Second commission for Lorna’s 50th anniversary, completed by boxofwant! This time, I commissioned both this version and a NSFW version.
Their account is set to only be viewable (directly and via searches) with safe mode off, so I’m making this separate post for everyone to be able to see the safe version.
And of course, I do want to note that box was great to commission and very patient and accommodating with what I requested. 🙂
If you’re curious, the first anniversary piece I commissioned this year was this one by decoysnake.
A teenage Lorna Dane watches a fight between the X-Men and Magneto on TV and wonders: why can’t she be one of them?
Author’s Note: This chapter takes a tense shift from past to present tense. I realize this is generally a bad idea, but I think present tense works better for what I’m trying to do. Anyway, this is a ‘fanon’ chapter, and I explained its inspiration on AO3 if you wanna see what it is there.
She watches them on TV. These superhumans. These homo superior. These X-Men. Their faces play over and over on the screen in sheer radiant glory, blasting debris, icing roads, tossing boulders. One majestic mutant soars to heights under his own power that only an Angel could dream to reach. Each of the boys – and one girl, she reminds herself – take to action with a youthful rebellious zeal only teens could bring.
An apocalypse. A revolution. The dawning of a new age filled with awe and wonder. People call these strange times many things, but as she looks on, Lorna Dane asks herself one simple yet important question.
Why not me?
She hides herself in hair dye. Chestnut waves roll down her shoulders, obscuring the painful truth of an emerald lie teasing her with the idea of becoming something more, something different, something special and better than a meek girl sitting in her living room. She wonders why her hair couldn’t stand for more than a rare condition inherited from a father she couldn’t even remember. Just enough strangeness that people might mistake her for a mutant. Not enough to be one.
A pitched battle between good and evil rages on the tiny box in front of her. Lorna bears witness to a scowling man in red and purple as he lifts whole cars off the ground. She imitates his motions, dreaming of the power to make them sail skyward as he did. The thrum in her fingers dissipates when she sees the Angel weave between those cars. Darting up, dodging right, all with the grace and finesse of an avian god. His gloriously fluffy feathery white wings pin to his back as he spin-dives into his foe.
For a moment, this Magneto looks finished. He topples over, rolls backward, electricity sparking along his body. Another lad’s crimson optic blast rushes toward him at the speed of light. Blink of an eye. But then, Magneto recovers at the very last second. A wave of his arm sends the blast into Angel, knocking him out of the air.
In her mind’s eye, it’s her deflecting that blow. Her feet lifting off the ground. Her cape billowing in the wind. She sees green all around her, on her, inside her, rippling like a force of nature.
Then, her mind drifts to other thoughts. Kinder thoughts. Gentler thoughts. She wouldn’t have to use such a wonderful gift for fighting. She could build things. Create things. From the tallest skyscraper in the world to the most elegant statues of these mutant heroes she could imagine, Lorna could mold each scrap of metal into precisely what she imagined. She could show everyone what a boon these mutants were.
… If she had the parts. She doesn’t have the parts. Her hands shake because her heart can’t. Tears stream down her face. She doesn’t understand the hole buried in her chest. Why she can’t fill it. Why the images playing in front of her press upon that void but don’t quite fit, tapping at the edges, slipping at the corners.
In those moments, she thinks about the man in red and purple. An outcast among his own kind, she knows he wreaks havoc and causes trouble for his fellow mutants. The X-Men wouldn’t fight him if they had no reason. Yet, she can’t help seeing some part of herself in him. His defiance. His rage. His spirit, burning as if guided by some higher calling. He glows so brightly that she finds it hard to believe all those horrid things people call him on the news. Murderer. Monster. Despite them all, one insidious label sticks out most of all: Mutie.
That word. The M-word. The reason her parents insisted she hide her green to make herself look normal, mundane, ordinary, like everyone else. The reason she sits inside the house while bigots and haters march along city streets, denouncing the future.
Not her future, of course. Her little quirk of color means nothing. ‘Minor detail’. Even Dr. Moira said so.
But it doesn’t stop her from wishing, and dreaming, and thinking. Her eyes light up. What if she could be part of something greater? What if she had the power to set an example, to right the world’s wrongs, to become her best self while standing beside friends who saw her green hair and loved her for it? She reaches out to the screen… and pulls away when it crackles.
When it spits sparks. When the picture flickers in and out with fiendish abandon. She mentally chides herself for not remembering her mother’s warnings about how sensitive these so-called technological wonders truly were. One wrong touch or one hand in the wrong place set them off in a smoldering heap. Like a good girl, she leans back in her couch and waits for her chance to see her mutant heroes once again.
Keeping in mind that I lack full context, this is good.
Much better than I was expecting from Bunn given his track record and especially Blue #23. Blue #23 had me expecting Malice to be used as an excuse to have Lorna and Havok bone without being a couple yet, or one of several other possible bad approaches, most of them revolving around building Havok up at Lorna’s expense.
For the moment, I feel comfortable saying these pages of #24 show Bunn actually acknowledging who Lorna is and what she’s been through, and providing her some real development and story substance in her own right. They show Bunn putting real thought into Lorna as her own character, not just a character who can benefit Magneto and Havok.
It’s actual character development for Lorna to see her turn the mental possession back on AU Malice. To me, this is Bunn’s biggest accomplishment to date with Lorna.
That said… the potential for Malice use wasn’t fully realized. Because utilizing Lorna’s history with Malice was buried within a storyline that’s fixated first and foremost on Havok and Mothervine, Bunn did not utilize the juicy opportunities that would’ve come out in an issue or story arc dedicated to this.
Lorna fighting for control could have been drawn out so we would see reactions from a wide range of characters as “Lorna” does things she would normally never do. We could have seen a battle between them in the mental landscape – not just combat, but Malice trying to exploit “weaknesses” in Lorna’s thoughts and feelings, Lorna fending them off, etc. We could have seen how much care and respect other characters feel toward Lorna as they talk about what she’s going through and try to help her.
Yes, the end result that Bunn provided was exactly right for her, and I’m glad he went with it instead of a myriad of alternative bad options. But we still missed out on what could have been an amazing narrative journey, because Bunn chose to embed it within a Havok-and-Mothervine-centric story arc and give the greatly abridged version.
These pages change one thing for me: I now think it’s possible for Bunn to do good things with and for Lorna. I think if he puts in real effort, he can bring himself to care about Lorna enough to see her for who she is and work with it.
However, there’s a lot this does not change.
Bunn’s written Lorna poorly enough times that one good depiction isn’t enough. I still expect Lorna will be treated poorly in future issues. I still expect she’ll be written to look stupid and naive so Magneto can “correct” her. I still expect she’ll be written as Havok’s manic pixie dream girl, singing his praises and putting him on a pedestal instead of getting to be her own character.
One case of good writing for Lorna isn’t enough to make me think the trend of poor treatment has been broken and everything’s blue skies from here on out. I’ll need a lot more cases of good writing before that happens.
The cover for Blue #28 remains the big painful sticking point that suggests this issue was a fluke of good treatment before a lot of coming bad treatment.
Covers represent the contents of the comic within. This is a huge warning sign that things will go back to the “status quo” of “dumb rookie daughter” with Magneto and “manic pixie dream girl” with Havok.
No reason to believe #24 is a full-fledged course correction when the cover for four issues from now suggests it’s not.
And the good of #24 doesn’t change what happened with this page of #23.
I’m still miffed about that “haven’t been together in a long time” line, and how blatantly false it is. It’s sticking with me as a loud ringing bell of Bunn really wanting to force Lorna back into the role of Havok’s girlfriend, and all the character destruction that would entail. It reeks of trying to build a case to put them back together by skewing the facts or flat out lying. Same as how Brevoort argued against Lorna being Magneto’s daughter, and used his editorial power to try to exclude her from her family and replace her with other characters.
One good depiction in #24 isn’t enough for me to forget that. I need more.
I’m still not reading Blue. I still think Bunn shouldn’t be writing Lorna. I still think she should go to another writer that cares more about her and what she can offer.
But I also think it’s possible for Bunn to change my mind and convince me she’s fine in his hands, if he keeps doing right by her. I’ll leave it at that.
Yep the cover for 28 is absolutely terrible BUT it could be a fakeout, surely you know covers are not always completely representative of the issues.
I’m glad you liked 24 re: Polaris though. And I agree with you that I wish there was a bigger deal about Lorna overcoming (an AU version of) Malice. It happened too quickly/easily for my taste.
I was just gonna chat reply, but I feel I’ve got more to say than what’ll fit there, and that it’s worth putting in a reblog.
I already know it’s not a fakeout, but even if it was, there’s still a bag of problems with the cover.
If the cover’s a fakeout, here’s what it could still mean.
Whoever decided on the cover thinks this sums up Bunn’s approach to writing and attitude toward Polaris to date, and they’re trying to exploit those low expectations to mislead
Whoever decided on the cover has seen complaints about Bunn’s treatment of Polaris and female characters and has decided to throw him under the bus by reinforcing those perceptions
Whoever decided on the cover thinks there’s a market out there they can reach that loves the idea of Polaris and female characters as a whole being treated poorly, and they’re willing to depict Bunn’s work this way to try to reach that audience
Whoever decided on the cover thinks treating female characters poorly and using sexist tropes is worth it if they can get more word of mouth “outrage” buzz and maybe sell more copies
No matter how you look at it, there are big problems with this cover that make a fakeout very much not worth it. The cover does more damage both to perception of Polaris and to female characters as a whole than can be gained by it having been a fakeout all along.
Also does more damage to Bunn’s reputation and perception of him than a fakeout could possibly gain him, if this is misrepresenting his work. Way more people are going to see that cover than will actually read the book.
In sum, if it’s a fakeout, the only thing it really changes is that three out of four reasons for the cover are (arguably) not Bunn’s fault. One reason is still that the cover fits his actual writing history, while the other three leave him the victim of misrepresentation.
Regardless, the cover alone is plenty reason to avoid Blue #28. Buying it is implied support for the cover.
One more thing for me to add about #24. I’ve come to realize that all the backlash and complaints about Bunn writing Malice at all, after those people were so quiet about him up to that point, demonstrated that they already had a pretty low opinion of his treatment of Lorna that they weren’t voicing until Malice came up.
It’s not like with Havok, where there’s misuse of Lorna around him that spans decades, keeps repeating, and is as recent as Blue #8 and #9. Malice hasn’t been used around Lorna for decades. To instantly assume the absolute worst of Bunn bringing Malice back, people would have to not trust his ability to write Lorna, especially around difficult past subject matter, in the first place. People don’t just suddenly flip like that out of nowhere. It has to start somewhere.
salarta 