MADELYNE PRYOR

When Madelyne Pryor first appears in Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 #168 (1983), she is not a mystery woman washed up in the X-Men's orbit. She is a working charter and cargo pilot in Alaska, employed by the flight company run by Scott Summers's grandparents, Philip and Deborah Summers — which is why, when Scott flies home to Anchorage for a family reunion, the pilot sent to collect the Summers clan at the airfield is her.

The introduction is staged as pure small-world comedy that curdles on sight. Madelyne walks up in her fur-collared flight jacket, name patch on her chest, hand out — and Scott, Alex and their father Christopher all freeze, because the family pilot has the face and voice of Jean Grey, dead since the Dark Phoenix's end on the Moon. Scott's first words to his future wife are not a greeting at all: he blurts that it cannot be her, while she is simply trying to welcome the Summerses to Alaska.

Read with hindsight, the job is the saddest part of her design. Mr. Sinister's clone was placed, or drifted, into the one workplace in the world guaranteed to put her in front of Cyclops — an ordinary pilot's job with his own family's airline, doing honest work she was genuinely good at, on the exact runway where her engineered life was always going to begin.