PSYLOCKE

For thirty years of publication, nobody — including most of her writers — knew that Kwannon had been a mother. Fallen Angels #1 (2019), by Bryan Hill and Szymon Kudranski, finally opened the sealed file: as a young trainee of the Hand, long before any body-swapping entered her life, Kwannon fell in love and had a baby girl.

The Hand does not do maternity leave. Her masters treated the child as a crack in their weapon, so they murdered the girl’s father and took the newborn away, telling Kwannon nothing she could use to find her. She carried the loss in silence for years — through death, resurrection and a borrowed name — and told no one, reasoning that a secret daughter was a safe daughter.

The silence ended on Krakoa, when a psychic summons gave Kwannon a target and a reason to go looking at last. What she could not know was that the trail had already gone cold in the worst way: the girl had surfaced in Tokyo, fallen under the sway of the very force Kwannon was hunting, and died there in the opening movements of Fallen Angels #1 — close enough to reach, years too late to save. Kwannon learned she had been a mother and a mourner in the same season.