Writer: Peter David
Artist: Leonard Kirk
A mystery 44 years in the making -not comic book years, but real years- is finally unveiled. Lorna Dane, the green haired mutant later known as Polaris debuted way back in X-Men #49 (1968) and ever since, her origins had been surrounded in a shroud of secrecy. Her parents had died in a plane crash, but at the same time Magneto was rumored to be her real father -a fact that writers struggled to maintain valid over the years. With this issue, Peter David finally puts an end to the speculation and ambiguity. Taking story elements that go all the way to 1968, and as recent as 2002 -when Lorna went crazy after surviving the extinction event in Genosha- Mr. David answers the lingering question in a way that respects all the characters involved, avoids retcons, and more important, explains Polaris' erratic behavior of the past decade and potentially primes her for a new start crazy-free. Thank you, PAD!
No one has pointed out yet that Lorna is way too young in this story for Magneto to have been involved when he was leading the Brotherhood when you consider she was first introduced in 1968 in her late-teens (and the Brotherhood had been formed only 5 years before).
ReplyDeletePAD would have been much better off to reveal that Zala was the older half-sister who discovers her mother's affair with Magnus and so sabotages the plane with the aim of setting him up as the one who brought it down because she is jealous (because she hadn't developed mutant powers like her mother but Lorna was more than likely to given she is the offspring of an Omega level mutant).
There is still some interesting stuff to be worked out when it comes to Lorna Dane though. It's moot in the present-day Marvel Universe because they did the (stupid, in my opinion) thing of saying she IS Magneto's daughter, which is so very problematic. But going back to Claremont and pre-Claremont versions of the character, she is fascinating. There is an interesting tidbit dropped by CC in his earliest Shi'ar stuff about how "Eric the Red learned about the X-Men through Lorna. But he did not say how he learned of *her.*" There is something weird there; a never-explained connection between Lorna Dane and the Shi'ar's undercover agent on Earth (Davan Shakari) The very fact that, as his super-villain identity, Davan chose "Eric the Red," is a strange thing. It goes back to when the X-Men met Lorna back circa X-Men #51, and begs the question of how Eric knew about that, and why he chose that as his identity.