Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Five Peculiar Mutant Powers
by Travis Hedge Coke
Quentin Quire
While he more often now wields a brightly colored psychic shotgun, Quentin Quire’s most interesting mutation is his see-thru mind. Other psychics, other telepaths cannot perceive clearly Quire’s thoughts, a power he can extend to temporarily render other minds as flickeringly perceptible as a Predator in the jungle. His thoughts are as transparent, and difficult to recognize, as a vast and clean window.
Combined with his mutant ability to be extremely convincing, this see-thru mind allows him a capacity for manipulation and an escape from consequence difficult to reckon with.
Storm
Storm’s ability to control weather is beloved by her fans it has been criticized even by the likes Stan Lee, with respect to its unlikeliness as a physiological mutation. What’s secreting organ or twinging muscle can redirect the rain?
Since the extrapolations in a 1993 X-Men Unlimited issue, building on earlier seeming incongruities her abilities, I have thought of storms powers not in terms of weather control. Her mutation maybe a defense against exposure to the atmosphere.
Storm can, at will, generate rain storms, direct lightning, and sublimate blizzards. However, reflexively, her mutation raises her body temperature when she is faced with extreme cold, generates erratic, isolating weather, when she is depressed or afraid, and seemingly provides her a natural affinity to the perception and manipulation of the forces known in the Marvel Universe as magic and cosmic.
Wolverine
Not Wolverine’s healing factor or claws. His brittle hair.
Two notable things about Wolverine’s hair is that it has those two points that stick up sometimes very high, and that it never grows very long. Which he is healing ability, rapid growth abilities, in mind, why does his hair never grow down his back?
Wolverine has mutant hair. His hair is clearly stiff enough to rise up into those dramatic points, but like diamonds, the hardness of his hair may be responsible for its common breakage.
Colossus
At a glance, Colossus is a man who is skin turns into metal and he gets super strong.
With more familiarity, wee see that Colossus’ entire body is transfigured into organic metal, the individual parts of which, are not reducible to any correlation with specific body parts, except for their placement at the time he returns to his carbon based normative organic form.
Organic metal does not seem to show wear or stress and the bending or flexing necessary to the mobility we witness and Colossus. Injuries received in his normative, fleshy form, are not carried over to his organic metal body, while injuries to his organic metal body are carried over to his normative body.
Meggan
Paul Cornell nailed it down into words, but it had been implicit down through writers and artists, Chris Claremont to Alan Davis: Meggan’s power is not flight, or shape-changing, or light shows, or physical strength.
Meggan’s superpower is empathy.
Not empathic, the emo of telepathy, but empathetic. She accommodates and connects with people. What text with in a person, what she intuitively understands and sympathizes with, what she can physically represent, may not be agreeable to the person or persons with whom she is empathizing, but it is generated from them.
She is as telepathic sister-in-law, Betsy, physically as strong as her husband, Brian, as much a reality manipulator was her brother-in-law, Jamie. She hardly notices and she hardly cares. They may be useful in a superhero moment, or helping busted lighthouse, but pale in comparison, as does her physical shapeshifting, to what her mutant empathy can do.