... And then there’s Lorna Dane, aka Polaris.
Lorna gets two sessions with Samson. In the first, she’s reserved. She’s wearing bulky sweats, her arms are folded, her gaze trained on a dish of wrapped candies. An off-hand comment from Samson triggers her to suddenly stand up and exclaim, “Now you’re gonna tell me I’m fat, right?” as she pulls her sweatshirt up to reveal a toned waist, as if a Big Two superheroine in 1993 was going to have anything other than that body type.
After a few more panels of getting sussed out by Samson, she begins to cry, tells the doctor to “get stuffed” – a very Comics Code Authority type of swear – and storms out, leaving tissues to float gently to the ground behind her.
Three teammates later, Lorna returns draped in a trenchcoat and shares, “I want you to know that I’ve dropped fifteen pounds in the last month” before shedding the coat to reveal her new costume, a red-and-gold number with thigh-high boots – effectively a one-piece bathing suit that rides high on the hips and has, because it was 1993, a headsock. Oh, and a boob window. Basically she looked like Image Comics in human form.
Samson’s response when pressed: “You kick my hormones into overdrive.”
…Now, I’m no expert, but that’s probably not something therapists are supposed to say to their patients. “I have an erection. Tell me about your parents.”
The thing is, there are very good reasons for Lorna to have body image and self-worth issues. In the years prior to this, Polaris had been relegated to a bit player who regularly gets possessed, manipulated or kidnapped by random villains. She served as the host for the Marauder Malice. She was abducted by Zaladane and drained of her magnetic powers, somehow in the process developing a She-Hulk-like build. And just before joining the All-New, All-Different X-Factor, she was manipulated by the Shadow King into fighting the X-Men on Muir Island.
That’s a whole lot of trauma… all at the hands of Chris Claremont, it should be noted. The problem was, these were all imperilments for a character who otherwise had no agency. Like Madrox or Strong Guy, David adopted a character who was fertile ground for exploration and growth. Unlike those two, he presents Polaris as the team’s hysterical woman still worthy of the male gaze.
It won’t be the last time the character would experience this portrayal, either.
For as much as David’s characterization of Polaris in this issue is uncomfortable, it’s damn near feminist compared with Chuck Austen’s handling of her in his early-2000s run on Uncanny X-Men, when she was the third leg in a love triangle with a post-coma Havok and his nurse, Annie. [editor’s note – actually Chuck Austen rules]...