The Comic Panel That Inspired Deadpool 3’s Nastiest Scenes
Deadpool & Wolverine is a film filled with many shocking moments, most of them courtesy of our titular heroes. However, the nastiest scenes were usually courtesy of the supervillain Cassandra Nova, whose signature move was plucking information out of people’s minds (quite literally) by using her hand. Like so much in the film, this attack was a callback to the comics…specifically, a callback to New X-Men #115, the Grant Morrison comic that first hinted at how scary Cassandra Nova could be.
The Hand Of Cassandra Nova
Aside from the fact that Cassandra Nova’s hand attack looks just as icky in a comic as it does onscreen, one of the first things you’ll notice is that the villain looks much older in these panels. That’s because the Deadpool & Wolverine movie aged her down considerably from her original appearance, with Deadpool himself jokingly calling her a Gen Z villain. In the comics, she always presents as an older woman, though her tendency to hop into other bodies (something not seen in the film) rendered her initial appearance mostly moot.
A Hands On Villain
While the movie mercifully left out all the granular details about the villain’s bizarre origin, it preserved the gist of her character…namely, that she is Charles Xavier’s evil sister. Like her brother, she has phenomenal telepathic power, but the movie portrays Cassandra Nova as needing to use her hand to make this power work. In short, she reaches her hand into people’s bodies as a way of probing their minds, and she does it so regularly that Pyro later chides her for not simply asking for the information she wants.
Amazingly, The Film Toned Down Her Powers
In the comics, Cassandra Nova was perfectly capable of reading people’s minds without using her creepy hand technique or otherwise making physical contact. In fact, she demonstrates this with her comic book victim: this is Donald Trask, a mild-mannered dentist and the nephew of Bolivar Trask, the man who invented the Sentinels. She needs his voice command to unleash some Sentinels to kill all the mutants on Genosha, which is the comic event that inspired a similar attack in X-Men ‘97.
Shortly before Casandra Nova uses her hand to brutally kill Trask, she reads his mind and discusses his fantasies of keeping “mutant women and children as slaves” in his basement. She then reveals that after 10 hours in his presence, she was able to copy all of the three billion letters of his particular DNA sequence. After that, she no longer needs him to control the Sentinels and kills the man, all while comparing him to a steak and herself to a gourmet.
Go Read New X-Men
Incidentally, this is as good a place as any to remind everyone that Grant Morrison’s New X-Men is a “must-read” for Marvel fans. It’s a great story unto itself, but these back issues are also worth reading because of how much this story continues to influence modern Marvel movies and TV shows. Morrison’s awesome writing has inspired major events in X-Men ‘97 and given us the Big Bad of Deadpool & Wolverine, so reading these old issues can give you new insight into the best of Marvel’s recent output.
Deapdool & Wolverine Made The Most Of Its Bonkers Villain
In case you’re wondering, Cassandra Nova doesn’t really do that hand attack often in the comics because, again, she doesn’t need physical contact for her telepathic powers. Still, we’re glad that Deadpool & Wolverine made ample use of this viscerally nasty attack. It was enough to make us wonder…would her hands in our heads be enough to finally help us forget how bad Quantumania was?
