Lorna Dane: Polaris Appreciation 2021

[jmc247]

Link

What version of Lorna can we get?

I believe they were referring to what some might call the core theme with the character. Its the question that matters above everything else I would say in terms of Lorna's interaction with the other X-Men as it represents the pivot point that will define her relationship to them.

[Gray Lensman]

What version of Lorna can we get? Hopefully, it’s a a little less problematic and she moves on ahead of some of her past. Not ignoring it but dealing with her past more healthier than she has been portrayed before. One thing I would like to see is Malice return with Lorna having to deal with someone who destroyed her life. I also would like to see Lorna not just rediscover her past friendships with Scott , Jean and the original X-men with acknowledging what’s happened before and where they go from there. Let’s not forget that Sinister and Shadow King (both who have hurt Lorna) have something up their sleeves. Also, I mentioned this before but we know so little of her adoptive parents that needs to be displayed more.

IIRC the Danes were killed off for Lorna's backstory. She fits right in with the other ladies from Disney.

[jmc247]

Jordan White interview

AIPT: Welcome back to X-Men Monday, Jordan! Let’s start with Jean’s green dress. Just kidding. X-Factor, we’re starting with X-Factor! The fan-favorite series wasn’t in Marvel’s July solicitations, and X-Fans Jake, Jay Wagner and Mark Floor all asked about its status. So, what can you tell us about X-Factor‘s fate?

Jordan: I don’t want to announce anything ahead of time, but you will see what is going on with X-Factor in a soon-to-be-made announcement. So it’s probably not what everyone is most fearing, but I think it is something that you guys are not quite expecting yet. So we’ll see.

AIPT: Fair enough! Speaking of X-Factor, we now know that Polaris won the X-Men Election. But essentially, you also just stealth market-tested several other mutants who X-Fans clearly want to see more of. Is it safe to assume interest in using characters like Banshee, Tempo and Marrow among the X-Creators is higher than ever coming out of the X-Men Election?

Jordan: Yeah. So, this is the first time I’ve done an interview since the X-Men Election was over and revealed, as well as the big piece that people didn’t know about — Gerry and Pepe’s book. So I’ll start by giving you a little peek behind the curtain on that. First of all, let me emphasize that this was 100% real because I know there are folks who still are skeptical. “Oh, they were rigging it,” or “They knew this would happen.” No, we didn’t. When I went to Gerry, we had this plan. There were a lot of plans. We batted around various ideas for half a second. We thought, “Should we let people pick the entire team?” And then we ended up going no — for various reasons.

AIPT: [Laughs] Yeah, that would have been bad.

Jordan: But we liked the idea of them picking the last member. So we talked to Gerry and said, “Let’s come up with a list of 10 characters, any of whom you’d be happy to have on the team.” So we threw names out and a bunch of people suggested names. I think Leah suggested Polaris now that I mention it, but everybody was suggesting names. Gerry was like, “Yes, no, yes, no” to various ones. And we ended up with that list of 10 characters, and he had preferences over who he hoped it would be, but he was prepared and happy to write any of those folks.

And one of the things I said to him was, “Now, Gerry, don’t think about this too much, because if you do, you’re going to end up coming up with great ideas for every character or for a bunch of the characters that are not going to get picked. So don’t think too hard on it. Let’s just let this happen.” And for the most part, he did, but he did think of a few things. So, you actually will see a couple of those characters in various places. You know what, I’ll just say, at least a couple of them are going to show up in Marauders, because Gerry had more ideas for some of them.

I’m pretty sure Gerry and I both voted for the same person in the election, which was Tempo. First of all, I really like time powers, even though I do have very strong opinions on how they should work and end up arguing with my writers about them. I still really liked them. I liked the idea of having time powers and a character who’s only appeared a few times, but not as much as any other character on the list. I think she’s the character with the fewest appearances of anybody on the list. So kind of going in and being able to have more freedom to flesh her out and establish her more sounded great. But then again, I’m not disappointed. It was very interesting to see how it played out.

AIPT: Well, that’s a good transition to a question I got from an X-Fan claiming to be Jordan D. Lite. Other Jordan asked, what campaign staff tried to cheat the most in the X-Men Election? Were there shenanigans?

Jordan: Oh, there were major shenanigans. Not internally, but amongst the fans, there were major major shenanigans. This election was interfered with — let’s say that our agencies at Marvel were able to suss out that interference and account for it. We were able to take out the hundreds of thousands of falsely made votes. Let me start by saying if we had not, Polaris would not have won. It’d be a character who I think you’d be quite surprised about. It was mostly due to the incredibly huge amounts of votes coming from Eastern Europe, one IP address for this character. I don’t want to reveal who though. I don’t feel like I should. But here’s the other thing — it wasn’t the only one. There were a number of characters who people made attempts to rig the vote in favor of.

It was interesting to see what affected it and why. Now I know a lot of people will say or have said — and maybe they’re right. I think probably the reason Polaris won was because of TV fans because of The Gifted, and that’s probably true. And I will say, is that bad? I can’t say it’s bad. We opened it to the public. We opened it to all fans and those are fans too. And then I know people will say “No, but they’re not going to read the comics.” That might be the case. It doesn’t matter. Gerry’s still into it. We’re going to write good comics for it. It’s going to be awesome.

And I’ll let you in on a secret, we’re planning to do this again. So you’ll have another chance and it probably won’t be the same characters. We’ll see, maybe some of them will be there, maybe some of them won’t. What’s funny is I think Polaris is the oldest character on the list? No, I think Banshee appeared before Polaris, but that means it did come down to the two oldest characters around the longest.

Polaris is a character who’s been around a long time and has a lot of fans. And I know that means people again have said, “Well, obviously they knew Polaris was going to win.” She’s been around the longest and therefore has had the most opportunity to gain fans. But that doesn’t mean she’s more popular, you know? There are folks on this list who, you know, have a lot of fans. I mean, again, a lot of us thought Sunspot was going to win. Who did I think was going to win? I’m trying to remember — it might’ve been Polaris that I thought was going to win, but I definitely thought Sunspot had a good shot. We did intentionally mess with people by putting both Sunspot and Cannonball on there. And I will say, man, Cannonball had a bad showing. He was very far down the list.

https://aiptcomics.com/2021/05/03/x-...hite-election/

On the issue of TG fans the more who pay attention and are interested the better.

[Odd Rödney]

Hey fellow Polaris enthusiasts!

Quick question for y’all:

I recently re-read Deadly Genesis and now I’m jumping into Rise and Fall of the Shi-Ar Empire. In issue one I saw that Lorna is talking about being a fugitive and being modified by “Apocalypse’s people”. I don’t recall this. Do any of you know what she’s addressing here?

2B99A20D-B8F1-4D32-B5FB-1224A7ED3069.jpg

[jmc247]

Hey fellow Polaris enthusiasts!

Quick question for y’all:

I recently re-read Deadly Genesis and now I’m jumping into Rise and Fall of the Shi-Ar Empire. In issue one I saw that Lorna is talking about being a fugitive and being modified by “Apocalypse’s people”. I don’t recall this. Do any of you know what she’s addressing here?

The x-line was still under orders of no more mutants after M-Day and Lorna had been recently depowered after House of M and in Milligan's run repowered using celestial tech.

They didn't want to say she was a mutant yet so they hedged on what repowered her and implied she might or might not be a mutant at times though in 2012 it was confirmed she was. Lorna’s interest in mutant activism sort of disappeared after House of M and never really recovered to date so it’s sort of a re-adjustment moment for the character.

[salarta]

What version of Lorna can we get? Hopefully, it’s a a little less problematic and she moves on ahead of some of her past. Not ignoring it but dealing with her past more healthier than she has been portrayed before. One thing I would like to see is Malice return with Lorna having to deal with someone who destroyed her life. I also would like to see Lorna not just rediscover her past friendships with Scott , Jean and the original X-men with acknowledging what’s happened before and where they go from there. Let’s not forget that Sinister and Shadow King (both who have hurt Lorna) have something up their sleeves. Also, I mentioned this before but we know so little of her adoptive parents that needs to be displayed more.

While I think stuff like Malice/Sinister/Shadow King could be revisited and reworked into something good, the new X-Men book isn't the place for it. The X-Men book is the sort of place where we need to see how Lorna fits into the grand scheme of things and who she is within the limited amount of time and panel space she'll have. Given how old and disconnected it is from current events, especially compared to other things in Lorna's history, the Malice/Sinister/Shadow King stuff is more like a side story you might address elsewhere at a later date.

IIRC the Danes were killed off for Lorna's backstory. She fits right in with the other ladies from Disney.

Unless I missed something, last I saw, her adoptive parents are still alive. Last appearance I'm aware of was being mentioned (but not shown, or given first names) at Lorna and Havok's wedding in the Austen era. It's her mother and stepfather that died as part of her origin story (X-Factor #243).

Hey fellow Polaris enthusiasts!

Quick question for y’all:

I recently re-read Deadly Genesis and now I’m jumping into Rise and Fall of the Shi-Ar Empire. In issue one I saw that Lorna is talking about being a fugitive and being modified by “Apocalypse’s people”. I don’t recall this. Do any of you know what she’s addressing here?

In addition to what was said already, the fugitive part (you may know this but I'm not going to assume) was an anti-Apocalypse cult trying to kill her because she had been Pestilence briefly.



On the topic of X-Men Monday, I'm not surprised there were attempts to rig the vote. Any contest like this is going to be rife with people attempting it. I'm glad they found the attempts and accounted for them.

Knowing this is good as well.

So we talked to Gerry and said, “Let’s come up with a list of 10 characters, any of whom you’d be happy to have on the team.” So we threw names out and a bunch of people suggested names. I think Leah suggested Polaris now that I mention it, but everybody was suggesting names. Gerry was like, “Yes, no, yes, no” to various ones. And we ended up with that list of 10 characters, and he had preferences over who he hoped it would be, but he was prepared and happy to write any of those folks.

It's good because knowing Duggan said yes or no to suggestions, and Lorna was a yes (otherwise she wouldn't have been on the poll), means he's at the very least open-minded to what can be done with her. If he had a negative impression of her, I think he would have said no to her as a possibility on the vote. I think that heightens the chances of Lorna being utilized with more modern possibilities in mind.

About impact of Gifted, let's say the show never happened. Let's say Banshee won. Would we see an argument of "Well Banshee only won because he was in that First Class film" cropping up? I don't really see a whole lot of complaint about Banshee on the poll over that. It makes me wonder about the underlying reasons for complaint. On the flipside, if it really was Gifted that caused Lorna to win, that kind of lends an argument that Lorna is an absolutely viable character if she has decent enough visibility with a good depiction.

It's also worth mentioning that Emma Dumont, Lorna's actress on Gifted, didn't talk about or promote the vote at all. So any votes for Lorna as a result of Gifted came from lingering interest in the character rather than any sort of big Gifted fandom push.

But all of that aside, it's a huge assumption to think "all those people who voted for Lorna aren't going to read the comics she's in." Maybe those fans will pick up a comic for the first time because Lorna won the vote. Either out of interest in the character, or feeling like they have a stake in the book after their vote led to this outcome. Maybe they're people who used to read comics and stopped because the comics haven't been doing anything they wanted to read, and now they will. I'm in that category; Lorna winning the vote, and initial impressions being good so far, means I'm planning to buy and read all the Hellfire Gala comics and each issue of X-Men as it comes out starting with the first issue that has Lorna on it.

As many have said, the premise of "they're all Gifted fans and they shouldn't have been allowed to vote" is very gatekeepy. It also suggests that comics should be treated like The Village where nothing from the outside modern world is allowed to have any kind of impact. For starters, either we wouldn't have Laura Kinney, or she wouldn't have the profile she does. She started as an X-Men Evolution character before coming into the comics, after all. And that's just the direct popularity/brand awareness talk. Same thinking could be used to argue that Marvel should completely ignore real world political and social circumstances when making their comics. It's a very slippery slope.

[juan678]

[jmc247]

It is true that Emma Dumont voted in the Marvel.com poll. But, she didn't publicize it behind signaling she voted in her replies on twitter. She does buy Lorna comics like any other fan. She didn't use her large social media following to rock the vote. The Gifted influenced fans self organized like any other group online.



Vote.

Also, the first trend I have seen at Marvel.com for Lorna since something like early 2018.

[salarta]

Also, the first trend I have seen at Marvel.com for Lorna since something like early 2018.

I had no idea this section of the site existed, but it's great to see her trending alongside all those The Falcon and Winter Soldier characters and Loki. I think it's a testament to how successful the X-Men vote was in generating interest and getting people to want to find out more about characters involved. The vote also definitely raised Tempo's profile, and made people more aware of qualities that all the voted on characters have due to discussion.

This also reminds me of when Polaris was trending on Twitter during the vote. I saved a screencap at one point, I just don't have it on me right now. Maybe I'll edit this post to add it later, or make a new post.

[Angleman70]

Link



I believe they were referring to what some might call the core theme with the character. Its the question that matters above everything else I would say in terms of Lorna's interaction with the other X-Men as it represents the pivot point that will define her relationship to them.

Something I would like add to your reply, it will be interesting to see how she interacts with the non mutant community such as the Avengers or the Fantastic Four. She has had little exposure to the other teams. What do you think?

[jmc247]

Something I would like add to your reply, it will be interesting to see how she interacts with the non mutant community such as the Avengers or the Fantastic Four. She has had little exposure to the other teams. What do you think?

I think to entice writers outside her book to want to do something with her and their characters they need to better settle who she is and what she represents before you are going to want to see writers pick her up on stories not directly connected to the book she is in. X-Men could help better define the character.

[juan678]

[juan678]

Thanks DaHX

[rhaenylis]

Uh oh

I love Wells but I don't know what to think about it

However the father daughter hug is cute

[salarta]

Well, now that it's been posted here.

My original plan was to read all of Hellfire Gala. This now forces me to change my plan to reading Hellfire Gala except for Hellions.

Depending on what we see, my plan may need to further change to not reading any of Hellfire Gala.

Fortunately, Hellions is released in the first week (June 2). If it was not, I would have to say I'm not reading anything of Hellfire Gala until I saw what happened on Hellions.

I will also just say I found out about this from multiple Lorna fan mutuals sharing it with me to voice their dislike and concern about it. If Marvel wants people that voted for Lorna to read X-Men #1, this is not helping. I've reminded people that Duggan is not writing Hellions.