Aside from having the best name ever, Moondragon is a very cool Marvel hero with a fair number of appearances, who yet remains a slightly-obscure character. Here’s how Wikipedia introduces her: “A vastly powerful telepath, master martial artist, minor telekinetic, and highly skilled geneticist, Moondragon’s most notable characteristics are her shaved head, superiority complex, and achieving excellence in virtually every area of human accomplishment.” Well yeah, if I’d achieved excellence in every area and was a universe-class telepath, I think I’d have a superiority complex too! It’s especially cool for a female character, though. While telepathy is something of a female-coded superpower, “being kind of a jerk” is usually reserved for male characters.
Moondragon generally appears in sci-fi storylines, sometimes as a quasi-villain. I know her from the absolutely amazing Annihilation miniseries and what followed on from that, including the Guardians of the Galaxy series that sold me on the team long before the movie came out. But this isn’t a GotG post, although she was an unofficial member during that series!
Moondragon is openly bisexual and an actively sexual person with a long list of ex-love-interests. In the books I’ve read, she’s in a pretty intense committed relationship with Phyla-Vell, aka Quasar aka Captain Marvel aka Martyr, the daughter of the original Captain Marvel (but no relation to the current Captain Marvel who will be getting her own movie soon. I’m sorry, I know it’s confusing).
Recommended Reading:
This is longer than most of my recommended readings, but it lists that whole sequence I mentioned, to the best of my ability. These are some of my very favorite books, partly because of Moondragon and mostly just because they are incredible in every way! You could probably start at the Guardians of the Galaxy entries if you wanted, but that team formed in the aftermath of Annihilation, and I really recommend reading them all in order, so I’ve included the Nova series… All this stuff is just so awesome, you don’t even know.
- Annihilation (Vol. 1: 9780785129011, Vol. 2: 9780785129028, Vol. 3: 9780785129035)
- Annihilation: Conquest (Vol. 1: 9780785127833, Vol. 2:9780785127178)
- I recommend reading Nova along with it. Vol. 1: 9780785126317.and so on. The first two volumes at least, as they kind of bridge Annihilation and GotG.
- Guardians of the Galaxy. Vol. 1: Legacy by Dan Abnett (9780785133384), and so on through the Abnett series. There’s also an omnibus available that’ll be cheaper!
- And if you’re still reading after that but can’t figure out what comes next, let me know, I’ll figure out what it was…
Hannah Reads Books 
I read the Guardians series for the movie LitFlix, so I got some Moondragon there 😀 However, you’re now making me want to go back and read Annihilation… Which I learned a bit about during Infinity…
Too many comics!!!
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And the more you read, the more you realize you WANT to read… 🙂
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totally changing my name to Moondragon. it’s so, everything!
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Not if I change mine first! 😛
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Annnnnnd, more on the TBR. Though she sounds awesome. Even though when I first saw her, she looked like Xavier and Ororo had a kid between them. (What is with the super strong telepaths going bald?)
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Ha! I have no idea about the bald thing. (Although I slightly resent Wikipedia putting that FIRST in her very-impressive list of distinguishing characteristics… 😉 )
She’s actually Drax’s daughter in some convoluted way, I believe.
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Cool name! Why is it that Marvel has most of its sex-positive female characters in the sci-fi stories, I wonder? I mean, can we take a moment to remember Gamora ****ing Tony Stark into oblivion?… XD
@TarkabarkaHolgy from
Multicolored Diary – Epics from A to Z
MopDog – 26 Ways to Die in Medieval Hungary
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XD Maybe it’s an alien thing? They think people will respond better if it’s hot aliens who have a “reason” to be sexually assertive, instead of human women who would just be seen as “slutty”? I’d need a larger sample size to draw conclusions.
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It would be worth a research project 😀 And also the thing about telepathy being female coded. Why are women supposed to just know what you are thinking?… 😀
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I’ll add it to my mega-list of projects to do, lol.
I’m sure others have written about the female character/telepathy connection. That or precognition, that sort of thing… “soft” powers that have to do with emotions and sensitivity, and also manipulation. Women get a lot of shapeshifting and pheremone-based types of powers.
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