The White Queen
My favorite comic book series as a kid was The Uncanny X-Men. I was too young for the Byrne era, but I was there for Rick Leonardi, Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee. Chris Claremont’s writing was so convoluted that half the fun was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on from issue to issue. The first time The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants showed up? I had no idea who they were, but Claremont wrote the story as if everyone knew who they were — I think that was kind of what made the book so interesting. Reading it was like joining a club and the longer you stuck with it, the higher you rose in the ranks. Long time readers knew the Brotherhood, and that’s all that mattered. Me? I just had to catch up.
And it wasn’t too difficult to find the motivation — the Brotherhood’s leader was a character called The White Queen. A cold, evil woman named Emma Frost who had the body of a supermodel and a costume that looked like it had been picked off the rack at Fredericks of Hollywood. To a pre-teen boy? The most terrifying supervillain imaginable — either she’d kill you or kiss you and at that age both prospects seemed pretty frightening.