Despite appearances, this woman is not doing a campus walk of shame at UW Green Bay the morning after Super Bowl XXXI. It may look like she was up all night doing Jaeger bombs and blowing rails at the Kappa Sigma Luau Daze blowout, but she is, in fact, a celestial super-being with crazy martial-arts skills. She is Mantis, the "Celestial Madonna."
Much like our own terrestrial Madonna, Mantis has undergone a staggering number of character reinventions, ranging from slutty to quasi-religious to whorish. And as with Madonna, following her convoluted backstory isn't quite worth the effort. Suffice it to say it involves dressing like it's Carnival in Rio and having lots of space sex. Hard as it is to believe given her modest clothing, Mantis spent most of the 35 years since her first appearance (in 1973's Avengers #112) as a Space Floozy. In fact, it's difficult to find panels in which she isn't rubbing her grass skirt against whoever's within reach...
The parallels between the Celestial and terrestrial Madonnas go beyond their shared love of plunging necklines and risqué antics. Both eventually found a higher calling and settled down to motherhood. In Mantis's case, this apparently involved copulating with a humanoid plant who looked like a tree stump with a bad toupee, and subsequently conceiving the Celestial Messiah. No, really.
These days Mantis works as the team psychologist for the Guardians of the Galaxy, which makes sense because shrinks are usually the most messed-up people in the room. With her greater responsibilities and the mellowing of age, she has embraced new concepts like "underwear" and "sleeves." She has also turned green, for reasons that remain unclear. Alas, while she no longer looks like the thing that popped out of the cake at Brett Favre's birthday party, she has apparently enlisted in Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation...
As befits an aging free spirit, she still has a leather pouch where she keeps her hash pipe and some assorted crystals while yelling new-agey platitudes at depressed superheroes. Because you can take the girl out of the shredded skirt...
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