Dazzler gets Malicious!
Originally Published February 1987
We begin in Denver, where pop rocker Lila Cheney is playing to a sold out crowd.
In prose as florid as anything having to do with the Phoenix, the narration boxes go on and on about how great Lila is - how her music is "hot as a midsummer sun and fierce as a blood fight," and how her voice is full of "love and life and pain and hope that tells of the worst of the human condition while ever reaching for the best" and how magical she is and how the crowd loves her... but conspicuously neglects to mention that one time, she tried to sell the Earth into slavery. It's not relevant to our story per se, but it's the kind of thing you don't forget and tends to define a character.
She is backed, so we are told, by the best band in the biz - including one Alison Blaire on keyboards and (ahem) harmony vocals. Blaire is, of course, in reality, the mutant Disco Diva known as Dazzler, whose own career hit the skids when it was revealed that she was a mutant, hence why she's playing a supporting role for the latest it girl, Lila, who is also secretly a mutant.
Alison also happens to be facing something of a personality crisis as her reflection has lately been telling her to do bad things -- to embrace her inner stardom and stop letting Lila outshine her.
Egged on by her dark side, which calls itself "Malice," Alison hijacks the show. The crowd, who paid to see Lila and not her keyboardist, are surprisingly okay with this. Lila is too, to a point, only telling Ali that if it happens again, she's fired, and expressing concern that she's going to blow her cover if she keeps making ostentatious displays of her mutant light powers.
Alison has her own read on the situation.
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| Careful Ali, she could still probably sell you into alien slavery. |
In the end, Alison declares she's done hiding, done playing second fiddle, and done being a nondescript brunette.
Back in New York, the X-Men are still reeling in the aftermath of the battle with the Marauders and Sabretooth's home invasion. While Rogue tries to fix Cerebro, Wolverine and Callisto spend some time working out their aggression in the danger room when they get a call from Lila looking for help with the situation.
They find Dazzler playing a show in Dallas, the whole club's mood heightened to a state of primal rage, seemingly egged on by Dazzler's powers. Wolverine questions the purpose for the visit - if Alison wants to be out in the open, who are they to say boo? But Storm figures at the very least they can touch base with their fellow mutant, perhaps give her a heads up about the mutant-killing squad that is currently on the loose.
But before they can say anything, Alison pays the X-Men a greeting of her own.
Dazzler assaults the team with her light blasts, focusing intently on Rogue, who had encountered Dazzler back during her days with the Brotherhood. The X-Men are baffled, and try to talk some sense into Dazzler, but unbeknownst to them the real source of the confusion leaps out of Alison's body, and into another!
That's right -- in case you hadn't guessed, Malice is not, as she had previously been presented, the manifestation of Dazzler's dark impulses and frustrations, but a separate being in her own right that had been feeding those impulses and possessing Dazzler's psyche.
And she lives in a necklace!
Storm, Rogue and Psylocke, however, don't know that, so they are slightly put off when Wolverine unsheathes his claws toward them.
Dazzler manages to subdue the berserker Mal-verine, but in the confusion the disembodied emotion-manipulating mutant leaps into Rogue.
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| Great, just what she needs - another person in there. |
As "Rogue" wreaks havoc on some law enforcement officials that have arrived on the scene, Psylocke downloads what she now knows about the Malice entity and determines that in order to do anything about it, she'll need to coax it into a mind that is less chaotic than Rogue. An understandably miffed Dazzler is eager to take part.
The assembled mutants launch an offensive on Malice, prompting her to change lanes and try to possess Storm, but the leader of the X-Men is a tall order -- as we know, Storm is possessed of almost superhuman self-awareness that makes her no easy target for someone like Malice.
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| Dracula couldn't control me, what chance do you have? |
As it turns out, that inner darkness on which Malice normally feeds is actually what drives Storm and from where she derives her strength as leader of the X-Men -- which, if true, is pretty big news.
Storm crushes the necklace in her bare hand. That would appear to be the end of Malice, a member of the Marauders who, it is surmised, was using Dazzler as a way to get to the X-Men. With Dazzler's name besmirched, and at risk for becoming a target of the Marauders again, Dazzler agrees to join the team, only seven years after initially turning them down.
Could be that disco really isn't coming back, thus leaving her short on options.
But as they're preparing to wrap things up, Wolverine's senses start working overtime as he realizes Malice is right behind you!!
Only... she's not. Before he can gut his leader and friend, he comes to the realization that she is not possessed. The tipoff should be that she's just wearing her regular choker.
The X-Men patch things up and affirm that trust in each other is what makes the whole team work, but from a distance, possessing one of the police officers we saw earlier, Malice laughs to herself -- perhaps she was expelled from Storm's physical form, but now having driven a wedge of suspicion between them, she lives in their heads rent-free.
Further Thoughts:
If I may be brutally honest, this issue didn't do much for me. Which is not to say it's bad, it's just a bit of a comedown after some fairly momentous, intense issues. Malice, the body-possessing hate-fueled entity is an intriguing villain and certainly there's something there of substance -- some attempts are made to really hammer home the thematic weight of the issue by sowing the seeds of paranoia between the X-Men and especially Wolverine -- but it was just there for me, in concept and execution.
By way of pushing Wolverine's paranoia angle, there's an early moment where he tests Psylocke's reactivity by popping his laws near her, an interesting foreshadowing that he himself might be the one who can't be trusted. It's not my favourite thing to do, but it's a thing.
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