To the ocean of being, the spirit of life leads the stream of actions.

Why X-Women? Because X-Men comics were one of the first Marvel comics to consistently sustain female superheroes as leads, and a diverse population of female superheroes, too! Think of it as an homage to the great Stan Lee, who first conceived of “The Mutants” in the early 1960s, bravely going where only one other man had gone before, under a different comic publisher with Wonder Woman. Lee and Kirby co-created an unprecedented world of gender equality, beginning in 1963 in the midst of the civil rights movement and women’s liberation. As a little girl in the 1970s, I had female superheroes to read about and relate to because of Stan Lee’s X-Men, not just glamazons in thigh-high boots and breastplates. X-Women are “real” heroes from diverse backgrounds with intriguing storylines and equally intriguing interior lives. There are so many X-Women to choose from in the Marvel X-Verse that it would be impossible to cover them all in this short chapter. So my modest goal here is to give a brief existential history of some of the main X-Women from the major comic storylines over the last four and a half decades.

Genesis-X

In the beginning, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Marvel Girl, Professor Xavier’s first female student at his School for Gifted Youngsters in X-Men #1 (September 1963). Jean Grey was one of the original seven mutants introduced in X-Men #1 as a young girl with tremendous mental abilities. From her debut, Jean has had to fight for her life. Whether being taken over by a sentient cosmic entity or duped by the mutant Mastermind or killed by Xorn (who was posing as Magneto) or cheated on by her one true love, Scott Summers (aka Cyclops, with Emma Frost), Jean’s been through hell and back. Jean Grey has had more resurrections than any other X-Men character, which means she’s also died more than any other mutant in the series. Who better to have an existential crisis?

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1975), the twentieth century’s best-known existentialist, summed up the basic tenet of existentialism in the phrase “existence precedes essence.”² This means that your essence, the meaning and purpose of your life, is undefined until you freely choose what your life will be, as opposed to the definition of your life being imposed by forces beyond your control, such as illness or genetics. According to Sartre, this is what makes human existence different from a manufactured object that exists only because of an idea its maker had formed about the purpose of its existence. The essence of this object precedes its existence because its maker first settled on its purpose and only then brought it into being. We’re different, declared Sartre, because we exist first and then assign meaning to our lives. Recognizing this fact can induce feelings of anguish or existential angst, for our freedom to choose means that we can’t escape responsibility for what we finally become. Sartre is convinced that many of us would gladly hand this responsibility over to others (our families, our peers, religious authorities), conforming to outside expectations. But this is “bad faith” (more on this later), a self-deluded and ultimately futile attempt to flee our existential freedom.

Let’s consider Jean Grey in terms of her existence and her essence. As a fictional character in the Marvel X-Verse, conceived in someone else’s imagination and beginning her life as an etching on paper, her essence isn’t hers to choose. She can’t be responsible for the meaning of her existence because she is, after all, just a comic book character, in the same boat as the object that has its meaning imposed by a creator. On the other hand, Jean Grey is brought to life on the silver screen by actress Famke Janssen, whose performance makes us believe that Jean is real. And that Jean, the one sustained in existence by our suspension of disbelief, is responsible for giving meaning to her life. If that’s not enough of a paradox for you, stay tuned.

From the day of her inception, Jean Grey has been fighting and sacrificing, fighting and sacrificing, and doing so ad infinitum in countless futures, dimensions, and timelines. In a future timeline, she and Scott have a daughter, Rachel; in another timeline, Jean’s genetic clone, Madelyne Pryor, marries Scott and has a son, who is still Jean’s son genetically, Nate Summers. Jean Grey merges with the Phoenix Force while in a continuation of that reality and later is duped into believing she lived a life in the eighteenth century, leading her to adopt the persona of the Black Queen, which triggers Jean’s evolution as the Dark Phoenix. Jean must also face her genetic clone and kill her in battle—essentially, kill herself.³ Jean dies again in a conflict with the first Xorn but rises once more as the “the White Phoenix of the Crown.”⁴ Her existence is seemingly infinite because her mutant powers allowed her to call to, and merge with, the sentient cosmic force of life and death. In that single act and in that singular timeline, Jean Grey effectively influenced every other X-Men storyline to come. And there we have it, paradox lovers. We—the writers, the artists, and the fans whose imaginations conspire together to bring Jean to life—are the ones who assign meaning to her fictional existence. Yet that fictional existence belongs to someone who perennially re-creates herself out of the ashes of her past, someone who might be thought to embody the existentialist ideal to an unparalleled degree, since through her choices she repeatedly redefines the meaning of her existence and reshapes the X-Verse she inhabits.

Let’s keep it all in the family and move on to Rachel Summers or Phoenix II or Marvel Girl II or Mother Askani. Talk about existential angst!

Evolutions

Rachel Summers, the daughter of Scott and Jean from the Days of Future Past alternate timeline, becomes Phoenix II, Marvel Girl II, and Mother Askani all in one fiery package. Rachel has multiple identities and crosses multiple storylines and timelines, first appearing in The Uncanny X-Men #141 ( January 1981). She transcends Jean Grey’s paradox, in that she was the creation of a horrible future, which is reversed through Rachel’s actions as Mother Askani, sending Kate Pryde into thirteen-year-old Kitty to stop an assassination that leads to the Days of Future Past storyline, where Rachel Summers originates. Kate then returns to the alternate future and sends Rachel to the mainstream X-Men timeline, where Rachel bonds with the Phoenix Force and adopts the code name “Phoenix.” Both Kate and Rachel are founding members of Excalibur, the British version of X-Men.

In another storyline, featured in New Mutants Vol. 1 #18 and Excalibur Vol. 1 #52, Rachel is a mutant “hound” as a captive of Ahab aka Dr. Roderick Campbell, who made his first appearance in 1990 in Fantastic Four Annual #23. During her hound-days with Ahab, Rachel was forcibly given facial tattoos to signify her status. Rachel is able to hide the tattoos with her powers, but the images of the tattoos show up when Rachel is in battle; she is both physically and psychologically marked by her past, present, and future. How does someone like Rachel find meaning in such an existence?

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was an existentialist writer-philosopher, who used literature to convey philosophical ideas. His Historia como sistema (History as a System, 1941) speaks to Rachel Summers’s existentialist predicament: “The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is—it is a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment.”⁵ The stone in this quote stands for all of those natural beings that never need to trouble themselves over the nature of their existence because they simply are what they are, without any prospect of becoming something else through their own efforts. Compare that “stone in the field” to a human being. We can’t adequately describe a human being’s way of existing without taking into account what Ortega calls her “project,” by which he means her aspirations or what she’s striving to become. Unlike the stone, the human being helps to shape her own existence every time she exerts herself to become who she will be.

With Rachel Summers, the audience sees again and again, as we follow her through alternate futures and multiple storylines, despite her “unfavorable circumstances” (among which is the destruction of her original timeline and therefore potentially herself), that Rachel makes her own existence “at every single moment.” Whether rebelling against Ahab, sending Kate to the mainstream timeline to save the future, bringing Nate to the future to save her people, or claiming her connection to the Phoenix Force and her mother, Jean Grey, and becoming the second-generation Phoenix and Marvel Girl, Rachel seizes what Ortega called the “abstract possibility of existing” that can be made a concrete reality only through our own efforts, earning her existence, her meaning, at every turn.⁶ No matter how or where or when the Marvel writers and illustrators place or portray her, Rachel Summers rises like the Phoenix she is.

Origins

Wanda Maximoff (aka the Scarlet Witch) first appeared in X-Men #4 in March 1964. Wanda is Magneto’s long-lost daughter from his estranged wife, Magda, and the twin sister of Pietro Maximoff (aka Quicksilver). The siblings were adopted and raised by gypsies and never knew their father. Almost killed by fellow villagers when their powers began to manifest, Wanda and Pietro were saved by Magneto and reluctantly joined Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants out of gratitude to their rescuer. Not until years later did the twins learn that Magneto was their father. Let’s note, however, that the Scarlet Witch, although a daughter of Magneto, has never herself had the same ambitions. She’s a hero in her own right, recruited into the Avengers along with her brother after their short stint in the Brotherhood. In time, Wanda found momentary happiness with the Vision, another member of the Avengers, and the two were married.⁷ Wanda gave birth to two children, believing them to be products of her loving marriage to the Vision. The revelation that they were not her children at all, only shards of the soul of the demon Mephisto (who then reabsorbed them), signaled the beginning of Wanda’s descent into insanity.

Her mutant powers originally consisted only of the ability to cast “hex-spheres” that changed probabilities, but the Scarlet Witch augmented her powers over the years until she became capable of altering reality as a whole, which made her quite possibly the most powerful mutant of all time. Existentialism urges us to assume responsibility as the authors of our own existence, but Wanda’s powers allow her to take this to an extreme no existentialist philosopher had ever envisioned. At their highest point, Wanda’s powers enable her not only to create herself in the face of “unfavorable conditions” but to alter those very conditions by decree. Tragically, the boundless scope of her power ultimately causes her downfall. Coupled with the mental strain of suppressing her memories of the two children she lost, her powers lead to mental instability, breaking open what we might call a “philosophical fracture.” As Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) observed, “[T]here is, as it were, a line beyond which, for every expanding system—every system which, by dint of exponential growth, passes beyond its own end—a catastrophe looms.” This line is the point of fracture, at which “the system cracks up from excess.”⁸

Wanda’s “crack-up” results in her attacking the Avengers and killing many of her former friends and colleagues, a conflict that is recounted in the Avengers Disassembled storyline. Not long afterward, she uses her powers to restructure reality, restoring her lost children and creating the alternative reality of House of M, in which mutants dominate the world. But when, with the help of Layla Miller, the Avengers and the X-Men discover what Wanda has done and launch an attack on her residence, she alters reality one last time and depowers most of the world’s mutant population, herself included.⁹ The lesson of Wanda’s downfall is one we might have learned from Baudrillard: there are limits to how far we can remake the world into a “virtual landscape” that simply reflects back the meaning we put there—and the price paid for ignoring those limits.

But don’t the existentialists tell us that we’re the ones who must give meaning to our lives? It may seem that Wanda is just being faithful to the existentialist creed when she refuses to acknowledge her limits and shapes her own existence, but in fact she isn’t. According to Ortega, we aren’t free to fashion ourselves any old way we choose, for there is one constraint to which everyone is bound and no one may ignore, “one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past. The experiments already made with life narrow man’s future.”¹⁰ Human existence is defined only in part by the “project” that focuses our aspirations for the future. In addition, said Ortega, “Man is what has happened to him, what he has done.”¹¹ From an existentialist perspective, when Wanda wipes out her real past and replaces it with a pipe dream, even going so far as to create fraudulent memories for herself, she’s guilty of “bad faith” or self-deception. Her denial of her past is tantamount to rejecting the fundamental aspects of who she is.

Astonishing ’70s

The X-Women of the 1970s, such as Storm and Mystique, reflected the social change of the era. Unlike Jean Grey, who was brought in as the fifth of five students (the other four male), at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, the X-Women who were developed in the 1970s were independent thinkers, strong-willed, and tough as nails. Let’s begin with Storm (aka Ororo Munroe), who made her first appearance in Giant-Size X-Men #1 in 1975.

Storm is a born leader, smart and sensitive, with a dedication to duty that produces unparalleled loyalty. In true existential fashion, Storm embraces freedom and responsibility. Despite being orphaned at a young age, trapped with her dead mother under rubble, abandoned and alone on the streets of Cairo, Storm manages to always make the right choices. The reason: She experiences no angst, no temptation to flee from responsibility. Life is beyond absurd in the existential sense for this X-Woman who faced tragedy and death at an early age and, later, suffered forced vampiricism on an alternate Earth. It would be easy for someone like Storm to be angry all the time, to hate, to do evil. But even as the vampire-mutant Bloodstorm, she does not feed on anyone but Forge, and only with Forge’s consent. Despite all the many difficulties that have befallen her, Storm always makes free and responsible choices.

But is an angstless existence really possible? Many existentialist philosophers have doubted that it is, simply because the responsibility our freedom confers on us is so great and often feels so cumbersome. “There are many, indeed, who show no such anxiety,” admitted Sartre. “But we affirm that they are merely disguising their anxiety or are in flight from it.”¹² This fact may explain why it is that however much we may admire Storm, we find it so much easier to relate to the more deeply flawed, but by the same token much more human, Mystique.

Mystique (aka Raven Darkholme, aka Mallory Brickman, aka Ronnie Lake) is a shapeshifter who made her first appearance in Ms. Marvel #16 in April 1978. Like the other ladies of the seventies, Mystique is not the “perfect” image of womanhood and goodness and is certainly no victim. Mystique is cunning, as her scaly exterior implies, and can always slither out of bad situations, living to fight another day. But Mystique has gotten a bad rep as being “evil.”¹³ In fact, Mystique is probably the most human of all the X-Women in her behaviors, in her flaws and foibles, in her loves, in her losses, and in her life. As confident and straightforward as Storm is, Mystique, in her humanity, is the opposite.

Mystique makes what existentialists call “bad faith” decisions all the time, just like the rest of us. What Sartre called “bad faith” is really a matter of self-deception, lying to yourself. Because lying to yourself implies that you really know the truth, Sartre called this a “cynical consciousness,” a label that perfectly describes Mystique—as well as most of the human population on planet Earth. She is in a perpetual existential conundrum, much like her sixties predecessors Scarlet Witch and Polaris, with reality pulling her one way and self-deception pulling her another.¹⁴ No matter what befalls Mystique, she always manages to get up, dust herself off, and walk tall. Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of Stan Lee’s X-Men comic series is the relatable, almost lovable nature of X-Villains like Mystique and Magneto.

Generation NeXt

Rogue and Kitty Pryde are part of the next generation of X-Women, following greats like Jean Grey, Scarlet Witch, Ms. Marvel, Storm, Psylocke, and Mystique.¹⁵ There are many, many other new X-Women who deserve to be included as well, such as Nightcrawler’s daughter, Nocturne, and the only nonpsychic psychic, Layla Miller.¹⁶ But because I am not a mutant superhero, just an ordinary human, I’ll limit my focus to Rogue and Kitty Pryde.

Rogue (aka Anne Marie) first appeared on the X-scene in Avengers Annual #10 in 1981. Traumatized by a first kiss that drained her boyfriend, Cody Robbins, of all his energy and left him in a coma, Rogue left home. She has the uncontrollable ability to absorb the energy from humans and mutants, and when this occurs with mutants, she can also take on that mutant’s powers. This is often a temporary side-effect of direct contact, as seen in the X-Men films when Rogue touches Wolverine and Iceman.¹⁷ Though the foster daughter of Mystique and a member of the Brotherhood, Rogue went to the X-Men out of a desperate need to control her newly acquired powers.

Imagine a life without touch. A life where you can see the people around you, talk to them, but never, ever touch them. We humans are tactile creatures, constantly watching how others move their bodies, constantly touching one another, whether through a handshake, a hug, or a pat on the back. Because of Rogue’s limitations, she is isolated and lonely and desperately wants to feel someone’s touch. The absurd nature of Rogue’s condition brings to mind the great existentialist philosopher and writer Albert Camus (1930-1960).

In his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses an ancient myth to illustrate the human condition. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a man who, due to his offenses against the gods, was compelled to roll a boulder up a hill every day for all eternity, only to have it roll back down as soon as he reached the top. Camus described Sisyphus as the tragic hero, not only because he had to relentlessly repeat the same pointless task each day, but because he knew what would happen each time he rolled the burdensome boulder back up the hill. Had Sisyphus been ignorant of the futility of his daily chore, he could have awakened each morning refreshed and hopeful. But the fact that he knew what he was doing, while doing it over and over, added to the overall torture and tragedy. Sisyphus symbolizes the human condition; he stands for all of us, perhaps especially Rogue.

Because Rogue at one time knew touch, her fate is all the more tragic. Even if Rogue were to engage in the self-deception of Sartrean bad faith, the very nature of her self-lie would indicate that she already knows the truth. Rogue was not born unable to touch; cruelly, that “power” came on in her teen years, the time when we are most vulnerable, the time when we long for reassuring touch. This is truly absurd in Camus’ sense; the world is indifferent to our hopes and dreams. Kitty Pryde must also face absurdities, but she does so with a different existential perspective.

Kitty Pryde (aka Kate Pryde aka Shadowcat) made her first appearance in The Uncanny X-Men #129 in October 1994. Shadowcat was a protégée of Wolverine, who taught her how to fight like a samurai in the comics. Kitty becomes a major force in mainstream X-Men when her older self, Kate Pryde, is sent into Kitty’s thirteen-year-old body to correct the incident that set the Days of Future Past timeline in motion. When she is successful, Kate returns to the alternate timeline, sending Rachel Summers into the mainstream, where the two work together again through Excalibur. ¹⁸

As Ortega might say, Kitty is a “substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being,” a phrase that signifies an existence that is never static but always changing. ¹⁹ Ortega believed that human beings had no fixed nature prescribed from birth, but rather came to be who they are over the course of their personal histories through the choices they made along the way. “Man lives in view of the past,” he wrote, meaning that what we are at this moment is the sum of everything we have done and undergone.²⁰ Kitty—with her alternate timelines and altered perceptions of history—is a prime example of Ortega’s “substantial emigrant,” moving from place to place, from one alternate reality to another, acting from what he calls “the relentless trajectory of experiences,” everything we carry with us from our past.²¹ In fact, Kitty’s first experience with the X-Men was the reason she joined the mutant superheroes to begin with: Emma Frost, then associated with the Hellfire Club, and Charles Xavier for X-Men, were both attempting to recruit thirteen-year-old Kitty to their respective “private schools.”²² Not long after Emma paid a visit to her home, Kitty witnesses Frost’s abduction of three X-Men. Kitty helps Cyclops in the rescue and immediately signs on. Shades of this were seen in X3, where Kitty and a handful of other mutant students were led into the ultimate battle by Storm, Wolverine, and Beast. It remains to be seen what Kitty will face in upcoming comic and film storylines. One thing is certain, though: Shadowcat will emerge as a formidable X-Woman, regardless of adaptation.

The Ultimate Conclusion

Though it is my heart’s desire to talk on about other X-Women such as Jubilee, Polaris, Psylocke, Moonstar, Meltdown, Husk, Ms. Marvel, and so many, many others, for the purposes of this particular chapter in this particular book, we have come to our end.²³ We, like Rachel, like Kitty, are also immigrants on our own pilgrimages of being. We may not be mutant superheroes in skin tight costumes with voluminous hair, but we are all human. Like Mystique, we, too, often live in deliberate self-deception, making mistakes over and over again. Like Phoenix or the Scarlet Witch, we are all in the midst of an existential predicament, struggling to heal philosophical fractures. This is what makes the X-Men, and particularly the X-Women, so relatable, so intriguing, and, ultimately, so entertaining.

In the style of the great Stan Lee: Excelsior!²⁴

NOTES

1 The Upanishads, translated by Juan Mascar (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 49.

2 In Walter Kaufman, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Plume, 2004), p. 349.

3 For more on Jean Grey, suicide, and “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” please see Mark White’s essay “Is Suicide Always Immoral? Jean Grey, Kant, and The Dark Phoenix Saga,” in chapter 3 of this book.

4 Xorn, a mutant, is part of the “New Mutant” series and was revealed to be one of the X-Men’s archenemies; Xorn was first thought to be Magneto, but it was revealed later that Xorn was never Magneto. There are multiple incarnations of the Xorn character in different X-Men comic storylines.

5 From Ortega; see Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 153.

6 Ibid., p. 153.

7 Vision was a synthozoid; Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch’s brother, did not approve of the relationship.

8 Baudrillard’s idea of “Lines of Fracture” corresponds with his work on Integral Reality, Dual Form, and the Great Game, a social criticism and a corresponding philosophy of how twenty-first-century society is obsessed with creating false realities by overassigning meaning to everything. For more, please see Baudrillard’s The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, translated by Chris Turner (New York: Berg, 2005), p. 191.

9 For more on Layla Miller, please see George Dunn’s essay “Layla Miller Knows Stuff: How a Butterfly Can Shoulder the World,” in chapter 6 of this volume.

10 Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 157.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 351.

13 In my 2005 essay “Myth, Morality and the Women of X-Men” in Superheroes and Philosophy, edited by Morris and Morris, an editing glitch rendered the final copy as reading Mystique as “evil.” I don’t believe people, or mutants, are strictly good or evil. It is not possible, in my humble opinion, in the past, present, or future. I finally get the chance to set the record straight. My deepest apologies, Mystique . . . keep on keepin’ on!

14 Polaris aka Lorna Dane first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #49 (October 1968).

15 Ms. Marvel aka Carol Danvers was part of the Avengers, then became Warbird for a time before readopting her Ms. Marvel persona. She first appeared in Marvel SuperHeroes Vol. 1 #13 (March 1968). Psylocke aka Elizabeth “Betsy” Braddock first appeared in Captain Britain Vol. 1 #8 (December 1976).

16 Nocturne is the daughter of Nightcrawler and the Scarlet Witch in a parallel reality and was one of the first recruits to the interdimensional team of “time-fixers,” Exiles, first appearing in Exiles #1 (August 2001).

17 However, Rogue’s initial battle with Ms. Marvel left Rogue with the flying Ms. Marvel’s powers permanently.

18 Kitty, with her ability to “phase” through solid matter, was also an agent with SHIELD.

19 See Ortega in Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, pp. 152-157.

20 Ibid., p. 157.

21 Ibid., p. 157.

22 First appearing in X-Men #132 (January 1980), Frost is known as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club, a secret organization, but in recent years has worked with the X-Men and Charles Xavier at the new School for Gifted Youngsters in Massachusetts as an instructor to mutants in Generation X.

23 Jubilee aka Jubilation Lee first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #244 (May 1989). Moonstar aka Danielle “Dani” Moonstar first appeared in Marvel Graphic Novel #4: The New Mutants (June 1982). Meltdown aka Tabitha Smith first appeared in Secret Wars II #5 (November 1985). Husk aka Paige Elisabeth Guthrie first appeared in X-Force #32 (March 1994).

24 My thanks to Bill Irwin, J. Jeremy Wisnewski, and especially Bob Housel and “Mighty” George Dunn (my personal editors), for help on this chapter . . . there really is no “I” in team!