Screenshot: Marvel
Deadpool
&
Wolverine’s
new
trailer
yesterday
didn’t
really
give
fresh
details
on
what
the
film’s
going
to
be
about,
beyond
the
vague
threat
of
multiversal
shenanigans
and
Wade
and
Logan’s
team-up.
But
it
did
give
us
our
first
really
good
look
at
one
of
the
several
villains
the
movie
is
playing
with—and
one
of
the
most
infamous
antagonists
in
X-Men
comics.
That is of course, Cassandra Nova, who will be played by Emma Corrin. Although the trailer doesn’t explicitly outright say that it’s Cassandra Nova, the look, the powers, it’s all there—and with it the potential for Deadpool & Wolverine to tackle one of the most evil, intimate villains the X-Men have ever faced. But if you don’t know your Mummudrais from your mutants, or your telepathy from your telekineses, we’re here to help with our brief rundown of Cassandra Nova’s comics history... and what makes her such a chilling threat.
Who Is Cassandra Nova?
Image: Marvel Comics
Introduced in the very first issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s run on New X-Men in the summer of 2001, New X-Men #114, Cassandra Nova is a villainous foil to the X-Men and more specifically to Charles Xavier. Returning to prominence as mutantkind undergoes a new generation of the species awakening to their powers, and as the first steps of mutant statehood begin to take form on the island of Genosha, Cassandra immediately has a devastating impact on the X-Men comics for the 21st century, setting the stage for much of the background and ideas Morrison would tackle during their run. But why does she so specifically have it in for Professor X? Well...
Is She Really Charles Xavier’s Sister?
Image: Marvel Comics
...
The
answer
is,
it’s
complicated.
Charles’
mother,
Sharon,
was
not
aware
that
she
was
carrying
twins
during
her
pregnancy.
Cassandra
Nova
formed
within
her
womb
alongside
Charles
as
a
spiritual
mirror
from
the
Astral
Plane—and
a
particularly
dark
one.
But
because
she
was
formed
from
the
genetic
potential
of
Charles
himself,
she
was
able
to
actually
create
a
physical
form
directly
from
Charles’
own
genome.
Sensing her dark nature in-utero, Charles’ psychic potential awakened as he tried to kill her—the shock of the attempt causing his mother to have a miscarriage. While Charles survived the ordeal, Cassandra was pronounced stillborn—but unbeknownst to doctors, she survived in a primordial physical form, slowly regenerating her body.
What Is a Mummudrai?
Image: Marvel Comics
The term used to describe Cassandra in the comics is that she is Charles’ “Mummudrai,” a term that comes from the theology of the Shi’ar, the interstellar imperialists who’ve long been a part of X-Men continuity’s connection to the realm of the Marvel cosmic. According to the Shi’ar, every living being has their own Mummudrai, a bodiless spirit on the Astral Plane that reflects the “anti-self”—the complete inverse of their organic counterpart. Every living being, before birth, faces the their Mummudrai and defeats it on the Astral Plane, as part of the birthing process.
Mummudrai are made up of emotional energy, and don’t usually take physical forms. Cassanda is the most famous in the comics, but they’ve appeared a few times here and there since New X-Men.
What Are Cassandra Nova’s Powers?
Image: Marvel Comics
As Charles Xavier’s genetic copy, Cassandra is also one of the most powerful mutant telepaths in existence. But she also has several more psionic abilities beyond Charles, thanks to how she formed herself—when Cassandra made her body in Sharon’s womb, she gave herself access to all of Charles’ mutant genome, taking not just the ability he would eventually awaken to as a child, but all of the potential abilities his X-Gene could have manifested. Along with extremely powerful telepathy, Cassandra has telekinetic powers, as well as the ability to project and manipulate a form on the Astral Plane.
As a Mummudrai, Cassandra also has multiple abilities beyond this—like the ability to regenerate and manipulate her own physical form through DNA manipulation, and even the ability to phase through solid objects, as well as plant her body into other people’s conciousness.
Why Is She So Evil?
Image: Marvel Comics
Cassandra
Nova
is
Charles
Xavier
without
a
filter—no
compunction
to
not
use
her
vast
powers
for
anything
other
than
her
singular
goal:
revenge
against
her
brother.
She
literally
sustained
herself
after
her
stillbirth
out
of
her
hate
for
him,
so...
it’s
a
lot!
But Cassandra’s effectiveness as an X-Men villain is because she’s the rare character introduced as actually achieving her initial goals. Cassandra’s very first act in the comics is to manipulate a surviving cousin of Bolivar Trask, the architect of the Sentinel program, so she can swipe his genetic material for herself, activate a Sentinel Master Mold, and use it to produce an array of Wild Sentinels that she immediately unleashes on the unwitting mutant populace of Genosha. Within hours, 16 million mutants are dead at her hands—a genocide with such horrifying, long-reaching implications that even in the ever-fluctuating continuity of superhero comics, Marvel’s mutants are only barely just beginning to really recover and move on from it.
Even beyond her opening act being the near-extermination of the mutant race, the first few arcs of New X-Men involve Cassandra’s revenge plot spiraling wildly out of control on Earth and in space. Although seemingly killed after she’s brought into Xavier’s Mansion for interrogation after kickstarting the Genoshan Genocide, Cassandra psionically swaps her consciousness into Charles’ body while placing his into her genetically sabotaged physical form, hoping to kill him while she puppets his body about. She infects the X-Men with a nano-sentinel virus that nearly finishes the job of exterminating Charles’ top students, and even manages to flee to space with the Shi’ar and destabilize the Empire along the way—almost convincing Charles’ on-and-off-again lover Empress Lilandra that Earth’s mutants have been infected with some kind of insanity plague, necessitating their total destruction.
Cassandra’s immediate legacy even beyond this shaped so much of what was important in Morrison’s work on New X-Men: through her, they established the concept of the Secondary Mutation, they set the stage for the worldbuilding of mutant culture and their presence among human society, sparked by Cassandra/Charles’ revelation of their mutant identity, that Morrison explored throughout their time on the book. Cassandra’s revenge spree also in part establishes actually setting Xavier’s School as a campus where hundreds of students live and learn—a de facto that would persist throughout the 21st century. Despite not actually taking that much page presence in New X-Men’s early arcs, Cassandra is a character that fundamentally shapes so much of that comic’s run—and in doing so helped establish New X-Men as one of the defining and influential runs in the franchise for the new century.
How Did the X-Men Stop Her?
Image: Marvel Comics
Amid all the chaos of debilitating the X-Men while also bringing the Shi’ar Imperial Guard to their turf to try and finish them off, Cassandra attempted to capitalize on the chaos by making her way to Cerebra, the telepathic-boosting supercomputer Charles used to detect newly-awoken Mutants—and with it, extend her already vast powers so she could psychically command every mutant in the world to kill themselves. However, upon reaching Cerebra Cassandra discovered at trap lying in wait: Jean Grey, having re-tapped into her connection to the Phoenix Force, had managed to extricate Charles’ consciousness from Cassandra’s sabotaged body, hold it in herself, and then store it in Cerebra.
Able to force Cassandra from his body, she fled into what she believed was her original physical form—but was actually the shapeshifting form of the Imperial Superguardian known as Stuff, disguised as Cassandra’s body. With her real form dead from the genetic sabotage Cassandra had intended to kill Charles with, Cassandra’s conciousness was wiped and reverted to a childlike state, psionically trapped within Stuff’s form as she went through a psychic re-education process by mental copies of Jean and Charles, in the hopes that she could be re-trained into a functioning member of mutant society some day.
What’s Cassandra Nova Done in the Comics Since?
Image: Marvel Comics
Although
Cassandra
was
defeated
and,
for
all
intents
and
purposes,
“dead,”
no
one
ever
really
stays
dead
in
comics.
She’s
only
re-appeared
a
handful
of
times
though,
in
spite
of
her
status
as
an
extremely
infamous
X-villain.
Five
years
later
in
Astonishing
X-Men,
Cassandra
briefly
returned
having
purportedly
placed
a
psychic
trigger
in
Emma
Frost’s
mind
just
before
she
was
transferred
into
Stuff’s
form,
eventually
forcing
Emma
to
turn
on
the
X-Men
and
force
her
way
back
into
existence
by
possessing
Kitty
Pryde.
That failed, but Cassandra went into hiding, eventually returning in the pages of X-Men Red in 2018, where it was revealed that she was behind an uptick of anti-mutant hate crimes and nano-organisms called “Sentinites,” similar to the microscopic virus she first unleashed in New X-Men, that she could use to send people into violent rages when detecting the presence of mutants. The recently reborn Jean Grey managed to put a stop to her, and turned Cassandra’s Sentinites on her, reprogramming them to make Cassandra feel empathy and atone for her history of horrors.
Most recently, Cassandra Nova made an appearance during the Krakoan Age of X-Men comics, playing a major role in the second volume of Marauders. Recruited by Kitty Pryde for a dangerous mission, Cassandra tried to turn on the Marauders while they were sent two billion years in the past to explore the previously unknown origins of an ancient mutant civilization called Threshold—but she was trapped there as part of Kitty’s plan, her fate left unknown even as Threshold faced its own cyclical story of extinction and rebirth, one seeded with genetic information recovered from the victims of the Genoshan Genocide.
What Does Cassandra Nova Mean for Deadpool & Wolverine?
Screenshot: Marvel
Right now, given that we’ve seen so little of the film, it’s hard to say. In the latest trailer, Cassandra seems to appear in what has turned out to be a little haven of former Fox X-Men villains, including Azazel, Pyro, Lady Deathstrike, and potentially more—a post-apocalyptic little shanty town walled out by the corpse of a giant-sized Ant-Man. We don’t even know if she’s the primary threat of the movie, just that she’s part of it in that specific moment of Wade and Logan’s multiversal adventure. And given that we also see the duo in the trailer seemingly leaping away from where Cassandra has been hiding out in a sorcerer’s “sling ring” portal, she might just be a minor villain that they deal with and then move on from.
Funnily enough, Cassandra’s legacy is actually probably being more keenly felt elsewhere in X-Men adaptations right now. Although the show’s yet to reveal if she’s involved or not (so far the blame has been firmly laid at the feet of Mr. Sinister), X-Men ‘97 just recently delivered its own devastating interpretation of the Genoshan Genocide, which was pretty faithful to how it went down in the comics even without Cassandra’s presence just yet. Time will tell, but right now, it’s hard to say which X-adaptation will handle Cassandra’s villainous legacy better... or even if she’ll appear in both of those X-adaptations.
What Comics Should I Read to Get Cassandra Nova?
Image: Marvel Comics
The bulk of Cassandra’s most important appearances are in New X-Men, starting with the very first arc, “E for Extinction,” in New X-Men #114, all the way through to her defeat in New X-Men #126. Marvel recently collected New X-Men in a complete omnibus format again last year—it’s well worth checking out!—or you can read those issues digitally through Marvel Unlimited.
The impact of the Genoshan Genocide—Cassandra’s defining legacy—appears here and there across the next few decades of comics, but if you really want to see the fruition of how mutantkind reckons with it all, it’s worth checking out some of the X-Men material of the post-2019 Krakoan age. The first “Hellfire Gala” event, as well as the spinoff miniseries Trial of Magneto, deal particularly with this, but for Cassandra’s return itself, you’ll want to check out 2022's Marauders relaunch—which is also available in physical trade paperbacks as well as digitally through Marvel Unlimited.