Who is Mantis?

God, Mantis. I thought it was pretty mean in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 when Drax was making fun of her looks and generally being terrible to her. Mantis wasn’t bad in the movie but in the comic, something about her always annoyed me.

Mantis first appeared in the Avengers comics of the ‘70s. In contrast with the movies, she’s not an alien. The daughter of criminal Libra (of the Zodiac gang), she is a young woman raised in Vietnam among an alien Kree sect. She is highly skilled at physical fighting and has limited empathic powers. She is very humble and refers to herself as “this one” instead of “I.”

The big storyline for Mantis was Celestial Madonna, involving the search for the woman who would mate with an alien Cotati to birth the Celestial Messiah. What bothered me about this was the other two candidates for Celestial Madonna were the Scarlet Witch and Moondragon, who I thought were much more interesting. The Scarlet Witch is a powerful reality warper, longtime Avenger and daughter of Magneto. Moondragon is an arrogant telepath who has been a hero and anti-hero, the Earth-born daughter of Drax who was raised on the moon Titan.

Then Mantis is just kind of—eh. We keep hearing about how she’s the perfect woman and what not but the comics more told us this than showed us. She just didn’t appeal to me. One amusing wrinkle to her story was that she was flirting with the Vision, which endlessly pissed off the Scarlet Witch. Celestial Madonna wasn’t all that bad a story, since it offered the first in-depth look at the Vision’s origin, and some other stuff. But the great promise of Mantis as a character never really did it for me. (They later retconned that the Scarlet Witch had much more potential for power and was more important to the multiverse than Mantis.)

The whole story ended with the time lord Immortus performing a double wedding: the Vision married the Scarlet Witch and Mantis married the Swordsman, a recently deceased Avenger whose body was reanimated by an alien Cotati. In conclusion, The Seventies.