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Featuring the following heroine!
Cerise
by Ray Schaff
First appearance:
Excalibur 46 in full
space-armor; she unmasked
in Excalibur 47 and then thrice
introduced herself with her
resume.
Favorite quote: "No. I
emerged from the Source
as I am. Kitty, are you still a children?" (Excalibur 63. Shadowcat tries explaining the alien (to Cerise) concept of human growth and kinda winds up regretting it.)
Team affiliation: Cerise was a bored native of the planet Shaskofrugnon, a "Warrior of the Ghrand Jhar [and] Genestock of Subruki, Zarstock and Kuli Ka" who wound up crash-materializing in the basement of Excalibur's lighthouse. She soon joined the British super-team in their fight against Necrom, proving to be a good team player and a soulmate for Nightcrawler. Considering that she was stranded on a planet which then had less than 2% chance of surviving the next 3 or 4 days, she handled herself rather well.
Powers: Cerise can "generate malleable energy fields of coherent light force that obey [her] will," that is, she produces versatile red force-fields as armor, bubbles, funnels, shields, swords, etc; she once carried an entire Sentinel with a dozen passengers inside across the Atlantic to New York! She can also project force blasts, fly unaided, and hold her breath for six or seven minutes. (Just ask Herr Wagner about how long she can go without breathing!) Cerise's gloves contain scanners that can detect specific life forms, temporal distortions, and other energy patterns.
Favorite storyline: Excalibur 41-52, 54-56, and 61-67. Great stuff that explains things like the Cross-Time Caper, the "Possession" Special Edition, the Courtney Ross mystery, Phoenix and Nightcrawler's powers and how to improve life in the Days of Future Past (for now -- so to speak). Cerise herself was a valiant fighter learning about Earth and love with little of that cliched extraterrestrial confusion. How can you not smile when she first met Nightcrawler, Kylun, Lockheed and the Technet, where she was the most human-looking creature in the room!
Least favorite storyline: Sitcom-style alien culture shock can stop a story cold; issues 59-60 found
Cerise eating lipstick before seeing what she called a "most touching, tragic scenario" which was,
of course, a comic opera. (Filling out this fill-in were some goofy goings-on with Brian Braddock as,
Lord help me, Jungle Man of Wakanda.) After Excalibur 67, the character was torched. Cerise was
suddenly an ex-soldier of the Shi'ar empire who programmed a spaceship to plunge into a star with
all onboard rather than tell the proper authorities about her commander's genocidal attitude. She hadn't
been on a barren prison planet five minutes before she killed a female version of the Imperial Guard's
Fang right in front of her Excalibur teammates, who had come to rescue her (Excalibur 68-70). She is
now serving her life sentence working for Empress Lilandra by seeking out those who commit atrocities
in the name of the Shi'ar.
Future for the character: Not good for either Cerise or Excalibur, I'm afraid. The cross between mystic mystery-science and good-hearted craziness that was Excalibur has been jettisoned, especially since Marvel got all caught up in the bigotry that is the all-too-perfectly-titled Zero Tolerance. There seems no hope of any return to previous ways. Even poor Nightcrawler seems to have had a nervous breakdown and now sports a pair of swords and a militia-style crew cut. Ugh.
