Hunt for Wolverine: Mystery in Madripoor
So Hunt for Wolverine saves the most important story for last. Not the most important to the return of Wolverine, mind you. From the look of it, this series plays into the return of Wolverine mainly by establishing that Soteira are baddies with an interest in Wolverine, which we’ve already established thrice over. There’s also a plot about a satellite that does something as yet undivulged, but the big-deal-ness of that is as yet unestablished.
This week, instead, people will be talking about the fact that Psylocke is now back to her original body, which means she isn’t Asian any more. That came out of nowhere – and that’s before you get to the surprise of having it happen in a Hunt for Wolverine mini.
There are wider issues to talk about here, of course, but let’s look at the story itself first. Hunt for Wolverine picks a different side of Wolverine’s mythos for each miniseries, so naturally one of them has to go to Madripoor. Our stars this time are the X-Men themselves – Kitty, Psylocke, Jubilee, Storm, and Rogue – plus Domino, for some reason. The tenuous basis for going to Madripoor is that Magneto lives there now, and maybe he stole the body, because, hell, it sounds like the sort of thing he might do.
But this isn’t a Magneto story; instead the X-Men end up fighting Viper and the Femmes Fatales, a bunch of 90s Spider-Man villains who haven’t been seen in ages. For added Wolverine content, they also now include Sapphire Styx, from the first Wolverine storyline in Marvel Comics Presents. This isn’t as obscure as it might sound – the story in question was the lead-in to the first Wolverine ongoing, which established Madripoor as a core part of his mythology – but she’s only appeared once since then, so she’s far from a big name. Anyhow, these baddies are all working for Soteira, who have a plan to launch a satellite for those Mysterious Reasons.
Sapphire’s thing was to stay young by absorbing other people’s life force, and since we last saw her, it seems she’s got a bit addicted. She’s also being haunted by the ghosts of people from whom she absorbed energy in the past, including Logan, since apparently she gets a bit of their personality stuck inside her (similar to the stories that have been done with Rogue over the years). So while she’s not actually trying to kill any of the prisoners, her overenthusiasm winds up inadvertently killing Psylocke.
All of which leads to issue #4, which opens with a lengthy sequence of Psylocke inside Sapphire’s mind, along with all the other people who’ve been absorbed by Sapphire over the years. For whatever reason, this time her spirit appears in the form of her original body (which I don’t think has always been the case in the past, however much sense it makes). She encounters the bit of Logan that’s stuck inside Sapphire, and somehow or other that results in her returning to the real world, back in her original body, because something something. I mean, there is an explanation, but it involves the line “Instinctively, I used the soul power she left behind to create a new body, molecule by molecule”, so that’s, er… how it works, apparently.
The baddies are captured, the satellite makes it into space because it’s presumably a plot point for the next phase of this storyline, and that’s your lot.
So… On the positives, it’s a fun little romp. The Femme Fatales are colourful and underused villains, and it’s nice to see them getting an outing. The pacing’s good, the dialogue’s punchy, the X-Men are in character, the Fatales get enough personality to make them more than just gimmicky names. It’s a nicely upbeat book – maybe not something that particularly echoes the mock-noir of Wolverine’s Madripoor stories, but quite welcome nonetheless. And most of the established Madripoor supporting cast are either not living there any more, or just plain not living, which doesn’t exactly help when you want to call back to old stories.
Artist Thony Silas is… let’s go with patchy. There’s a minimally angular aspect to his work that at best has a fair amount of energy, and reminds me a bit of Geoff Senior. At other times, it just looks unfinished. Then again, the heavy shadow in the opening of issue #3 looks rather good. Still, it’s hard to avoid noticing that the lynchpin sequence of the series – Psylocke inside Sapphire’s mind, in her transition back to her original body – is handed over to Leonard Kirk. (Who does it very well, as you’d expect.)
Like some of the other minis, it’s not very clear what’s actually at stake, nor what it has to do with the return of Wolverine. So it’s four issues of fighting over a threat which is at best hazy, at worst merely implicit. And what’s more, the rest of the story doesn’t have a great deal to do with Psylocke’s identity, unless you count some brief comments in issue #1 where she notes how Logan always had such a clear idea of who he was. The big talking point of the series is Psylocke, and while the first three issues set it up in terms of the plot mechanics, they don’t do so much in terms of the theme.
But let’s turn to the bigger picture. This is a plot development from 1989. It’s stood for nearly thirty years. Jim Lee’s redesign of the character was a big hit. So if it’s an outright reversal then that’s a big deal – though a coda suggests the Lee design is sticking around too in some form, which might imply she’s been divided or something. We’ll see.
Times have changed since 1989 and it’s hardly surprising that if you go back thirty years you’re going to hit things which have not aged well. The X-Men in the 80s did okay on gender balance, but their ethnic diversity hasn’t aged so well, particularly when you consider that the premise ought to lead to mutants coming from all over the world, let alone all walks of life. (New Mutants did somewhat better.) Chris Claremont was very keen on Japan, but tended to treat it as a collection of genre tropes more than an actual place, or at best a fascinatingly exotic place full of people who felt honour-bound to advance the plot.
That’s very much how Psylocke’s transformation was played at the time, and I suspect how it was taken by many readers – it wasn’t so much that she’d become Asian as that she’d become a ninja, and being Asian was more a genre convention of that character type than anything else. I was going to say that, even at the time, it’s unlikely that someone would have done this story with a white character becoming black, since that would have been read by American audiences of the time as primarily a story about race and identity, and it would have seemed horrifically crass. Then I remembered that Marvel did that story with the Punisher in 1991. But it lasted three issues, and the writer quit, and it was regarded as a fiasco almost instantly…
And yet nearly thirty years later, ninja Psylocke is (or was) still around. On that side of things, Marvel are probably quitting while they’re still ahead.
But even aside from that, there have always been problems with this version of Psylocke as a character. The accompanying personality change made Psylocke feel like a pod person, with a questionable sense of identity and a lack of organic connection to her own back story. She never entirely felt like a transformed version of the earlier character so much as a different character entirely who’d been swapped in; viewed the other way round, her British backstory and link to Captain Britain had become bizarrely irrelevant to the character as now portrayed. The early nineties Revanche storyline attempted to make some sense of it all by claiming that she’d actually been mentally mixed up with Kwannon, the original owner of her new body, but that didn’t really solve the problem so much as reinforce the idea that Psylocke was a character who had been ground zeroed in 1989. In recent years she’s had a lot of stories bemoaning her confused sense of identity and general lack of direction, surely a warning sign that most writers are struggling to make her work, or to find a hook beyond trying to turn “character makes no sense” into a virtue.
So Psylocke has been in something of a dead end for a while now, and a hard reset is no bad thing as a way of clearing out the clutter and paring her back to something more coherent as a character. On top of that, the whole concept of ninja Psylocke is… well, you know.
Issue #4 of this series handles the reset itself pretty well from a character standpoint, even if the mechanics of it are obscure in the extreme, and its connection with the rest of the series isn’t as strong as you might want. The mini as a whole is mixed stuff, but hey, we get a big event at the end, even if it does come out of the blue.
Finally, Betsy isn’t Rachel Dolezal anymore.
In addition to the Punisher story, Fabian Niceiza did something similar with Abner Jenkins in Thunderbolts.
Of all the retcons Betsy’s had, I wonder if that’s the first one that’s been reversed.
I just wanted to let you know that ‘a fascinatingly exotic place full of people who felt honour-bound to advance the plot’ made me giggle.
I’m pretty sure that Psylocke’s now-abandoned Asian body at the end is meant to be a restored Kwannon. She gets namedropped near the start – “since my life merged with Kwannon” – after all, in a way that immediately suggests the effect of Psylocke being ripped out of the Asian body would be to UNmerge them. In X-terms, the closest equivalent would probably be how the Carol Danvers psyche from Rogue’s mind was separated into its own body – separate from both Rogue and the Danvers who had become Binary in the meantime – post-Siege Perilous (albeit without it necessarily being “one or the other must die”, like the Claremont story).
And yeah, that would be dubious in continuity terms – between Psylocke’s death in XXM and subsequent resurrection, the Matt Fraction story that temporarily swapped Psylocke back to her original body, the fact that Revanche (Kwannon-in-Betsy’s-body) was meant to have stripped all traces of herself out of Psylocke and vice-versa before she died (but, really, it’s not as if her characterisation significantly changed as a result of it) and so forth – but it seems most likely. Especially since they go out of the way to highlight her speaking Japanese at the end, which makes it being Styx (the most likely other choice in plot terms) improbable.
> Artist Thony Silas is… let’s go with patchy.
Wasn’t he a last-minute replacement for Chris Bachalo?
> For whatever reason, this time her spirit appears in the form of her original body (which I don’t think has always been the case in the past, however much sense it makes).
Definitely not – hell, didn’t she use the “Lady Mandarin” armour from the story that “made her Asian” as her psychic avatar for a long time?
> She encounters the bit of Logan that’s stuck inside Sapphire, and somehow or other that results in her returning to the real world, back in her original body, because something something.
Isn’t the Leonard Kirk sequence a step back to the end of issue 1?:
• Betsy gets drained by Styx there, then we see what happened to her from her perspective at the start of #4.
• Meanwhile, in the real world, issue 2 is going on (during which, Styx apparently discovers that Betsy’s body is dead – how that fits with the twist at the end of #4 is an open question), until we get to the end where Styx apparently sees “Patch” sitting on the couch in her room with the Asian body on his lap.
• In #3, suddenly “Patch” is pink and we discover no-one else but Styx can see him* – Betsy has somehow “unbound” the bit of Wolverine she finds in Styx’s brain (“Together, we’ll find a way through her mind and escape”, and that’s what Styx is hallucinating (*although the blonde one somehow sees him after waking up from being knocked out).
• And then, at the end, he gives the go-ahead and Psylocke herself manages to make the weakened Styx explode, which leads her standing where Styx was because of the “something something”.
To be honest, the bigger thing for me was that when she’s listing people who’ve tried to control her, she stops in 1989.
(Incidentally, why did the X-Men just leave the Asian body just lying around? Surely – especially in a story notionally ABOUT a dead body vanishing – they should have picked it up for burial, at least.)
I think it’s interesting how Betsy not only psychically reconstructed her body, but also managed to throw in a costume and purple hair dye. That’s something. Come to think of it, whenever her original body or Kwannon’s body gets resurrected, the hair dye always manages to come along for the ride. I mean, you’d think either body would be restored in a completely natural state (no hair dye). Maybe it’s organic hair dye?
I’d imagine Betsy having blonde hair is one of those things that Marvel have forgotten about. Like the fact that she’s also supposed to be precognitive.
@Moo
I’m pretty sure Spiral officially made the Kwannon body hair’s naturally purple from that point on during the whole bodyswap fiasco. It’s quite possible Betsy did indeed make her new “original body” naturally lilac-haired.
The costume bugged me more ’cause… where did the design come from? It’s not something she’s ever worn before (and she’s had plenty of chances to have it made as her costume before if she wanted one like it), so it can hardly be said to be part of her self-identity. She didn’t even use it as part of her disembodied avatar, instead “wearing” something more like a pink nightie.
@Taibak
They remembered it in this very issue – her psychic self is blonde at first until she changes it by running her hand through her hair.
Also, re: precognition – besides the initial bodyswap, her powers have been screwed with so much it’s hardly surprising it’s fallen by the wayside. [The X-books don’t tend to like precognition much as a power anyway – Rogue used Ms. Marvel’s “seventh sense” what, twice? And the precognition Cable was briefly given a couple of X-Force revamps ago as part of that book’s gimmick didn’t last long.]
@Sanity
Betsy psychically made a costume. She actually made clothes with her mind and it’s the design that strikes you as odd?
Not that her being able to construct a human body with her mind makes any sense either, but a costume (regardless of design) to go along with it is just silly. I certainly hope she also remembered to make the little tag with the machine-washing instructions because I hear the colors in those psychically-fabricated garments tend to run if washed improperly.
This was solicited as having Chris Bachalo on art, and seeing Thony Silas as a replacement is more than a disappointment. He was terrible.
It’s probably a sad commentary on the prominence of Asian charicters in comicbooks, but psylocke is probably one of the most prominent Asian heroes out there (in appearance anyway). Even though there’s baggage tied to her backstory I’m surprised that Marvel went ahead and decided to make her white again. Yes I know she didn’t start out that way, but your average joe doesn’t.
The art in this was dreadful. The series was obviously rushed. But I am delighted to have original betsy back as I always preferred the English Rose who was secretly a cutthroat spy trained by a James Bond like organisation rather than ninja in a thong.
I blame Olivia Munn for ruining Psylocke. 😉
I’ve never really understood Psylocke’s appeal. She’s always seemed to be a mish-mash of stock characteristics writers’ thought were cool in the early 90s.
“The accompanying personality change made Psylocke feel like a pod person, with a questionable sense of identity and a lack of organic connection to her own back story. She never entirely felt like a transformed version of the earlier character so much as a different character entirely who’d been swapped in”
A great way of putting it. The problem for me with the transformed version of Psylocke is that the original was an interesting character who was basically overwritten. True, the trip through the Siege Perilous ended up a sort of funhouse mirror version of flipping her fears (being a physically weaker hero relying protection of armor) and her strength (turning the mind-controller into the mind-controlled), but keeping that as the new normal made her seem seem like a different character rather than a different period of her life.
The closest Psylocke ever had to an engaging personality was in Remender’s Uncanny X-force. She was concerned about her boyfriend Archangel and pissed at basically everyone else. And worried about the effects that regular killing might have on her personality/soul. So good. And the only time I’ve cared about her as a character. Not really a coincidence that she ditched the “ribbons tied around my thighs” costume design at the same time that she became a well-rounded character.
I’d like to see Betsy:
1) Wave bye-bye to the X-Men
2) Move back to England.
3) Ditch the name “Psylocke” (what a stupid name)
4) Trade in the superhero tights for chic business casual. Lavender, of course. Something elegant and classy with a butterfly pin on her lapel shaped like her signature butterfly effect.
5) Become the head of MI-13 and star in a new MI-13 series.
6) Start insisting people call her “Beth” rather than “Betsy”.
Get her back to her to British agent roots.
Patchy, ha!
“Lady Mandarin” was the first Uncanny arc I ever read. I bought #267 on the newsstand, and boy was I confused. If they hadn’t been simultaneously publishing the Dark Phoenix Saga in Classic X-Men, I probably would have become an Avengers fan.
Anyhow, when Jamie Braddock resurrected Betsy, why would he have left her Asian? Was that ever explained? Seems like that would have been the right time and story to undo this transformation.
Brendan: I’ve never really understood Psylocke’s appeal. She’s always seemed to be a mish-mash of stock characteristics writers’ thought were cool in the early 90s.
Seconded. Cf. Gambit.
And Psylocke is everything you say, *plus* a hefty dose of a character who was English, and therefore had to be repressed and “demure” (as Claremont presented her), who was put in an Asian body and immediately became hypersexualized in her depiction.
” I certainly hope she also remembered to make the little tag with the machine-washing instructions because I hear the colors in those psychically-fabricated garments tend to run if washed improperly.”
Surely it would need brainwashing.
Granted, the British agent stuff was a massive retcon too. She was originally a regular human who Captain Britain could rescue. For whatever reason, Alan Moore, of all people, decided to give her the superpowers, the purple hair, the position in S.T.R.I.K.E. and, I believe, the modeling career.
Incidentally, since Moo brought up MI-13, I wonder how her personality would mesh with Pete Wisdom.
Nu-D: Jamie has a *very* questionable grasp on reality. Betsy’s lucky she wasn’t reincarnated as a, 8 foot tall Formula 1 groupie who thought she was Queen Victoria.
@Si: I loled.
@Nu-D: From what I read, Claremont only killed Betsy off in the first place as a means to ultimately get her back in her in original body. Then after he’d already killed her, he was told he couldn’t bring her back because Marvel, at the time, were still trying to enforce their “dead is dead” policy. When they eventually okayed her resurrection, he was told he could bring her back, but not in her original body. I don’t know for certain if all of the above is true, but I do recall reading it somewhere or another.
@Taibak: Re: Pete Wisdom & Betsy. I was thinking the same thing. It’d be interesting.
Granted, the British agent stuff was a massive retcon too. She was originally a regular human who Captain Britain could rescue. For whatever reason, Alan Moore, of all people, decided to give her the superpowers, the purple hair, the position in S.T.R.I.K.E. and, I believe, the modeling career.
Moore was following up on an odd incident in the earlier Captain Britain #34, in which Betsy had a remote psychic dream about her brother being badly wounded in battle. Moore’s story, and later ones, have treated this as an early manifestation of her psychic powers.
In the original story by Gary Friedrich , Larry Lieber, and Ron Wilson, this was likely intended as Betsy having a nightmare after seeing Brian fight Lord Hawk on television. Moore was probably also influenced by Betsy’s stint under the mind-control of another villain, Doctor Synne, in issues #8-10. She was used mainly as a damsel in distress in those older issues.
More generally, all of this stuff seems like it was part of the much bigger retcon that Brian’s father was from Otherworld, tying in to all the multiverse stuff that Moore introduced by modifying David Thorne’s dimension-hopping Saturnyne storyline midstream.
With Betsy, it was also a way to take her out of her role as hostage bait and play with more of the Claremont X-Men themes and plot gimmicks Moore and Davis were already riffing on. Given the general quality jump that resulted, and the way David and Jamie Delano kept building on these turns, it’s hard to feel like much was lost with the original-model “fainting Stan Lee female” version of Betsy.
Now, Jamie Braddock, on the other hand….there’s a character who’s been radically revised by pretty much everyone who picked him up from his early days as the cool older brother: he’s been Delano’s and Davis’s comment on British neo-imperialism, Claremont’s more sympathetic Jim Jaspers replacement, and ended up as Rick Remender’s tragic “tough choice” victim.
Grrrr…..that’s Dave Thorpe, not David Thorne.
I am continually surprised by how extensive the Marvel UK material was which never penetrated my consciousness as a comic reader in the US in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s.
Especially given how much of it tangentially touched Claremont’s Uncanny.
I think that’s why, essentially. If Claremont hadn’t decided that these were toys that he had to play with, none this might ever have entered the main US version of the Marvel universe. In turn, that probably has a lot to do with Claremont having been the first writer of Captain Britain back in the days before Chris Claremont was Chris Claremont, giving him a personal reason to keep track of this corner of things.
Still, for all that (as I said above), I don’t like what Claremont did with Betsy Braddock very much, one has to give him credit for deciding that he wanted to build on what was done with this corner of the MU and not do what so many writers in his position might have done, say, “No, this needs to be turned back to what it was when *I* was writing it.”
Yeah, Claremont was never one to let a character go. It’s how a lot of characters got dragged into the X-Men. We’ve already mentioned Psylocke and in another thread we’re talking about Longshot, but don’t forget that Sabretooth was an Iron Fist villain while Mystique (and Rogue!) were created for Ms. Marvel. He’s probably the only writer Marvel’s ever had who’s tried to connect plot threads across such a large part of the shared universe.
And for all his flaws, he’s never been shy about taking risks with his characters. I mean, this is someone who dismantled the X-Men in the Australia era and introduced one of the Spider-Friends as a supervillain.
[B]but don’t forget that Sabretooth was an Iron Fist villain while Mystique (and Rogue!) were created for Ms. Marvel. He’s probably the only writer Marvel’s ever had who’s tried to connect plot threads across such a large part of the shared universe.
I think it’s come up in comments here before, but this is actually rather typical for the younger writers who joined Marvel int he 1970s. Steve Englehart, for example, started his Secret Empire/Brand Corporation plot in the Beast series in Amazing Adventures and, when that series was cancelled, finished it in Captain America (where it was rewritten on the fly to become Watergate allegory) and then ties off the loose ends in his final full Avengers arc. Even before that, he’d done not only an Avengers/Defenders crossover but also the Celestial Madonna storyline which connected to both his Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel runs in various ways.
The original Thanos saga starts in Iron Man, winds through a couple of issues of Marvel Premiere when that was still the first two issues of the Thing’s team-up title, and of course settled in Captain Marvel with some stray threads in Daredevil (where a single page by Starlin finally gives Moondragon’s origin) and an issue of Engelhart’s Avengers.
Claremont just stuck around longer and thereby got to keep doing it after it was otherwise out of fashion. (When Engelhart returned to do West Coast Avengers and Fantastic Four, he not only connected those two books, but also revived a bunch of *his* 1970s plotlines and characters from various titles). But the prominence and longevity of Claremont’s X-books work means that his use of his pet characters and plots more noticeable.
Omar: It still makes more sense than Steve Skeates starting a story in Aquaman and finishing it up two years later.
In Sub-Mariner.
You also have the Rutland Vermont stories that took place in both DC and Marvel books.
What’s a “Spider-Friend”?
The mention of Rutland reminds me that the real originator of all of it was Roy Thomas, who did the first Rutland stories and the first “unofficial” Marvel/DC crossovers, as well as stuff like the Kree/Skrull War and that odd little crossover where a bunch of the mad scientist villains hatched a scheme than ran across Captain Marvel, Sb-Mariner, and Avengers.
Engelhart was Thomas’s mentee, of course, and Claremont’s first Marvel work was having one of his plot suggestions used for the Thomas/Neal Adams Sentinel stuff and the follow-up Thomas did in Avengers. Beyond that, the first few years of Claremont’s run had a lot of callbacks to those Thomas/Adams stories.
All of the aforementioned writers were of the sort to wedge in “fixes” and continuity welding in the oddest places. Psylocke getting revamped in a Wolverine mini seems like a natural evolution from that way of approaching a shared universe.
It may also be a nod to the way Psylocke’s pre-“Asian” armored look was referenced by Claremont in the early Wolverine arcs. Isn’t there a bit in one of the early Madripoor stories where Lindsay McCabe gets some kind of armor that was commissioned for a friend of Logan’s, and which is heavily implied to be armor meant for Psylocke? (I think this was even in the Danglers list that Paul curated for many years.)
After all, if the story is pulling in characters like Sapphire Styx and the Femme Fatales, both of whom debuted in MCP serials that involved Wolverine, it could well be dredging up that tangential Psylocke connection as well.
Moo: There was a cartoon on American television called Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends that ran off for about five years, despite only producing three years’ worth of episodes. It focused on Spider-Man, Iceman, and Firestar, who were college classmates and housemates and who fought evil as a team called the Spider-Friends.
Firestar was created for the show – supposedly because they couldn’t get the rights to the Human Torch – but she didn’t debut in the comics until Uncanny X-Men #193 in 1985, right at the tail end of the series run. The easy approach would have been to introduce her as either a new member of the X-Men or the New Mutants. Instead, Claremont introduced her as one of the Hellions, which always seemed like a strange choice for a tie-in for a cartoon.
I grew up in Rutland. I had some oversized DC treasury edition with several shorts, including a Batman Halloween story set in Rutland. It’s long gone now, but I’ll be damned if I can recall what became of it.
The Psylocke reveal certainly explains why Bachalo was initially attached to the project. I was scratching my head a little.
As far as Johnny Storm replacements go, HERBIE > Angelica Jones. 🙂
Thomas also gave us the Squadron Sinister all the way back in the late 60s.
@Taibak
Yeah, I watched Spider-Man & his Amazing Friends on Saturday mornings when I was a kid (when it wasn’t frustratingly preempted which seemed to happen pretty often). Don’t remember them calling themselves the Spider-Friends though, so I though you might have been referring to something else.
At any rate, it wasn’t Claremont’s idea to bring Firestar into canon and he certainly didn’t portray her as a villain. Within three panels of her intro it was made clear to the reader that Empath was using his powers on her.
Moo: But, correct me if I’m wrong, at the end of the story Empath is unconscious and Firestar still chooses to stay with the Hellions.
@Taibak: She does, but now with an awareness that Emapth and Roulette are complete assholes, and only because she naively believes that Emma Frost is pretty decent. Her dialogue reads:
“I’ve had rotten classmates like Empath before, kids who loved to pick on me– but I’ve never known anyone, ‘cept my dad… as kind as Miss Frost. I can’t run out on her. It’s something Empath or Roulette would do– I don’t want to be like them.”
And she says this to Xavier who neither argues the point nor attempts to talk her out of it. “I understand. I hope the White Queen proves deserving of that trust.” he replies.
She’s basically just naive, and Claremont wrote her as pretty saccharine throughout. She even says “golly” at one point.
Claremont seemed to have something against fire-wielding characters. Sunfire was written out of the book as quickly as possible, same with Firestar. He even went to great pains to make Pyro’s power “control over existing flames” instead of actually generating fire himself. I wonder what his thinking was — maybe it was too derivative of the Human Torch? Or maybe the it would outclass the rest of the team’s powers?
Thom: He also explicitly said that Firestar didn’t have fire-based powers – she generated microwaves.
Oh, yeah — that became an issue later on when she joined the Avengers, right?
He really didn’t want a fire-based character on the team. I guess when you’ve got someone who can hurl lightning, fire becomes a little redundant.
Speaking of Sunfire, contrary to what every version of the Official Handbook states, he was never actually a member of the X-Men. Literally, the first X-Men scene Claremont wrote when he was given the series had Sunfire explaining to Xavier that he never agreed to join the team. X-Men #94, page 2, panel 3.
Xavier: “Shiro, I don’t understand. I thought you agreed to join us.”
Sunfire: “I agreed to HELP you, Professor. Once!”
He never joined. It was an assist as far as Shiro was concerned. He ought to be categorized as an ally not a past member.
Eh, I don’t think there’s a real pattern here. Claremont co-created Magma and she was one of his regulars for a while. I don’t see Pyro as an example of an “anti-fire bias” either; the fact that he can’t make his own flame is just characteristic of the classic Marvel effort to give each character a flaw.
So I see two fire-based characters CC created and used, and two he didn’t create and therefore didn’t want to use. The common theme is the creator, not the power.
Nu-D: Three. Don’t forget Neal Shaara.
@Taibak
I prefer to forget Neal Sahara, and most everything CC wrote after 1991.
But yes, that character supports my thesis as well.