Alan Davis wrote:I have no idea exactly why Betsy/Psylocke was changed. Her transformation into an oriental (No one at Marvel was ever able to give a definite ethnicity) Elektra clone removed any connection to her original incarnation so she may as well have been a totally new character. In Captain Britain, Betsy was established as the perhaps cliché British Lady heroine whose poise, frills and decorum hid a capable and dangerous ‘strong’ female— not unlike Purdey in the New Avengers TV series or Lady Penelope in Thunderbirds. Her costume and attitude in X-men was supposed to play to that conceit and to be a deliberately uncomfortable fit. Sadly, the idea of character diversity has been lost to homogenization and the notion all characters must be sexy or ‘kewl’.
Alan
I think that initially the story Chris Claremont came up with of Betsy being given the opportunity to become the 'warrior' she had maybe often wanted the chance to be in X-Men was fair enough, as a concept. It's a classic 'be careful what you wish for, little girl' kind of scenario.
As with all of the X-Men who had been through changes as a result of crossing through the Siege Perilous it was quite genuinely interesting to see these alternate takes on the characters.
I think what I object to is that, as with all those other characters, the change was never meant to permanent. All the other X-Men eventually returned to some semblance of normal, but Betsy did not. Whether it was Jim Lee's redesign just being popular, or his insistence she stayed that way, I honestly couldn't say. But it does seem odd that she is the only X-Man to have suffered a permanent change.
And then there was the whole Kwannon/Revanche complication, which is a whole other can of worms. The 'homogenization' as you put it was definitely something which put me off a lot of characters in the 90s.
I understand that when Chris Claremont recently brought Psylocke back from the dead he had wanted to do that in her British body, but the editors had said no. As you were working with Chris around that time you might know more than us as to how much truth there was in that rumour.
Either way I think it's very sad. I personally think that the ninja vibe Psylocke has very much run its course. To me it's stuck in a creative rut these days, and I personally think a return to her original body would have been both far more interesting creatively, and also given plenty more options for future development of the character.
