Dazzler

Alison Blaire began life as a marketing deal. Marvel and Casablanca Records wanted a mutant disco star who could headline a comic, an album and a feature film simultaneously. Disco died, the deal collapsed, and Marvel was left holding a character with no franchise attached to her. She turned out to be the best accident in the whole line. Her mutation converts sound into light: she stands in front of a wall of amplifiers and turns the noise into lasers, blinding strobes, holograms and hard-light constructs. A stadium crowd isn't her audience. It's her ammunition supply.

The genuinely interesting part is the job. Dazzler wanted to be famous in a world that hates mutants, a career built directly on a fault line, and Marvel has mined that for forty years through the outings, the boycotts and the club owners who wanted the light show without the mutant making it. She has been a Xavier student, Longshot's partner inside Mojo's television hell, a S.H.I.E.L.D. field agent, and Krakoa's marquee act at the Hellfire Gala, where Orchis eventually dragged her off the stage and made an example of her. Same woman, still holding the microphone.

Dazzler is Marvel's most famous cross-promotional misfire: created in 1980 for a Casablanca Records tie-in and a Bo Derek film that never got made, then left to survive on her own merits. She did. Her 1981 solo title was one of Marvel's earliest direct-market-only experiments, sold straight to comic shops instead of newsstands, and it ran for more than forty issues. Dazzler: The Movie in 1984 gave her a graphic novel about being publicly outed that reads far sharper than its origins suggest. Claremont folded her into the X-Men, Longshot gave her a partner, and the Krakoa era finally cast her as what she always was: the mutant world's only real celebrity.