By Isaac Kelley — A major aspect of mainstream superhero comics — for good and for ill — is the way that their characters accrete decades of history. If done right, it gives these goofy pajama punch stories dimensionality, as well as a sort of depth. If done wrong, it makes the material incestuous and inaccessible. No stable of characters in all of fiction have backstories that are more convoluted, weird, and occasionally stupid as the X-Men, and I love them for it. The current era of the X-Books has mostly done a great job of making that history part of the texture of the story, and a shortcut to characterization, without making the stories or the readers beholden to the history.

There have been exceptions to this, here and there, and Excalibur #17 is one of those. In it, Captain Britain, having survived being shattered, finds herself in the body of one of her multiversal duplicates, the Queen of England. In order to return to her own reality, she is forced to team up with her duplicate’s boyfriend’s ex-wife, Revanche. Unsurprisingly, she feels a bit awkward about this.

While legible to newer readers, it is a story that really assumes the reader is at least somewhat familiar with the history of the two women known as Psylocke. And hoo boy, it is a twisty, stupid history. Let’s dig into it.

Betsy Braddock is the psychic twin sister of Brian Braddock, the previous Captain Britain. A former pilot and former model, after a brief stint of her own being Captain Britain that cost her her eyes, she joins the X-Men under the codename “Psylocke,” a word which means exactly nothing. When she joined the team she had cyborg eyes, purple hair, and basically no combat skills. The canon is contradictory on the matter of whether or not purple is her natural hair color or not so you can go ahead and make your own decision there.

At some point in her adventures with the X-Men, Besty gains amnesia and is brainwashed by the Hand clan of ninjas. The Hand gives her ninja training and alters her body to have Asian features. She can now create “psychic knives,” which sometimes act more like knives and sometimes act more like psychic-ness.

It is later revealed that instead of her having her body altered, Betsy’s mind had instead been mystically transferred into the body of a comatose ninja assassin named Kwannon, while Kwannon’s mind was transferred into Betsy’s body. This is a retcon that required many issues of explaining as was the fashion in those days.

The sorcery involved in this body transfer causes their...it causes their DNA to “mingle.” They now both have purple hair, ninja abilities, and British accents. It’s so much stupider and so much more complicated than it sounds. This is revealed slowly, over many issues, after Kwannon, now calling herself Revanche, comes to the X-Men, claiming to be the one, true Betsy Braddock.

After some tussling, Revanche becomes a de facto member of the X-Men for a brief time, alongside Psylocke, but she has the Legacy Virus, a designer disease created by Cable’s evil clone, devised to be an analog for AIDS, a timely choice in the 90’s. Revanche goes off to die from the disease, leaving her cybernetic eyes behind. The eyes had exposition in them that attempted to smooth over all the continuity errors created by this retcon.

Later, Psylocke would get a magic face tattoo and the ability to mystically jump in and out of shadows. The tattoo also affected her personality, making her colder and more distant. Eventually, Psylocke was killed and resurrected (back before such things were commonplace). Resurrected by her second, crazier, brother Jamie, when she came back to the mortal plane, she had lost her tattoo and her tattoo powers.

Much later, after fighting a psychic “soul vampire” named Sapphire Styx, Psylocke was able to use…to use the remaining “soul energy” of Styx to reform her original body and to restore Revanche to life within her body. This is the sort of plot detail for which the word “somehow” was created.

Now, in the Krakoan era, Besty has ceded the codename of “Psylocke” to Kwannon, and she has again taken the mantle of Captain Britain from her brother. Kwannon, meanwhile, has become the morally ambiguous leader of the morally ambiguous Hellions.

So, that’s the grossly simplified history of these two interconnected characters. The thing is, even though pre-House of X I had read hundreds of issues featuring Elizabeth Braddock and maybe ten featuring Kwannon, in Excalibur, Captain Britain feels like a character I’ve never really seen before, while in Hellions, Psylocke feels like the same character I’ve known for years. Perhaps this owes to comics being such a visual medium. Whatever the case, I have to keep reminding myself that even though she looks like the old Psylocke, and acts very much like the old Psylocke, this character is almost brand new.

It’s all fraught and unfortunate. Despite decades of history, Psyloke — the white woman in the body of a be-thonged Japanese ninja — has rarely transcended the terrible fetish object aspect of her character. Due to a combination of unimaginative (mostly white) male writers and the larger tendency present in superhero team books to reduce characterization to a minimum of traits, Psylocke has seldom amounted to much more than “the ninja one” or “the sexy ninja one.”

Betsy is now a very different kind of hero. And Kwannon is more interesting than Psylocke ever was, because her character seems to now be defined by being “Psylocke”. That is to say, the character takes advantage of the fact that people look at her and do not see a person, they see “the ninja one.” The people in her life, like many readers, have to struggle to even see her as different than the woman who used to wear her skin.

In summation, some 30 years after Chris Claremont, Jim Lee, and Fabian Nicieza created this mess, the once and future Psylokes are finally compelling characters.

Krakoan News Reel

In the larger Marvel universe, there has been a Venom-centric crossover entitled King in Black. And while the second issue of a new series (S.W.O.R.D. #2) might seem an awkward time for a series to tie into a larger Venom-based event, the story involves an alien invasion, so S.W.O.R.D. pretty much had to cross over. The ensuing hijinks result in a monstrosity that is a half-Venom, half-Cable, which pretty much feels like what it was to read Marvel comics in the 90s.

In Hellions #8 the team discovers a group of friendly robots. Havok befriends them because of their friendliness, and while he gets to know them, Psylocke murders them all. She does this at the behest of Magneto and the Council, which is the first reminder in a while that there is a larger game afoot and that everything Xavier and Magneto are doing is to further Moira’s plans to survive a Sentinel Armageddon. It also might explain why we haven’t seen former room Danger since this era has begun. I hope Danger is okay.

As established last month, Scott and Jean are reforming the X-Men as a democratically elected militia. As a weird gimmick, Marvel decided to let the readers vote for one member of the team via online poll, without knowing the composition of the rest of the team. I normally love this sort of goofery, but this seems hollow and unnecessary. Sunspot will probably win, right? It’s hard to really care. Except...

HOW COULD THEY NOT PUT GLOB HERMAN ON THE BALLOT????? GLOB HERMAN IS TEN TIMES THE X-MAN AS THESE OTHER DINKS! ARMOR IS JUST KITTY PYRDE 3.0, MARROW’S POWER IS TO ATTACK PEOPLE WITH BONES, AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO TEMPO IS! THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE REASON FOR GLOB HERMAN TO NOT BE ON THE BALLOT IS BECAUSE GLOB HERMAN ALREADY HAS A GUARANTEED SLOT ON THE TEAM. IF THIS IS NOT THE CASE, THEN WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING?

Read past installments of Pax Krakoa.

Isaac Kelley should really be working on his novel, but he can't stop thinking about the X-Men so he wrote this instead.