Flashback Friday: Mystique's Movie Design

Each Friday, I take one of the entries from my old Super Posts and expand it into its own featured article.

This week: Mystique's movie design!

It can't be understated how big the first X-Men movie was in 2000. Avengers: Endgame becoming the top-grossing movie of all time can be traced directly back to the success of this movie. It was certainly the most important Marvel adaptation at the time, and Marvel - generally not one to have major canon immigrants at the time - bent over backwards to make the comics better reflect the movies.

As I'm sure you know, X-Men was much different from the comics of the time. The team was smaller and wore black leather. Xavier's was an actual school. The Brotherhood was made of some of the team's biggest villains (and Toad), and nearly all of them had a less human appearance than normal. The changes go on and on. Mystique in particular was naked with small spikes all over her skin. The rationale for her nakedness was that, if she morphed clothes, she'd be naked regardless (although let's be honest: they just wanted Rebecca Romijn to be naked); the textured skin was never explained.

But that's not how Mystique appeared in the comics. From her first appearance in Ms. Marvel #18 (April 1978), she's had more or less the same iconic look.

In 2001, Marvel started publishing a miniseries called X-Men Forever, ostensibly to build on the success of Avengers Forever. Like that series, this one would travel through the X-Men's history, but that's where the similarities end. While Avengers Forever's ultimate goal was to explain away some continuity bugs, the goal of X-Men Forever was simply to make the X-Men more like the comics. And that is how, in issue 6 (April 2001), Mystique came to look like this:

To say the change didn't last would be putting it lightly. It might as well have not happened at all. Her next published appearance that wasn't a flashback or morphed was a year later in Uncanny X-Men #404 (April 2002). She looks normal.

In fact, the only other appearance I can find of Mystique's movie form is in X-Treme X-Men #32 (October 2003), when a mutant named Revenant make Rogue think she's turning into Mystique.

And that's not even really Mystique. But that's for the best, because it's not a great design. I think the movies have realized that too, because over time, her skin has gotten smoother and smoother and she's started wearing clothes even when unmorphed.