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Characters
Dazzler
Alison Blaire / Dazzler
Notable Aliases: Agent Blaire, Alison Brown, Buzzler, La de los patinetes que canta, Dazz, Dazzler, Disco Dazzler, Dolores Rudolph, "Lightengale", Sandy Blossom, Skippy, "Songbird", Brightengale
Nationality: American, Krakoan
Species: Human mutant
First Appearance: X-Men #130 (February, 1980)
Can you hear it? The wind. Cars. The ocean. The laughter and the screaming and the hum of everything. This city is a symphony. And I'm her speaker.
The musically-inclined Alison Blaire is introduced as a young mutant who has no desire to be a hero or villain, but just wants to use her powers to entertain and further her Idol Singer career. Although initially popular, after coming out as a mutant to help quell anti-mutant sentiment, the public rejects her. After a short stint as a back-up keyboard player, she joined the X-Men and developed a romance with Longshot. After a long time in limbo, she resurfaced as a successful techno-trance musician and rejoined the X-Men.
- Action Girl: A very athletic woman who uses her powers but can also fight hand to hand if necessary.
- Barrier Warrior: Thanks to Hard Light force fields. Another one of her powers that's largely forgotten about.
- Cain and Abel: Has this relationship with her half-sister Lois London (aka Mortis), which culminated with a one-on-one fight in a standalone issue, which ended with Alison knocking Lois out and giving her to Psylocke for psychotherapy.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Is often underestimated, in- and out-of-universe, due to her history as a blatant Fad Super and her preoccupation with her singing career. Despite this, she's proven she can more than pull her weight whenever she's on the X-Men.
- Darker and Edgier: Following Mystique keeping Dazzler comatose so she could impersonate her, as well as for the sake of harvesting Dazzler's blood to create Mutant Growth Hormone (which can revive the X-Gene for a short period), Dazzler will be receiving a new look to reflect her pissed off attitude. The key word is "Black."
- Dropped a Bridge on Her: Gets abruptly killed off in Fall of X's Hellfire Gala one-shot along with other recurring X-Men characters by Nimrod.
- Elemental Powers: Sound into light.
- Emotion Control: Can generate lightshows that stimulate specific emotional moods. Usually she can use this to calm a crowd; however, under the influence of Malice, she also spread feelings of aggression and hostility at one of her concerts.
- Energy Weapon: Her primary form of attack.
- Everything's Better with Sparkles: A visual trademark of her powers.
- Expy: the "pop singer with a secret identity" plot would later find itself as the basis of two popular TV series aimed at young girls, Jem and Hannah Montana.
- In-universe arguably DJ/Mark Sheppard from New X-Men, who could directly convert different types of music into various effects: Dance music allows him to manipulate light, Gospel lets him fly, while Rock and Roll gives him energy blasts.
- Marvel tried the idea of a singer/superhero, again in the 90's with Nightcat.
- Fad Super: Her original incarnation was textbook example of this trope. Luckily, when she joined the X-Men, she ditched her Outdated Outfit. Although it's worth noting that she's now an electronic dance musician during that genre's current boom.
- Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Her father wanted her to be a lawyer like him because he didn't want her to go into music like her mother who walked out on them for it.
- Film Felons: She was recruited to dance in a music video that is a thinly veiled Thriller reference, and the director tries to cause her "accidental" death to further hype a curse on the production.
- Friend to All Living Things: Sometimes
- Hard Light: She can make this too, though it's more difficult for her than her normal-strength light shows.
- Hidden Depths: Although her concern for her music career seems pretty shallow she was compassionate enough to figure out that the Hulk was just a Non-Malicious Monster that only wanted to be left alone.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Would really rather focus on her career than be a superhero. Unfortunately, she keeps being dragged back into the world-saving biz.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: It had been implied that she was Shatterstar's mother (with Longshot as the father). But this was later forgotten, only for it to be revealed that she did give birth to Shatterstar, and as part of a Stable Time Loop he, as an adult, wiped her memory of giving birth before taking his infant self to be raised in the future. She still has no idea that he is her son.
- Light 'em Up: The crux of her powers revolves around the use of photons and light by using sound as a fuel. She can either blind people with her powers or use a concussive beam of photons, among other things.
- Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Invoked with her half-sister Mortis who emits dark energy instead of light.
- (Magic) Idol Singer : Well, she's Caucasian AND a mutant, but she's pretty close.
- Make Me Wanna Shout: On one occasion released all her stored sound energy in a scream.
- Master of Illusion: With enough concentration and sonic energy, she can create three-dimensional holograms. This power is largely forgotten, though, in favor of her flashier powers.
- Missing Mom: Her jazz musician mother left the family because she didn't want the stress of her husband fighting for her to give up her career to help around the house to affect Alison.
- Most Common Superpower: In early issues, at least, she was occasionally drawn very top-heavy for a roller-skater.
- The Movie:
Almost. A Dazzler movie was planned but scrapped after the script was made by Jim Shooter. Parts of the script were leaked online and it would have been, mostly because it was made in four days, the most coke-fueled, cameo-heavy, disaster ever. - Ms. Fanservice: She's a very attractive woman and her costumes often highlight her perfect body.
- Mundane Utility: Her powers first surfaced as a light show accompanying her singing. That was her regular use of them, assumed by fans to be a gimmick.
- My God, What Have I Done?: When Klaw, a villain literally made of living sound, made the mistake of attacking her, she fought back with her sound-absorbing powers and, to her own surprise and horror, basically ate him. (He got better.)
- Navel-Deep Neckline: Her original costume had a slit that Depending on the Artist could stretch as low as her navel.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: One whose powers have evolved the most ever since her introduction. While they're always light-and-sound-based, many of her abilities have been retconned or forgotten or modified throughout the years.
- No-Sell:
- Since she can absorb any sound and convert it into light energy, she is the bane of any being with sonic attacks. Anyone with light/photon-based powers are likewise out of luck, as she is immune to and absorbs them just as easily.
- In addiction, her half-sister's Touch of Death just doesn't work on her, which is a quite common occurrence between siblings in The 'Verse.
- Outdated Outfit: Not the one pictured above, but the page image for Fad Super. it doesn't help that she was created to cash in on the disco craze. By the time she was finally introduced, the "Disco Sucks" backlash had already come, making her instantly dated. One can only think that there was more than a little insult to Disco and having a disco tie-in character forced upon Claremont and Byrne when they introduced her in a "disco" that owed more to Moral Guardians' worst nightmares of CBGB's in New York and The Masque in Los Angeles than Studio 54.
- The Power of Rock: What? Did you really expect her music not to evolve with the times?
- Given her "sound into light" powers, she can make this literal.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The last issue's cover featured the caption "Because YOU demanded it" making it the end.
- Reimagining the Artifact: As seen on this page, many Marvel writers have tried to update Dazzler's music genres to keep her relevant.
- Resurrective Immortality: To an extent. If she were to say, die from a gunshot wound or a stabbing, she would come back to life. If you tear her to shreds the way Nimrod did it, she will not.
- The Rock Star: Executive Meddling forced her to start off as a Disco Dan (at the exact time when disco was dying out, no less!), but as time went on, became more of an '80s pop sensation, in the style of Cyndi Lauper or Sheena Easton. In the early-to-mid 90s she was all but ignored, then brought back in the late 90s as a Disco revival act, before becoming a lounge act in the early '00s and finally, a circuit club star in the modern story arc.
- Rollerblade Good: In her early appearances, and sporadically still, she is shown to be an excellent roller skater.
- Slice of Life: Her original genre.
- Special Guest: In many of the early issues, popular established Marvel heroes such as Spider-Man, the X-Men and The Avengers as well as such villains as Dr. Doom. Also, her first appearance was as a guest star in X-Men.
- Super-Cute Superpowers: There is "Dazzler: Disco Queen" whose mutant power is effectively to make shiny bright sparkling lights in time to music. In reality, her ability is turning sound into light which has staggering implications, but for the most part it's used for her disco image.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Rogue, who she had a lot of trouble forgiving for their previous fights from when Rogue served Mystique. While they did grow to have some respect for each other and learned to work together, including saving each other's lives in several fights, they never grew as close as many of the other X-Men did.
- Took a Level in Badass: She joined the X-Men thanks to being forced by circumstance, but over the course of her run with the team, she focused mainly on becoming a more capable combatant. And it showed: by the time she left the team, she was considered one of its most potentially powerful members.
- When people realized just how powerful her abilities really are, she became more badass as well. The more sound or light there is, the more energy she can charge and release, meaning enough light can make her sound powers Black Bolt-level, and enough sound can make her light powers Wave-Motion Gun-level. She's fine-tuned her light powers enough to make holograms, and the Hard Light ability means while it's extremely difficult for her, she can be the poor man's Green Lantern. At one point Galactus had her absorb the sound of an exploding solar system so she would be charged enough to retrieve something out of a black hole for him. She also gets immunity to sound or light attacks as a bonus; bad news for your average Frickin' Laser Beams-wielding opponent.
- In "What if? Infinity " she managed what Black Bolt couldn't and converted one of his screams into a beam powerful to obliterate Thanos.
- Case in point, when Emma Frost wanted to punch Black Bolt in the throat to avenge Scott, Emma didn't call Colossus or Magneto to help. She called Dazzler, who used her aforementioned Man of Kryptonite status to negate Black Bolt's sonic powers.
- Unexplained Recovery: She has died multiple times and resurrected without much of an explanation (even for Comic Book Death). This was discussed by her teammates when this occurred twice in quick succession while on Excalibur but so far nothing has come of it.
- What the Hell, Hero?: She never forgave the X-Men for welcoming Rogue into their ranks after how many times the latter tried to kill her and destroy her life while serving Mystique, and to this day relations between them tend to be rocky at best.
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: Although she lost that specific title to the Enchantress twice, she has won the title of best singer on both Earth and Asgard to Amora's frustration.
Mortis
Lois London / Mortis
Nationality: American
Species: Human mutant
First Appearance: Dazzler #21 (November, 1982)
Lois London is a mutant with powers that can drain life force from other humans or disintegrate inorganic matter. As Mortis, she was part of Selene's Inner Circle.
- Alliterative Name: Lois London
- Ascended Extra: When introduced she was only an enemy of her sister, but returned as part of Selene's Inner Circle.
- Cain and Abel: She is the evil half-sister of Dazzler.
- Touch of Death: She can generate a highly-destructive energy from her being which, through molecular transformation, can disintegrate or liquefy inorganic matter or cause living things to disperse their life-energies, either causing temporary bouts of pain and weakness or instant death.
- Woobie Destroyer Of Lives
