradict just about everything in the original. Also, they are godawful. Seriously. Fuck the midquels.)

To refute this in its entirety, let's look at the four conditions necessary for Stockholm Syndrome to develop, as detailed by a recent FBI study:

1 - A person held in captivity cannot escape, and depends on the captor for life. The captor becomes the person in control of the person's basic needs for survival, and the victim's needs itself.

We can safely throw this one out from the get-go.

When Belle first agrees to take Maurice's place as the Beast's hostage, he's a pretty terrible person. As such, he treats her, predictably, like dirt, refusing to even let her eat unless she eats with him. In short, he tries to invoke this.

The entire point, though, of the "Be Our Guest" scene is that the household staff is defiant of him and wants her, not only to be fed, but treated as an honored guest. They feed her, not the Beast, and so she develops an affection for them. They aren't the ones holding her against her will, after all.

And Belle can escape. Easily, in fact. She ran right out of the castle the moment Beast crossed the line from 'jerk' into 'monster'. The only reason she didn't was because of that unfortunate encounter with the wolves, and after saving her from them, Beast was in no condition to prevent her escape. She could have made off right then and there and never looked back.

But because she's a good person, she stayed and helped nurse him back to health. And she still didn't like him all that much.

Observe the dialogue from one of my favorite scenes, where she cleans his wound:
(Video not uploaded by me)

That is not a woman falling in love with her captor. That's a woman sticking up for herself while still expressing gratitude for an actual (not perceived) kindness.

And of course when she needs to leave to save her father, it takes the (new, reformed) Beast all of two seconds to decide to free her, thus possibly damning himself to an eternity of monstrosity.
So, that's one prerequisite down. What are the others?

2 - The hostage endures isolation from other people and has only the captor's perspective available. Perpetrators routinely keep information about the outside world's response to their activities from captives to keep them totally dependent.

Well, first off, the outside world doesn't really know about the Beast at all until after Belle is freed. When that happens, she's exposed to their response to him fairly first hand.

Secondly, she's not isolated or alone with him at all; he's got a whole household staff and servants, an entire community she interacts with on a daily basis. Granted, they have an investment in seeing her fall in love with him, but that doesn't change the fact that they hold very strong opinions about how he treats her, and indeed coach him on how to be a better person for her.

Secondly,  look at the scene with the mirror.

See a fandub here. (Again, not mine)

After her escape from the castle and return of her own free will, Belle is mostly shown as being happy. The minute she shows herself to be otherwise, Beast whips out the mirror and lets her use it to check up on her father. And, oh yeah, lets her go when she realizes Maurice needs her.

So, nope. The outside world is very much within Belle's reach, and she is never isolated with the Beast; in fact, they're hardly ever even alone together throughout the movie.

3 - The hostage taker threatens to kill the victim and gives the perception as having the capability to do so. The captive judges it safer to align with the perpetrator, endure the hardship of captivity, and comply with the captor rather than resist and face murder.

Simply put, nope.

Never happens. Not once.

Beast is physically capable of killing Belle...he's a super-strong lion-wolf-buffalo-bear guy. Duh. 

But he never once intimates the intent to do so, even at his worst. Indeed, any attempt on her life, real or implied, would be completely counterproductive to his whole goal, which is for her to fall in love with him, and vice versa.

Remember, she can leave any time she wants. The only threat to her escape was the wolves, and the Beast took care of those. Belle made it perfectly clear that she will leave if Beast treats her in any way that she doesn't like.

And Beast takes this to heart. After the scene with the wolves, Belle's captivity isn't really a hardship to endure. Not only is she in the lap of luxury, with servants catering to her and her horse's every whim, but Beast himself makes every effort to be nice to her, to be courteous and a gentleman. Even if he's not very good at it at first, the effort is there, and it's sincere.

So the very premise of Belle's captivity pretty much negates this aspect of Stockholm syndrome.

And finally:

4 - The captive sees the perpetrator as showing some degree of kindness. Kindness serves as the cornerstone of Stockholm syndrome; the condition will not develop unless the captor exhibits it in some form toward the hostage. However, captives often misinterpret a lack of abuse as kindness, and may develop feelings of appreciation for this perceived benevolence. If the captor is purely evil and abusive, the hostage will respond with hatred. But, if perpetrators show some kindness, victims will submerge the anger they feel in response to the terror and concentrate on the captor's "good side" to protect themselves.

This one is the one most people latch onto when they think of Belle as having Stockholm syndrome.

Their favorite piece of evidence to throw out here is, ironically, tied with the dance and the final transformation as my favorite scene in the entire movie:
Yup, it's another fandub. Nope, I don't own it either.

Here's why this doesn't work:

a) The library scene is Beast's repayment to Belle for saving his life after he was injured fighting off the wolves.
b) It's a genuinely kind gesture. This goes beyond 'he stops being a dick to her' and into doing truly nice things for her. It's a character moment for Beast, breaking away from a lifetime of selfishness to do something good for someone else.
c) Belle's not afraid of him, or angry at him anymore, by this point. Remember, by now she's proven she can leave any time she wants. She stays now because she wants to, because she likes the household staff and is starting to like the Beast. There's nothing to submerge, so her feelings of gratitude are genuine.

So to close out, no, Belle does not and never did have Stockholm syndrome. She interacts with Beast as an equal, not a prisoner, and they fall in love as such. He changes on a fundamental level to win her over, becoming a better person, worthy of that love. That was the entire point of the movie, after all...that love has the power to redeem someone, but it has to be earned, to grow on its own, and not be forced.

I'd say, Beast earned it.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I welcome discussion in the comments.

Men Reading Women In Comics: My Top 15 X-Women, Part 2

7) Kitty Pryde

Is it even possible to be an X-Men fan and dislike Kitty Pryde? I don't think so.

Kitty started out as the first "newcomer kid" X-Man. She was the audience surrogate when she showed up, and readers were introduced to the X-Men through the eyes of someone their age. She started out with the ability to go through walls...and that was it. Nifty trick, sure, but not the kind of thing that would make for a rock-em sock-em action heroine...or so everyone thought.

Chris Claremont poured so much life and soul into Kitty that the readers instantly took a shine to her. While there were detractors and haters, they paled in comparison to the outpouring of support for this likable, spunky genius girl who kept the audience able to relate to a bunch of superpowered misfits.

When the time came for an X-Men spinoff team set in the UK, Kitty proved so popular that she (and fellow X-Men alumni Nightcrawler and Rachel Summers, listed in my last list) became the headliners for the new team. Excalibur remains a fan favorite team to this day, and in large part it's thanks to Kitty's amazing journey there from girl to young woman...

Or in this case, from Sprite to Shadowcat.

She's returned to the X-Men since then, and remained a vital mainstay of the team, proving to be one of its most valuable members thanks to the massive skillset she's accumulated over her 40+ years as a heroine.

Now she's a genius ninja with a pet dragon who goes through walls. How is that not the coolest development arc ever?

6) Magik

Stories about characters who fight corruption are always amazing to me. The temptation of the Dark Side is a very strong one, especially in the life of a superhero, and not every superhero can have Clark Kent's incorruptibility. Some give in to their darker natures and become villains. Some fight that darkness with everything they have.

And then there's Illyana Rasputin.

Younger sister to Colossus, the team's resident Gentle Giant, Illyana was a normal seven-year-old girl until she stumbled into a portal to the hell-dimension known as Limbo. Its ruler, the demon sorcerer Belasco, took her in and trained her to be his apprentice and heir, but she fought against him, winning the battle after seven years and the deaths of many friends (alternate-universe versions of the X-Men). After winning the throne of Limbo she escaped, only to realize that while she was suddenly a teenager, mere seconds had passed in her home dimension.

She became a New Mutant shortly thereafter, fighting alongside them in adventure after adventure, but the more she used her powers, either mutant or mystical, the more their corruption took hold of her, until she became a demonic creature in her own right.

Even then, though, she held on to her humanity enough to make a final sacrifice and return herself to the little girl she had been before she'd fallen into Limbo, giving herself a second chance.

Regrettably, due to a series of events involving death and resurrection, she was aged up again, but now she's a member of the X-Men, and continues to walk that razor's edge between good and evil.


Only time will tell how she handles it this time.


5) Dr. Cecilia Reyes


It's a shame this woman slips under the radar so often, because she's one of the most underrated gems of the X-Men during the 1990s.

Let's face it: If you're a mutant living in the Marvel Universe, your choices are pretty slim: either sign up for the X-Men or an affiliate team, or join up with one of the plethora of Brotherhood-esque mutant-rights jihadists they fight on a monthly basis. Meet one of the few mutants who has tried her damnedest to take a third option.

Cecilia Reyes was approached by Charles Xavier around the time of X-Men (1991) #1-3. She turned him down and he promised to leave her alone after that. She pursued her dream of a medical career and became a doctor, one of the best in the biz, despite being a Puerto Rican black woman.

Unfortunately, a few years later, Operation: Zero Tolerance kicked in, and the federal government declared open war on mutants, thus catching poor Cecilia in the crossfire.

Her power - a forcefield that protects her from any attack, but not from the pain it causes - is pretty much the definition of being Blessed With Suck. It's hard to blame her for wanting to live a life off the battlefield, where she can do what she does best without mixing it up. In her own words, her superpower is saving lives, not the forcefield that happens to spring up around her whenever something shoots at her.

Despite being literally dragged kicking and screaming into the X-Men's universe, Cecilia acquitted herself well. Her first night, she presided over a medical procedure that saved Cyclops' life with only minimal supplies, and she went on to form strong bonds with Beast, Nightcrawler, and Gambit, all the while learning to develop her powers and continuing to practice medicine.

These days she's more a reservist than an actual member, patching up the X-Men and generally staying off the front lines. I think that's the best place for her, personally, but it always gives me a thrill to see her in action.

4) Polaris

I don't think it's possible for me to talk about underrated characters and NOT bring up Lorna Dane.


She's been around since shortly after the original generation of X-Men, but tragically, hasn't gotten as much focus as characters who've been around half or even a third as long. Since her inception she's been strictly "second-string", with the exception of the time when it was finally revealed, after decades of denial, that she is in fact the daughter of Magneto.

Since then the character enjoyed a minor Renaissance, even getting to challenge Xavier on his views versus Magneto's. However, she's always been short-shifted as a character thanks to others getting more popularity.

Fortunately, we have Peter David's X-Factor series, where she's always shone as a strong character with a lot of heart and a whole lot of muscle. The woman has the same powers as her father, did I mention that? She really should be one of the strongest contenders in the X-Men universe at this point.


3) Psylocke

I don't know of any X-Man more drastically changed by their time with the team than Betsy Braddock. Reading the books today, it's nigh-impossible to believe that she started out as this:

But that's comic books for you.

However, I'd argue that even when she wore the pink frilly costume, there were the makings of the character she would eventually become. Even back then, Psylocke could be ruthless and manipulative, and would often be the first person -- even before Wolverine, sometimes! -- to suggest a violent or drastic course of action. That side of her never really toned down, though she did tend to accede to the wishes of her more merciful teammates more back then than later on.

So even through the changes...and there've been a lot...

...there's always been an element of strength there, of courage, adaptability, and ruthlessness that continue to make Psylocke one of my all-time favorite X-Men.


2) Jean Grey/Phoenix

What can be said about Jean Grey that hasn't already? The first X-Woman, and by far the one with the most impact. The Dark Phoenix Saga is still one of the best-remembered stories in the X-Men''s history, and it wasn't even about their usual raison d'etre of mutant rights.


For my money, I'll take this Jean:

over this one

but that's just a matter of personal taste.


I like Jean Grey as a character who learns from her mistakes and grows past them, who is constantly seeking to define herself, not by who she's with or what cosmic force has her by the ovaries this week, but by her own standards, her own power.


That's not to say a good Phoenix story isn't still the awesomest thing ever, though.

(hint, hint you guys)


1) Storm


And here we are at last. My favorite character in the X-Men, my favorite character in comics, probably my favorite fictional character ever to exist



Storm was the reason I got into the X-Men in the first place. A strong-willed, dignified black woman who led her team, commanded the weather, and kept a sympathetic side to boot? I was sold from the get-go.


She's beautiful, strong, regal, tough, brave, and compassionate. In short, Ororo Munroe is everything I think a superheroine should be, X-Man or otherwise. The only other comic book character who I think captures all these traits and does them well is Wonder Woman, which says volumes about Ororo, that I think she can stand alongside Diana to that extent.


I've always identified as a feminist -- I believe men and women can and should stand on equal footing with each other. And Storm was the one who taught me that.

Whenever she led the X-Men, I loved the team. She brings a mix of toughness and compassion to whatever team she's in charge of, and she's strong enough, both in terms of powers and character, to carry the weight in a way few other X-Men can, male or female.


Whenever I'm making a dream team of X-Men, she's always my first pick for leader. Whenever I'm thinking back to my favorite lineups, they're always the ones with her in charge. That's how valuable I think she is to the team.

(and if there's any doubt that she could do the job better than Cyclops, go check this issue out!)


~*~

So that's it, my Top 15 X-Women of all time. If you agree or disagree, or have a different ranking, please let me know in the comments! I welcome discussion about this topic!


Thanks for reading!

~Ingonyama/Curt

Men Reading Women In Comics: My Top 15 X-Women, Part 1

Hello, ME!

On Tuesday, August 28th, 2012, Tumblr kicked off a project called "Men Reading Women In Comics". Luckily for me, I am a (gay) man who enjoys reading comics, especially when strong female characters are contained therein.

One of my pet fandoms, in fact my primary obsession since 1993, is X-Men, which over the years has given me many powerful, amazing superheroines worthy of celebration.

Beginning with the start of Chris Claremont's run in 1975, the Uncanny X-Men underwent a shift in paradigm that I feel is partially responsible for its continued popularity and staying power to this day. Namely, a vastly improved treatment of its female cast, pushing them into the spotlight, giving them storylines and showcasing their powers to a degree before then unheard of in comics.

Since then, there've been authorial missteps, to be sure, but the women of the X-Books still stand strong.

This is a list of my favorites. Whether they're actual members of the team or one of its affiliates, allies who struck me as particularly cool, or superheroines from other groups who just formed strong ties to Marvel's mutants, I just love seeing these ladies in the pages of an X-Book. Some of them will have lots of images to accompany the text, and others will just be short blurbs.

This will be a two-part blog, with part 1 detailing #s 15-8 and my Top 7 in part 2.
Enjoy!

15) Moira MacTaggert

Image courtesy of xmen-supreme.com

Moira is tough to pin down. She's not a mutant, and not an X-Man, but her character and history is so indelibly tied with the X-Men that she might as well be. While largely known as Professor Xavier's ex-girlfriend and a gifted geneticist-slash-plot device for patching up the X-Men and/or unlocking any science-related problems they stumble across, I like her because of her courage and strength, as much as her brains.

She doesn't have any real powers, just her brains and her guts, and she's plentiful in both, as evidenced from her very first appearance in Uncanny X-Men #96

Moira decides the Hippocratic Oath doesn't apply to omnicidal demons. Image courtesy of media.comicvine.com

Yeah, she started off as willing to mix it up with the bad guys just as readily as the X-Men themselves. She'd spend as much time with a pistol, rifle, or machine gun in her hands as in her laboratory.

Over time, she got less combative and more like a den mother, particularly in the pages of Excalibur, but I'll always remember her as the woman able to both solve the X-Men's tougher scientific quandaries and pull a gun on anything and everything that threatens her or the people she cares about.


The Hippocratic Oath should also not extend to abusive rapist ex-husbands.

Long story short, Moira is probably the X-Men's best-known human ally, and certainly one of my favorite non-team-members of either gender they've ever had.

14) Monet St. Croix

She's sexy and she knows it. Image courtesy of media.comicvine.com

M started off in the pages of Generation X, as a...quandary. The woman who appeared in the early books calling herself M was an imitation, her young sisters Nicole and Claudette merged into the likeness of their elder sibling after she was transformed into Penance. Yeah...

Convoluted backstory notwithstanding, I think M is an amazing character. All the blunt, brutal honesty, snobbery, and snark of Emma Frost combined with a set of superpowers that would too easily guarantee her a spot on the Mary Sue list. However, we've been lucky enough to get some top-notch writers handling her, who make her both a powerhouse and a flawed, but still sympathetic character.  Currently she's X-Factor Investigations' team snarker, having overcome her complex, troubled past to become one of the organization's most popular, bluntly honest member, and thriving under the writing of Peter David.

13) Jubilee

Jubilation Lee's signature design, courtesy of uncannyxmen.net

Anyone who's watched the X-Men animated series in the 90s knows this girl. She was the smart-alecky teenage newcomer we were supposed to identify with. Her powers, and her wardrobe, were bright, flashy, and loud, her slang trendy and dated almost before it left her mouth.

In short, she was a microcosm of the 90s. So why do I love this character so much?

Probably because for all that she's a bratty, smart-mouthed snot, there is a heart under the attitude, and a brain as well. In her time with Generation X, she grew into her own as a character, and I always liked her powers; she had real, genuine potential for growth and expansion in their use, unlike a lot of other energy-blasting types among the X-Men (I'm looking at you, Havok).

An alternate costume from a fan on DeviantArt. If you know the source, let me know so I can credit them!

That said, I can't say I was completely displeased when, after M-Day, she became a vampire and faced a whole new set of challenges. The Wolverine & Jubilee limited series may have had something to do with this, since it showed that despite having a serious chip on her shoulder, she was definitely still the same person she always was, just with a new power set. I also really enjoyed her relationships with Gambit, X-23, and Wolverine during her guest appearance in X-23. So while I'd of course love to see her powers come back, if she stays as she is, I won't cry too many tears. She's still a valuable asset to any team she's on. Just now, she's the loudest, liveliest dead girl I know to boot.


Now if she'd just drop the damn jacket I'd be happy. Image courtesy of uncannyxmen.net

12) Rachel Summers-Grey

uncannyxmen.net again.

Out of all the characters in this portion of the program, Rachel (the second Phoenix and the third Marvel Girl) is probably the most quintessentially Claremontian. Her watchword started out as being 'tough'...so tough that she was arguably the least feminine female character on the X-Books during her early tenure with the X-Men and her time with Excalibur.

Given her backstory...a victim of the original 'Days of Future Past' timeline where mutants were hunted nearly to extinction by Sentinels and most of the X-Men were slaughtered...it's no surprise that she raised as many defenses as she did, or that she would fight so hard to keep it from coming true.


Baby Phoenix? Yeah, no one calls her that twice.

Since taking the name Marvel Girl in 2004, she's softened up considerably, adopting more feminine forms of dress and hairstyles, but she's still plenty tough.

I wish the writers of Avengers Vs. X-Men (the latest CROSSOVER EVENT THAT WILL CHANGE THE MARVEL UNIVERSE FOREVER SERIOUSLY WE SWEAR) would remember Rachel's ties to the Phoenix and use them better in the wake of this event, but as long as she continues to have a role in the books rather than be shuffled off to Limbo again, I won't complain. Too much.

11) Danielle Moonstar


Mutant powers? Girl, please.

It would be so easy to write Dani Moonstar off as the token Native American on the X-Men. She certainly makes a bigger deal out of it than Forge, her closest male analogue, does.

But the great thing about her, IMO anyway, is that she managed to rise above being a token (at least in terms of her character), to be not only the leader of her own team, but one of the few examples after M-Day that there is life after mutant powers.

Don't get me wrong; Moonstar's powers, both as Psyche/Mirage and later when her codename was her surname, were awesome, and had some of the greatest potential I've ever seen in a field that, even by then, was starting to get old hat. Her psychic powers started off as a mix of emotion-based illusions and animal empathy, then went through many, many permutations until they finally became a kind of psychic Swiss army knife, where she could do anything that wasn't the standard psychic tricks of 'read minds, communicate psychically'.

Then she was depowered. And for most characters in the X-Men universe (see: Jubilee), losing your mutant power is the next worst thing to a death sentence, at least as far as being in the books goes. Instead, Dani taught young superhumans at the Intitiative for a while, and then went back to being in charge of the New Mutants, who had by now become their own team of X-Men, shouting down or smacking down anyone who dared tell her that she couldn't.

To this day, she is one of the strongest characters in the X-Men universe, and the spearhead (so to speak) of her own book. I can't help but wish she'd get her powers back, at least a little, if only because I'd like to see how they juxtapose with her new, tougher, go-getter attitude. But with or without them, she's still a force to be reckoned with.

10) Dazzler

Icon of the 80s.

Dazzler's origins as a comic-book character are...complicated. Suffice it to say that she was originally designed as a multi-media crossover project, complete with a movie, studio-released albums, and a comic book. Except for the comic about a mutant singer who transduced sound into light, which gained a loyal cult following, the rest of the idea fell through fairly dramatically.

With that outfit, it's hardly surprising.

However, despite an inauspicious beginning, the character herself endured, and wound up in the pages of the X-Men, where she had originated. During a time when the X-Men were in a period of great upheaval, the character of Dazzler found herself at loose ends as well, with her singing career destroyed thanks to her secret being blown wide open. After the X-Men saved her from possession by a psychic entity called Malice, she wound up running alongside them, more a victim of circumstance than of her own free will. Despite this, time and again she was tested as a superheroine, and time and again she proved herself up to the task, becoming one of the most positive and potentially powerful members of the team.
She's taken several extended hiatuses from the team, mostly when the books were trying to seem cooler or take themselves too seriously. Currently, she's taking her show on the road, as the leader of the dimension-hopping "X-Treme X-Men"

"Wait, you're calling my book WHAT?!"
Sooner or later, though, she always comes back to brighten things up.

9)  Emma Frost.


For many fans of the "classic" period of the X-Men, between the 70s and the 90s, the time Emma Frost joined the team is considered the comic's "Jump The Shark" moment, a slide in quality of storytelling from which they never bounced back.

I respectfully disagree.

Emma Frost may have joined the team under extremely questionable circumstances, but she's also a compelling character in her own right. Much like the X-Men as a group seek to redeem mutants in the public eye, she seeks to redeem herself in their eyes. And while she may follow a different moral code than the rest of the team, hers are held no less strongly than theirs are.

Guilt is a powerful motivator for Emma; guilt over her actions as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club, a long-time adversary of the X-Men's, guilt over the many classes of mutant students she's taken under her wing only to lose in a number of horrific tragedies, and guilt over surviving an apocalyptic strike on the island nation of Genosha that killed sixteen million people.


Wearing this outfit in public, however, was apparently A-OK. Go figure.

Her quest for redemption clashes with her refusal to compromise her own morals to fit in with the X-Men, and that's what makes her a compelling character to me. Even if I dislike the fact that she's been pushed to the forefront of the X-Men books in recent years at the expense of some other great X-Women being shoved back, I can't deny that her story is one of the most captivating in the X-Men's history.

8 ) Rogue.


One of my favorite non-X-Men heroines is Ms. Marvel, an Avenger who was given the superpowers of an alien race by a lab accident. I never would have heard of her if not for Rogue.

For years I thought Rogue had just won the Superpower Lottery. Flight, superstrength, invulnerability, and the ability to drain off other people's powers with a touch? Sounded awesome. Then I learned that the flight/strength/invulnerability stuff wasn't her power at all, but someone else's, and that that someone else shared her mind and body, locked away inside her consciousness but still there, like a voice in the back of her head.

My heart went out to both women in that moment.

Of course,  I'd already come to love Rogue for herself. Brash, rebellious, flirty, and funny under normal circumstances, every now and then she could show real softness and vulnerability, sorrow for the pain she'd inadvertently caused, and a desire to be free from her own curse.


Today, the woman running around with the X-Men bears little resemblance to the Rogue I used to know. She can control her powers now, but Ms. Marvel's powers have faded from her, and with them a lot of the strength of character that drew me to Rogue in the first place. However, I'm holding out hope that the brash, sassy Southern scrapper I got to know and love will rise again someday.

~*~