Retro Review

Some characters are created to die. Their creators never intend them to live on past a certain point in the story: once they serve their dramatic purpose, they exit the stage, generally never to return. In the first two posts in this series, I dealt with characters dying to provide motivation to the hero, but there are of course other reasons for characters to die soon after being introduced, other roles for those who are about to die to play.

The rest of this post contains spoilers for the Phalanx Covenant: Generation Next storyline running through Uncanny X-Men #316 and 317, and X-Men #36 and 37.

(Three of the covers to the Phalanx Covenant: Generation Next cross-over event)

The original Blink was created by Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira as part of the Phalanx Convenant cross-over event running through Marvel’s mutant titles in 1994. She is one of the young mutants captured by the Phalanx to be experimented on. Only barely able to control her teleportation powers, she is afraid of them, refusing to use them. However, she comes through in the end, heroically sacrificing herself to defeat the villain and allow the other young mutants to escape.

Not only does her sacrifice mean the others survive, but her death acts as a lesson, showing the younger characters the dangerous reality they face as mutants, and the older characters that there is a need to train the new generation: if Blink had been able to control her powers, she wouldn’t have died. It’s a well-handled story. It is actually a shame that she dies: her look and back story seemed interesting, so she didn’t feel like she was supposed to die, and I found myself rooting for her by the end, hoping she’d escape. 

 As a character created to die, the original Blink served her dramatic purpose well, and stands as a good example of heroic sacrifice done right. The only shame in the handling of her death is the lack of reference to it in the Generation X book that spun out of the Phalanx Covenant. Her death should be a defining moment for the other characters, but she isn’t referred to by any of them in the first issue. The only mention of her is in a caption towards the end of that story. However, that doesn’t detract from the original story, it only shows editorial oversight between the books of the X-Men line.

 Because she was a well-done visually interesting character, some readers called for her return, but the creators thankfully resisted the temptation to reveal that she had actually survived, which would have cheapened the original story. Instead, an alternate reality version of Blink was used in the Age of Apocalypse cross-over event the following year, and she continued to prove so popular that she was included in the roster for the reality-hopping team in Exiles some time later, and appeared there for most of the run of the first volume.

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