New Mutants will introduce viewers to the superhero Dani Moonstar, aka Mirage - and here's everything you need to know about Dani in the comics. In the comics, Dani Moonstar is one of Marvel's few Native American characters. As a result, when Fox cast actor Blu Hunt (The Originals, Another Life) it spawned some complicated debates about race. Although Hunt is of Native American heritage, the comic book iteration is a dark-skinned full Cheyenne. That kind of controversy could have proved fatal for any other movie - but New Mutants has been in Development Hell for so long that it's mostly been forgotten.
One thing's for sure; Hunt has signed up for a major role. New Mutants is at least partly inspired by the classic "Demon Bear" storyline by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, and Mirage sits at the emotional center of that particular arc. That means this is one character who viewers really need to know well if they're going to make sense of New Mutants.
So here's everything you need to know about Dani Moonstar - from her first appearance in the pages of New Mutants to the present day.
Dani Moonstar was introduced as one of the most remarkable members of the New Mutants, a powerful and gifted psionic. Her powers first manifested when she received a precognitive vision of her parents being killed by a mystical Demon Bear, and she was sought out by the Hellfire Club as one of their potential recruits. Fortunately her grandfather had already reached out to Charles Xavier, and the X-Men came to the rescue. Dani was taken to Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, becoming part of the New Mutants team, and began to hone her powers. She learned that she possessed the ability to reach into the minds of others and create heartwrenching illusions that portrayed their deepest fears. In addition, she had a limited ability to communicate with and control animals.
The Demon Bear tracked Dani to Xavier's School, and attempted to kill her. The New Mutants intervened, and Magik's Soulsword was able to cut the demonic entity apart. It turned out that the creature absorbed people, rather than killing them; Magik's act freed the spirits of Dani's parents.
The early adventures of the New Mutants were often fantastical, and as a result Dani began to explore her possible mystical heritage. One of their first missions took them to Asgard, the Realm Eternal, where Dani became one of the Valkyries. Charged with ferrying the souls of the dead to Valhalla, she gained a winged horse, and learned to perceive death itself. She even proved capable of challenging Death Incarnate, battling to save a soul if she so chose. Dani's powers continued to grow, amplified after a battle with the mad scientist called the High Evolutionary, and she gained the ability to turn her illusions into solid form. She further learned to manifest a so-called "ghost spear," a dangerous weapon that she used to deadly effect against her foes.
But Hela, the Asgardian Goddess of Death, had ruthless plans of her own. She planned to take Odin's throne and become absolute ruler of Asgard; that involved corrupting the Valkyries as her agents. Dani began to go insane under the psychic strain of it all, but fortunately Doctor Strange was able to help them. The New Mutants figured out the truth, and they worked with the wolf prince Hrimhari to defeat her. But the victory came at a terrible price, with Dani losing her winged horse. She left the New Mutants, devastated.
Dani joined SHIELD, and was assigned to go undercover with a group of terrorists called the Mutant Liberation Front. SHIELD also somehow arranged for Dani to gain a new winged steed, but this horse too tragically proved to be short-lived, given Dani's work with the Mutant Liberation Front meant she wound up in conflict situations. She was ultimately extracted by X-Force, and returned to the X-Men.
Then came the darkest days in the history of the mutant race, when Scarlet Witch stripped the bulk of the world's mutants of their powers. Dani, who had settled at a teacher at Xavier's School, was one of the mutants to lose her powers. Cyclops sent her away, believing that ex-mutants would be targeted by anti-mutant forces; his worst fears were realized when a busload of ex-mutants from the school was bombed. Dani decided to continue her teaching career, though, and actually worked with Avengers Academy.
When Cyclops relocated the X-Men to San Francisco, he decided to take a chance and asked Dani back. He did so for a strategic reason, because he was aware that - for all she had lost her mutant powers - Dani had the potential to be something far more. As pressure built upon the surviving mutants, Cyclops had Dani go to Hela and reclaim the powers of a Valkyrie so she could serve as a weapon against the rogue Greek god Ares. Dani was the only member of the old Valkyries to survive the War of the Realms, although she seems to have stepped away from that role once again.
The first wave of Jonathan Hickman's X-Men relaunch includes the return of a New Mutants book, with Dani Moonstar one of the team members. Right now, though, it's unclear what her powers really are anymore; the X-Men are currently cloning people, and it's possible they've used this technique to create a duplicate Dani who has her old abilities back. If that is the case, Xavier could then have used Cerebro to transfer Dani's consciousness into this new body. But if that has indeed been done, then it's also unclear whether or not Dani still possesses mystical powers. Xavier's technique doesn't seem to acknowledge the existence of an immortal soul, and Dani's abilities as a sorceress and indeed as a Valkyrie are bound to her spirit rather than her genes and her mind. There's no reason to believe they would transfer into a duplicate.
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