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.
~*~
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