Fictional Obituary: Madelyne Pryor, Marvel Comics (Comic spoilers: Inferno)

Fictional Obituary: Madelyne Pryor, Marvel Comics (Comic spoilers: Inferno) Madelyne Pryor, the pilot and former associate of the X-Men who became known as the Goblin Queen, died during the final confrontation of the Inferno crisis in New York. Her death followed a psychic confrontation with Jean Grey. Her young son, Nathan Christopher, survived and was recovered by his father, Scott Summers. Pryor first became known to the Summers family while working as a cargo pilot in Alaska. She was capable, outspoken and accustomed to managing practical problems. Her resemblance to Jean Grey, whom Scott believed dead, became an immediate complication in their relationship. Madelyne objected to being treated as someone else's replacement and wanted Scott to recognize the person standing in front of him. They married and attempted to build a family life. The arrival of their son brought responsibilities that often competed with Scott's attachment to the X-Men. When he learned that Jean was alive, he left Alaska. Madelyne was left with a child, an increasingly uncertain marriage and questions she could not make him answer. Further violence followed. The Marauders attacked her and took Nathan. Madelyne survived, but her recovery took place without her son and without knowing where he had been taken. The X-Men became her protection and, for a time, the people with whom she could begin putting together a life again. She accompanied them through the crisis in Dallas and shared in the sacrifice that stopped the Adversary. After Roma restored the group, Madelyne joined their hidden life in Australia. She helped operate the team's technology and communications while continuing to search for information about Nathan. Before the world believed her dead in Dallas, she had used her opportunity to speak publicly to ask Scott to find their child. Her later relationship with Alex Summers grew out of the life she was sharing with the X-Men. It also became entangled in the anger and isolation that demons exploited as she moved toward the role of Goblin Queen. During Inferno, she learned that Mister Sinister had created her from Jean Grey's genetic material, supplied a false personal history and arranged circumstances intended to bring her together with Scott. Nathan's birth had been the objective of a plan in which she had never been allowed an informed choice. The discovery did not erase the life she had experienced. Her marriage, motherhood, work and friendships had been real experiences for her, even where other people had manipulated their beginnings. It did, however, place much of what she believed about herself under a devastating new light. As the Goblin Queen, Madelyne became a participant in the violence engulfing New York. Her alliance with demonic forces endangered the city and her own son. The people who had tried to protect her were forced to oppose her. Her suffering and exploitation were part of that history, alongside the harm she chose to inflict. The confrontation ended after Scott rescued Nathan and Madelyne attempted to draw Jean into her own death through their psychic connection. Jean survived. Madelyne did not. She is survived by Nathan Christopher. Scott, Alex and the X-Men are left with memories of a woman whose place in their lives cannot be reduced to the circumstances of her creation or the title she held at the end. Before the Goblin Queen, they knew a pilot who could speak her mind, a mother searching for her child and a companion who had stood beside them in Dallas. Those memories remain part of the record of Madelyne Pryor's life, together with the catastrophe in which it ended.