New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Dazzler!

Let’s be honest – while I have the excuse of creating this guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis to fill in one more missing link on the Fresh Start era page (for her new one-shot, out tomorrow!), we all knew I did it just because I love…

Dazzler – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I’ve always loved Dazzler, purely because she was the Madonna of the Marvel Universe back when I was originally a reader (and a Madonna fan) back in the early 90s. However, her run on Uncanny X-Men by Claremont was much too expensive for me to buy as back issues (and, for some reason I never sought out her 1980 series as a lot at a convention).

As with all of my guides for individual heroes who have not anchored their own titles for long, putting this page together was punishing. It would be easy to simply link to Dazzler’s solo stories, or even to list all of her guest appearances in order.

Of course, I had to do more than that. I browsed nearly every Dazzler appearance outside of her solo series to figure out which were the most important!

Having had that look back at Dazzler’s story chronology at Marvel, it’s remarkable how little development she has received after the initial issues of Claremont adding her to the team in 1986. She steps through the Siege Perilous in 1989 into 17 years of story limbo which is handwaved away as her leading a mostly-unseen revolution on Mojoworld. (Even when we do see it, it frequently doesn’t make much sense).

Luckily, it seems like almost the entirety of Marvel’s modern writers think Dazzler is just as cool as I do, as she’s made a steady stream of canon appearances in the past decade after Claremont was through with her revival in New Excalibur. She was a cameo queen in Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men, unexpectedly lead a team in Pak’s X-Treme X-Men, and became an agent of SHIELD under Bendis in Marvel Now.

Dazzler was meant to have a Marvel Legacy one-shot that extended her classic series to issue #43, but instead she’s getting a random one-shot today called “Dazzler: X-Song.” It was probably held back until now to tease her upcoming appearance in Matthew Rosenberg’s Astonishing X-Men, starting with issue #13 in July.

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