One of the purposes of the X-Men over the years has been to show they’re a diverse group. Mutants can come from anywhere, and they don’t always have to be good or noble. For every Russian farmboy, German circus performer, or African goddess, there was some mutant who came from the wrong side of the tracks and was trying to make the world a better place anyway, the only way the person knew how.
That brings us to Stacy-X. She was a prostitute.
Stacy, real name Miranda Leevald, had snake-like skin and could emit pheromones that could cause a person to feel physical pleasure or pain depending on her mood. She had some other basic abilities as well along those lines, like the ability to sense when someone wanted to jump someone else’s bones, but basically it was the pheromones.
Oh, she also managed to fight Wolverine to a standstill once.
Stacy was introduced as a member of a brothel staffed entirely by mutants, the X-Ranch. She ended up joining the X-Men after your standard mutant-haters, the Church of Humanity, wiped the rest of the brothel out, and she wanted some revenge. Naturally.
Now, as much as a character like Stacy could be, well, abused as your prototypical sexy stereotype, I think it’s worth noting that original creator Joe Casey really seemed to want to make Stacy, well, not that. Despite a barely-there costume, she wasn’t one for being flirty or silly or whatnot. Stacy was written as tough, someone who grew up on the streets and learned to survive by any means necessary. I got the impression that Casey really wanted to make Stacy a reliable member of the team, maybe something of a bad girl, but not the kind you’d be led to think of as a bad girl.
It’s not as if she was even the first X-Man with a criminal record or a background implying poverty or anything. There have been plenty of mutants toughened by circumstances or whatnot. Whether or not Uncanny X-Men is the right comic to use to explore issues involving human sex trafficking or the like is a debatable topic, but at the time, it was clear Casey wanted to make her a character who came from a bad background and was trying to make good. Maybe he was trying too hard, but he was trying all the same.
Of course, that means when Casey left the book and it was taken over by Chuck Austen, a writer who was not, shall we say, regarded fondly by the readers, she didn’t last long.
Austen, I noticed at the time, could not go one issue of X-Men without making a sex reference. Someone would always say something about mutants getting freaky. As such, while Casey was working out a love triangle between Stacy, Archangel, and Husk, Austen figured he’d end it with all the subtlety that he was known for.
By that, I mean he wrote Stacy out of the book by having her make a videotape for Archangel where she does some naked jumprope…more or less the opposite of the sort of character Casey had been writing her as.
Once she was gone, Stacy was among the depowered mutants who joined a New Warriors team made up entirely of depowered mutants using stolen supervillain tech to fight evil. Then she more or less disappeared again.
I’m sure someone could do something with her, but I couldn’t say what without causing problems. There’s a reason characters like Stacy-X disappear, no matter how well-meaning the original concept.
Gabbing Geek 