I figured, in light of the upcoming release of Deadpool & Wolverine, that the thing to do is cover what appears to be that movie’s antagonist, Cassandra Nova. Granted, I haven’t seen the movie, and I suspect with many of the promised cameos in the movie, I might have a few more weeks’ worth of columns I can pull from that movie.
In the meantime, I got another character created by Grant Morrison that somehow keeps popping up but only really got anywhere while Morrison was writing the character.
Yes, much like previous Morrison-based entries Zauriel and Beak, Cassandra Nova was a character created by Grant Morrison (working with artist Frank Quietly) that had a purpose in Morrison’s work, has somewhat hung around since then, but is more of a random character that sometimes appears here and there. It’s not like either Beak or Zauriel never appeared again after Morrison was finished with them. It’s more like their appearances are generally more random and whatever character arc they had in Morrison’s stories is basically forgotten. Cassandra Nova more or less fits that bill as well.
First appearing in July 2001’s New X-Men #114–an odd title since the series was just plain “X-Men” prior to that issue–Cassandra Nova was something of a mystery woman. Not a young woman, but her first appearance had her escorting a generally unsuspecting cousin to the Trask family through a jungle so he could re-activate a Mastermold. After killing the hapless cousin who didn’t even seem to know what was going on, she sent a giant Sentinel to Genosha and wiped out all the mutants there save Emma Frost when her new “diamond form” powers kicked in. From there, the Sentinel just disappeared or something because it wasn’t the villain for the arc: Cassandra Nova was.
It would be worth pointing out that Cassandra did seem to have some superpowers, but they were initially vaguely defined. Was she a mutant? Well…no. Not, really. What she was, it turned out, was Professor X’s twin sister. Within the womb, the unborn Charles sensed the evil in his sister and used his psychic powers, possibly in self-defense, to kill Cassandra before she was even more. But being a stillborn was apparently not enough to stop this malignant thing! She came back as a mummudrai, a parasitic lifeform formed by energy from the astral plane.
As a mummundrai, Cassandra had the same powers as her brother as well as the ability to manipulate flesh and blood for herself and others. In practice, that meant she could do things like withstand Cyclops’ strongest optic blast, strip the flesh off Wolverine, and within stand the psychic powers of the likes of Jean Grey, Emma Frost, and the Stepford Cuckoos. In fact, in her first battle with the X-Men, she switched her psyche with her brother, so that when Emma, angry over the deaths of her Genoshan students, snapped Cassandra’s neck, she was really doing it to Charlies, and it didn’t help when Cassandra, in Charles’s body, put a bullet through her old form. And because she was as powerful as she was, none of the telepaths knew.
From there, Cassandra decided to go hurt the Shi’ar by driving Empress Lilandra insane, and only Jean Grey’s Phoenix-strengthened powers was enough to put Charles’s psyche back together and then force Cassandra out of his body. That left Cassandra as, essentially, a disembodied intelligence that would bounce around and cause trouble for the X-Men for years to come. Other writers have used Cassandra, some even with interesting storylines of their own, as it seems that Cassandra Nova is the sort of villain that invites creative storyarcs. One writer, Mike Carey, had an idea where Cassandra would meet another mummundrai and have a mummudrai child by it, but other writers were using her first, so he has to abandon those plans.
That said, Morrison did use Cassandra again in his final storyline, one set in a distant potential future where the real villain of Morrison’s entire arc, a mutant microbe called Sublime, was on the verge of defeating the remaining X-Men, and Cassandra was there as a reformed villain, leading a team that included Wolverine, Beak’s grandson, a kid with a pet Sentinel, three of the surviving Stepford Cuckoos, Fantomex’s brain ship, and a character called “No Girl” who apparently existed or maybe didn’t.
Never let it be said Morrison’s stories aren’t really, really weird.
As it is, Cassandra Nova will be making her live action debut in the new MCU movie Deadpool & Wolverine as played by Emma Corrin.
Will this Cassandra be as evil as the one from the comics? Eh, maybe. I’m hoping to find out very soon.
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