Profile: Jubilee

Jubilee

First appearance: Uncanny X-Men #244, May 1989
Real name: Jubilation Lee
Creators: Chris Claremont, Marc Silvestri

History: Jubilee was a teenage girl of Chinese descent, daughter of wealthy immigrant parents who'd lived in Beverly Hills, California, who were both murdered by mafia hitmen, and lost her family fortune in the process. She wound up homeless after fleeing from an orphanage, and survived by hiding out an a shopping mall, where she even tried to make money panhandling, or more specifically, by using the mutant power she discovered she had (pyrotechnic light beams) to entertain the patrons, while simultaneously evading mall security that wanted to throw her out. Later, she wound up being teleported to Australia with the X-Men in the Siege Perilous affair, and befriended Wolverine, who made her into a team member and a protege of his. In 1994, she became a cast member of the Generation X spinoff series.

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: in the House of M crossover of 2005, already notorious enough for its "no more mutants" alterations that were laughable, she loses her powers along with a number of other characters. Then, in Marvel's 2010 crossover Curse of the Mutants, in X-Men's third volume, she was affected with vampirism, and reduced to the sidelines for a time. It was only around 2018 that she was written being cured of vampirism and her mutant powers restored.

What's wrong with how this was done? The slew of crossovers that began with Avengers: Disassembled and spiraled into shoddiness was some of the most inorganic productions that could've gone on under Joe Quesada, whose staff really seemed to go out of control with such stuff after Bill Jemas left the publisher. And Jubilee was clearly one of the biggest victims of the pointless directions taken, right down to the repellent path with turning her into a vampire, something which also happened to Looker from Outsiders at least a decade prior.

Was there anything good to come of this? Of course when the writers finally reversed the vampire theme in a 2nd volume of Generation X in the past decade, that was a good thing. But it was far too late to care what would come next, since artistic quality had been ruined even long before. So if Jubilee was boosted to a more adult age by that time, even that was late in coming.

Regarding her original outfit with a trechcoat and shorts, I did think that was silly, even if it was meant as an allusion to Robin's costume in Batman comics. But aside from that Marvel's artists did change some of it a few years later and draw her with longer hair, it was still the least of the problems to come, which creator Chris Claremont clearly doesn't care about today, seeing how he'd never taken issue with the mistakes made with the characters he created in the years after he stopped writing X-Men.