Profile: Polaris

Lorna Dane, Polaris
First appearance: The X-Men in 1967

Current status: occasional member of the X-Men.

Was subjected to the following acts of discrimination: when the onetime hack writer Chuck Austen was assigned to write Uncanny X-Men in 2003, he savaged her character with alarming heavy-handedness, writing her with some of the most unbearable dialect you’ve ever heard in comics. All this in order to put her at odds with the rest of the X-Men, alienate her, and even to ruin her relationship with Havok.

What’s wrong with how this was done? No realism whatsoever, just character assassination by a writer who clearly had no respect for the characters, and was only interested in money.

It’s fortunate that this has since been dropped and forgotten, but that doesn’t excuse the negligence they led to in the first place, which could have been avoided, and was one of the biggest farces in comics history.