University of Panels

11: Cassandra Nova Xavier

 

As I've mentioned on numerous occasions, I'm a huge fan of Grant Morrison's work in comics. One aspect that I love about his stories is the villains that he creates for them, and I especially love the build-up he gives for these characters. I've worked out the formula:

 

The villain is one that has never been seen before, but has some connection to the hero's past. We don't fully know the antagonist's backstory or motivations for their actions, but are established to be a legitimate and intimidating threat. As the hero battles against this new enemy, their backstory is gradually revealed through bits and pieces before it is finally fully established just before the villain is defeated, and makes sense in the context with what the reader knows about the antagonist so far. 

 

Cassandra Nova truly qualifies as one of these villains. 

 

She makes her pressence first known in Morrison's run on NEW X-MEN, where she unleashes an armada of wild sentinles on the island nation of Genosha, home to sixteen million mutants, killing them all in a matter of seconds. The X-Men soon capture her, and discover that she is neither human or mutant, but something far deadlier. She escapes captivity and attempts to gain control of Cerebra (Xavier's telepathic mutant locator) in order to psychically kill every mutant on the planet. Cassandra is stopped however, being shot by Charles Xavier himself. But Cassandra had transfered her conciousness into Xavier's mind just before being shot however, now having complete access to the body of the world's most powerful body. With Xavier now trapped in Cassandra's dying body, the X-Men make it their top priority to stop Cassandra Nova before she obliterates all of mutantkind. 

 

What I especially loved about Cassandra Nova was not just how she was incredibly intimidating as a villain, but also had a lot of mystery and build up around her. At first she appears to be an old woman with a hatred for mutants, but is also a being beyond either human or mutant. The X-Men then later discover that she is actually Xavier's twin sister, who Xavier had attempted to kill while they were still in their mother's womb. While these bits and pieces of information are gradually provided to the reader, her true nature and motivations are fully revealed just before the final confrontation. Cassandra Nova is actually a Murudammai, a psychic parasite that exists only on the astral plane, and is the spiritual opposite of one's sould (the yin to one's yang). According to the legends of the alien race known as the Shiar, all individuals have a murudammai that they face before birth, essentially being the individual's first encounter with evil. While murudammai normally only exist as spiritual beings, Xavier's developing telepathic abilities were so powerful that Cassandra Nova was able to use Xavier's DNA to clone a physical body for itself. With his latent mutant power, Xavier sensed the evil within Nova and attempted to kill her as he knew that if she was born, she would bring untold evil to the world. Nova's soul was able to survive however, and has now returned to destroy everything that Xavier holds dear. 

 

The level of build-up around her backstory made her vendetta against the X-Men highly compelling, and the amount of power she possesses makes the atmosphere of any story that she's in all the more engaging (due to how big of a threat she is). A feeling of menace which was perfectly conveyed in both Grant Morrison's run on NEW X-MEN and the TORN arc of Joss Whedon's ASTONISHING X-MEN when she returned, working alongside the Hellfire Club!