Popverse's top stories of the day

• My (pseudo) apology to My Dress-Up Darling
• The Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont has come out of retirement for Stranger Things' final Netflix season
• Why both Louise Simonson and Chris Claremont "weren't sure" Marvel's New Mutants was a good idea

Marvel’s From the Ashes relaunch of its X-Men comic book line has drawn praise for focusing on some unexpected characters and putting them in unexpected places — but there’s one fan-favorite character that people shouldn’t be expecting to see that much of any time soon, because the editor in charge of the line feels she might be a bit too messy.

“I will say that poor old Madeline Pryor is a bit of a mess of a character, one whose entire backstory and history has been revised to the point where her existence doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense,” Brevoort wrote in the latest edition of his Substack newsletter. He’s not wrong; the character was originally introduced as a new love interest for Scott Summers (Cyclops) who looked like the then-deceased Jean Grey… only to later be retconned into a literal clone of Jean Grey upon her revival. Oh, and she also became an actual demon around that time as well, and has since been killed herself (and brought back to life), because why not?

“The X-Men ‘97 show did a much better job with her, largely by knowing where they were going from the start and so simplifying her background in that series,” Brevoort continued. Pryor is a big part of the show’s first season, but her storyline is significantly re-written and simplified with a defined end-point clearly in place from the start.

In comics, however, Brevoort argued that Pryor is “one of a number of X-characters whose history is messy, and it’s difficult to truly get a grasp on who she is and what she wants, at least consistently. Until and unless somebody cracks that, she’s likely going to mostly be sidelined. I don’t want to field a character just because they’ve appeared in a bunch of comics previously.”

Bad news, Madeline fans — unless, of course, this is all a misdirect and there’s a writer out there who has already cracked things, and is working on bringing the character back in secret right now…

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• Which Secret Wars comic the Russos are basing Avengers 6 off of
• How Marvel Studios is now working "much more closely" to sell Marvel comics
• Where Marvel sees its future audience (and it's not at Marvel, yet!)
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Marvel's accidental closure on the Kang storyline
• Phil Coulson is the heart of the MCU (and it's time it starts beating again)
• Captain America: Brave New World provides an unexpected punchline to a Marvel Studios joke Kevin Feige made in 2014.
• Robert Downey Jr. is entering his villain era