Psylocke is a very fascinating character to me because she really only exists in her current
form because of non-stop tweaking, but although she’s a very well known member of the X-Men,
not a lot of people know all that much about her.
Like did you know that she went from a white girl to an Asian woman because of TV aliens?
Well she did.
Because comics.
Hello and welcome to Because Comics, the show where we take a look at all of the crazy,
strange, and straight up bizzare things that make comic books well… comic books.
I’m your host, Drake McWhorter!
So to start things off, let’s go back all the way to the beginning.
Betsy Braddock is the twin sister of Brian Braddock, better known as Captain Britain,
the flagship character of Marvel’s UK publishing imprint which is something that I might actually
need to give its own dedicated video sometime in the future.
Betsy mostly served as a supporting character in her brother’s book as a pilot, but she
later become a supermodel and a special psychic operative of S.T.R.I.K.E. which is kind of
like Britain’s version of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Interestingly, these developments helped gain Betsy a sizable fanbase with Marvel UK’s
audience and although she seldom took on a leading role, she was getting close to matching
her brother in popularity.
There was even a VERY brief period where she actually took over as Captain Britain by...
donning a uniform from an alternate universe version of her brother that she killed when
he tried to rape her.
Okay, wow.
That took a really dark turn.
But if that wasn’t dark enough already then you might want to know that Betsy’s time
as Captain Britain was cut short when a villain named Slaymaster gouged her eyes out which
caused Brian to take up the mantle once again.
This was certainly tragic, but Braddock’s psychic powers gave her the ability to sort
of see so it was kind of alright.
This wouldn’t last long though since her vision was fully restored about a year later
when she was taken prisoner by the villainous TV alien, Mojo, who gave her new mechanical
eyes, brainwashed her, gave her the name Psylocke, and used her as a puppet against the New Mutants
who managed to break her free.
This storyline is more or less what transitioned Psylocke from a character that only had notoriety
in British comics to a major player in the broader Marvel universe.
She quickly became a member of the X-Men which is something that ended up biting the team
in the butt since a little bit later, it was discovered that the eyes that Mojo gave Psylocke
were being used as living cameras to document the daily lives and activities of the X-Men.
However, all of these tweaks and developments over time absolutely pale in comparison to
the single weirdest thing to ever happen to Psylocke.
So have you noticed that Betsy was a white girl for all of this history and yet she’s
typically depicted as an Asian woman?
Well here’s how that happened.
After walking through a plot device called the Siege Perilous, Psylocke washed up on
the shores of Japan with amnesia and she was discovered by Matsu’o Tsurayaba, a member
of a ninja clan that is responsible for so much crazy stuff that happens in the Marvel
universe.
You probably guessed it, it’s The Hand.
By using a combination of technology from Mojo’s assistant, Spiral, and Iron Man’s
villain, The Mandarin, Betsy swapped bodies with a Japanese ninja assassin named Kwannon,
Matsu’o’s recently injured lover.
In a twist of events though, it turns out that Spiral sort of fused Betsy and Kwannon’s
minds together which gave them each memories of the other.
These new memories gave this new Asian bodied Psylocke all of Kwannon’s martial arts skills
and allowed her to develop her now iconic psychic dagger, but she was also brainwashed
into being an assassin of The Mandarin under the name Lady Mandarin...
Despite the fact that Braddock’s new body is Japanese.
Yeesh.
Anyway, during a fight with Wolverine, Psylocke plunged her psychic dagger into his skull
which then caused her to become flooded with memories of her old life which managed to
snap Betsy back into her right state of mind and allowed her to rejoin the X-Men.
Alright so that was a little bit complicated, but it’s relatively straightforward when
it comes to all of the craziness that is comic books.
However, I’m sure that there’s a couple of you out there that are currently wondering
“So what happened to Psylocke’s old body?”
Don’t worry, there is a super contrived comic booky explanation for that as well.
A few years after Psylocke got her new bod, Kwannon showed up at the X-Manor with her
mind inside of Betsy’s old body.
There’s only one problem though.
Kwannon was claiming to be the REAL Betsy Braddock and that Psylocke was an imposter.
So there’s one thing that I should probably mention.
Remember how I said earlier that Betsy and Kwannon swapped bodies?
Well that was actually me jumping the gun a little bit.
So originally when Psylocke was turned into Lady Mandarin, the writer, Chris Claremont,
just wanted to change her race with the martial arts and psychic knife not really being explained
at all.
In fact, this was only supposed to be a temporary race change kind of like the time that The
Punisher became a black.
In an interview with Claremont, he said
“In the case of Psylocke, it was something we had originally just intended for the “Acts
of Vengeance” three-parter, the rationale being that the Hong Kong gangs would not accept
an Anglo, a pure Caucasian, as the Mandarin’s emissary, as a Lady Mandarin; therefore, the
Mandarin had to take steps to make her more physically acceptable to his people.
Then Jim did such a bang-up job.
It was such an effective presentation of her and it seemed to strike such a powerful chord
in the audience.
We figured, “Let’s go with it and see what happens.”
And from the reader response, it seems to be an extremely positive move.”
Well yeah, Claremont.
It’s not much of a surprise that the readers liked this new Psylocke design considering
that she went from this to a scantily clad ninja bombshell.
With the core of comic book readers being teenage boys, it’s not hard to put two and
two together.
I mean just look at some of the comic book redesigns of the era.
So when Fabian Nicieza came onboard to take over the writing of the X-Men comic, he introduced
the character of Kwannon and the entire body switching thing because he never actually
read Claremont’s work before writing this new imposter story.
As he said,
“So I started a storyline about the two different bodies because I screwed up the
research and no one else in editorial noted it.
In fact, no readers noted it until many issues after the storyline had started (don’t forget,
this was before the instantaneous fact-checking and hating that can be accomplished on the
internet today).”
So with Nicieza’s body swap retcon, all of the loose ends were nicely tied up.
But now there was a new issue.
There were kind of TWO different Psylockes.
Thankfully, this was made a little bit easier to keep track of with Kwannon in Betsy’s
old body taking up the new codename Revanche and then it was made even easier to keep track
of when Revanche contracted the Legacy Virus and straight up died which purged Psylocke
of Kwannon’s memories once and for all, but she was still somehow able to keep the
martial arts powers and the ability to speak Japanese…
Because comics.
Look, there is so much more that I could talk about in terms of Psylocke’s crazy history
including when she almost died and was restored by a magic elixir that gave her new powers
or when she temporarily became a horseman of Apocalypse, but with how much time I had
to spend on just explaining the body swap, I’m going to need to save those for later.
Here’s the thing though.
All of that craziness with the body swap happened decades ago back in the 90s which makes a
lot of sense considering that those were just a really weird time for comics, but the reason
that I’m bringing it up now isn’t just so I can talk about clickbaity comic book
nonsense and then also have an excuse to put a sexy ninja in the thumbnail.
At least those aren’t the only reasons.
You see, in the Hunt For Wolverine series, Psylocke was seemingly killed, but she was
able to reconstruct herself a new body through sheer force of will, but here is the interesting
fact.
This new body is her original British one and Kwannon was seen brought back to life
in her original Asian body at the end of the issue!
When I posted about this on Twitter, there were several people who had never even heard
that Psylocke was originally white and it leaves me with a question that I am somewhat
conflicted on.
Was this a good move?
There is no way to deny that Asian representation in mainstream superhero comics is lacking
and Psylocke was one of the most recognizable Asian women in the genre, but this is a weird
case.
Psylocke is definitely more than just a skin color and her value as a character should
fall more on her writing than her appearance, but with so many people not knowing about
her British origins and with Olivia Munn playing her in the movies, is this taking away representation
even though she was somewhat of a trojan horse?
I know this is a really weird and oddly specific set of circumstances, but I really would like
to hear your comments about it down there there below, but any time that we’re dealing
with race on the internet, I know it can be a very contentious topic, but please just
try to be civil.
But if you liked this video then why not consider subscribing or even watching another one?
In fact, if you liked this, then you might like the Because Comics episode I did on when
Supergirl dated a horse…
Yeah…
Also while I have you guys here, I want to give a very big thank you to all of my Patreon
supporters.
You guys are pretty much the reason I’m still able to do this so thank you very much
and even if you’re not a financial supporter, thank you very much for your view and for
sharing these videos around.
It really does mean a lot and you’ve also contributed in amazing ways.
But anyway, I hope you learned at least a little something new and hopefully I’ll
see you next time!