It’s been a big week for Marvel’s mutants. X-Men ‘97 blew the doors wide open with a haunting, epic episode that has everyone talking, while at CinemaCon, Kevin Feige introduced a rip-roaring batch of Deadpool & Wolverine footage. But as rumors continue to swirl as to who might be the big bad behind both of those things, maybe it’s time to turn to the source material—and one of the greatest runs on X-Men in the book’s long, long history.
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s bold re-imagining of the X-Men in New X-Men mid-2001 adds much to the legacy of Marvel mutantdom. Beyond its additions to the canon—examining the destruction of Genosha; bringing to an end the first attempt at mutant statehood that would then be mirrored decades later in the ascendancy of the Krakoan Age; the development of the concept of secondary mutation; its explorations of a world where the world was exposed to Charles Xavier’s mutant identity on an international scale; the arcs it sets Emma Frost on as one of the most important additions to the X-Men of this generation; and even its controversial handling of Magneto—New X-Men set the tone for the kinds of stories Marvel would tell about mutantkind in the early 21st century.
Its pressing, modernized encapsulation of the mutant metaphor in a world about to be rocked by the September 11 terrorist attacks—its opening story arc covering the Genoshan Genocide, “E is for Extinction,” began in July 2001, and concluded in September—throughout its three-year run it deftly weaved the expansion of mutantkind’s presence on Earth amid its superheroic shenanigans with the advancement of exploring unique aspects of mutant culture, both in the wider world and with the codification of the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning as an actual educational facility with hundreds of students living on campus. But it’s in those early arcs—“E is for Extinction” and “Imperial,” specifically—that New X-Men gives us one of the most remarkable, fascinating, and altogether terrifying mutant antagonists in the X-Men’s entire history: Cassandra Nova.
The “twin sister” of Charles Xavier—in actuality, a parasitic, bodiless psionic reflection that developed in utero alongside Charles, before attempting to kill him by strangling him with his own umbilical cord—Cassandra Nova’s threat and impact is made immediate and horrifying in New X-Men. X-Men comics have long dealt with ideological foils to Xavier’s dream of mutant assimilation, but Cassandra’s twisted origins as a literal duplicate, surviving only by the sheer strength of psychic power she has and her hatred for the brother that cast her our before he was even born, make her an incredibly chilling threat—a Professor X with no filter, no morals, no compromise, only great power and no hesitance to use it.
The thing that makes her work outside of her personal connection to Xavier is also made immediately apparent in her debut: Cassandra Nova is a villain that wins. Her manipulation of the descendant of Bolivar Trask to activate the Wild Sentinels that would enact the Genoshan Genocide occurs in just two issues, and she is not stopped at the last minute, instead slaughtering 16 million mutants, a turning point that New X-Men continues to reckon with throughout its entire run, and the ramifications of which are only still being really dealt with in recent comics—a legacy few villains can match.
Even beyond her role at Genosha, Cassandra wreaks psionic mayhem while actually barely appearing in the book at all. Either formless or in Charles’ own body—which she uses to expose his mutant identity on national television, and even sunder the Shi’ar Empire as part of her incessant desire to kill anything ever connected to her brother’s life—Cassandra is not a villain of grand speeches (Morrison weaves some of their best one-liners into her presence) or stagecraft; all that is just simple theatrics when she can turn you into a gibbering wreck of self-doubts, or convince you to turn your own mind into mulch. The X-Men, in both of their major encounters with her, barely make it through by the skin of their teeth, and she ruthlessly tears them down in the process anyway.
An unstoppable, vindictive force, there is no reasoning with her, no evil she will not sink to. Even without her personal link to Charles, Cassandra represents the kind of ultimate foe that tests every aspect and legacy of the Xavier dream, both in pain and in ideology, asking how far Charles’ beliefs can go, not just in a modern, scared world, but when confronted with acts of horror so profoundly devastating they warrant a response in kind. Even though ultimately the X-Men prevail over Cassandra, with Emma trapping her mind in the form of the alien polymorph “Stuff,” the impact of her brief-but-bloody time in New X-Men shadows the rest of the series, pressing on not just Charles, but all of the X-Men—and even further beyond, given Genosha’s ongoing legacy.
We’re still not sure even if these contemporary Marvel Studios projects will attempt to tackle her. After all, it’s all-but-confirmed, but still not yet confirmed, that Emma Corrin will play Nova in Deadpool & Wolverine (even if the trailer makes it look like they will)—and even then, given all the multiversal shenanigans at play in that movie, there’s no telling just what kind of version of Cassandra we could get. Similarly, X-Men ‘97 is still grappling in the moment of the Genoshan Genocide, leaving it unclear just who specifically was behind its own version of the horrific act so far—and with Cassandra nowhere in sight on the show yet, there’s plenty of opportunity for the series to twist and do its own thing there.
But even then her impact, and New X-Men’s legacy, is being keenly felt as Marvel Studios makes its way back into the world of the mutants. Wherever these two very different X-Tales go, if all roads lead to Cassandra Nova, it’ll be very interesting to see how they handle it.
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