Sympathy For The Goblin Queen

Madelyne Pryor got a raw deal.

Here’s a character who was minding her own business, enjoying a perfectly good life when Scott Summers and the X-Men appeared.

Maddie fell in love and promptly discovered she’s the spitting image of the guy’s dead girlfriend. Adding to the creepiness, the plucky pilot survived a plane crash the same day said lover died.

Faster than you can say Vertigo, she’s swept into a complex plot engineered by a criminal mastermind known as, um, “Mastermind.”

Still, the couple managed to overcome those hurdles and got hitched. Scott retired from the X-Men and the two gave birth to a son, Nathan.

All seemed well … for a while at least. Then the sh!† well and truly hit the fan.

It turned out the ex-girlfriend wasn’t quite so dead. Scott up and left his wife and infant child. (Let’s not hear any more about how Cyclops’ tryst with Emma Frost was “out of character.”)

Adding insult to injury, the Marauders attacked Madelyne and kidnapped Nathan. She survived the attack, but Mr. Sinister (*gag*) managed to wipe all records of her existence.

Happily, the X-Men proved more loyal than their former leader and rescued Madelyne.

She stayed with the team as they sacrificed their lives to save the world, got better really quick and operated secretly in Australia.

(Eeeeee….X-Men continuity!)

Then things REALLY got complicated. In fact, the tale is so tangled that your weary Keeper is forced to reprint a Wikipedia summary (with a few edits):

The demon S’ym later came to Madelyne in her dreams and offered her the power to hurt Scott just as he had hurt her with his adultery and his abandonment of her and their child, and she accepted. She then struck a bargain with another demon, N’astirh, to find her missing baby; the demons then fully activated her latent telekinetic and telepathic powers and she became the Goblin Queen.

This started the Inferno crossover.

This crossover (unveiled) a new origin for Madelyne. In this origin, Mr. Sinister - believing that a child of Scott Summers and Jean Grey would have great powers - had created a clone of Jean specifically to fall in love with Scott and produce a child. When Phoenix committed suicide, a part of the Phoenix Force entered the clone and gave it life. Sinister named the clone Madelyne Pryor, created a false background, and sent her to Alaska where she fell in love with Scott Summers.

N’astirh took Madelyne to an orphanage in Nebraska, the front for Sinister’s genetic laboratory. Sinister captured her and told her all about her creation and intended goal. She used her black magic to escape, and N’astirh brought her son, intending to sacrifice him to ensure a permanent demonic presence on Earth.

She pitted X-Factor against the X-Men by reverting to Madelyne and claiming that Scott wanted to take their baby away. She even took Scott’s brother Havok as her lover. The teams defeated N’astirh, but Madelyne - becoming suicidal upon the discovery of being a clone - trapped herself and Jean Grey in a telekinetic bubble (as per Psylocke’s assessment), then killed herself and tried to telepathically take Jean with her.

Jean survived by re-integrating the portions of her essence absorbed by the Phoenix Force and by Madelyne (which she would later expel).

Her son, Nathan Christopher, (turned out to be) the time-travelling soldier of fortune Cable, who had already been appearing in comics for some time by then.

Of course, this wasn’t the end. Madelyne returned in X-Man, the adventures of a younger, alternate-universe version of Cable.

This time around, she was a “psychic construct” who somehow achieved a sentient soul.

Madelyne flirted with heroism and villainy before the inevitable confrontation with Jean Grey, a clash that left her even more embittered.

Later in the series, it was revealed that Maddie had been replaced (off-screen) by an alternate-universe version of - get this - Jean Grey, who had secretly been programming X-Man to be her ultimate weapon.

(But if this Jean Grey was evil, that made her the evil twin of Jean Grey’s evil twin. The Keeper sees a massive headache looming on the horizon …)

We haven’t even mentioned the other alternate versions of Madelyne who appeared in Mutant X and X-Men: The End. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, the Keeper will leave such paths unexplored.

However, Madelyne made one, last appearance in the 616 universe that underscored her hard-luck status. In Cable #76, Cyclops and Nathan encountered Maddie on the psychic plane. Although no more than a ghost, she offered her son shelter from Apocalypse.

He turned her down cold, natch. The kicker? Neither Scott nor Cable expressed much in the way of remorse for the disintegration of their once harmonious family.

Like we said, Madelyne Pryor got a raw deal.