Casting Call: Magik

Illyana Rasputin is a wonderful character that I remember from The New Mutants way back when.

She's Colossus' younger sister, and Kitty Pryde's best friend.

She is a mutant, but everything beyond that is whacked-up and sideways.

Her born ability is teleportation, but unlike Nightcrawler, her ability works in two steps. First she teleports to a place known as Limbo, and from there goes on to her final destination.

But Limbo isn't just a place of nothing - it's full of creatures easily described as "demons".

Belasco, the ruler of Limbo, sensed the power within Illyana and basically kidnapped her into Limbo to train her as an apprentice in the mystical arts of the realm.

By the way - Belasco took her when she was a child, around 10 or so.

She spent the next 7 years in Limbo living among Belasco and the creatures before eventually returning to Earth-616...only to learn that time moved differently in Limbo, and the teenager Illyana had only been gone for less than a year.

She ended up ruler of Limbo, but her time there corrupted part of her soul.

As a New Mutant, she worked on gaining control of her demonic side and control over her teleportation ability (which can move her through time as well as space) with the use of her Soulsword - the manifestation of her magical strength that appears when she needs it (along with armor, but that's another story).

Now, there's a show Mrs. Adorkification and I have been watching on Netflix recently called Lost Girl...

...about a succubus trying to find her way between the worlds of humans and fae - which is what they call everything from vampires to demons to will-o-the-wisps to leprechauns etc.

Bo is the main character - the succubus - but her partner/sidekick/human is Kenzi (the woman second from the right in the pic above), basically a gypsy/thief of Russian descent that winds up with Bo, played by Ksenia Solo.

Now, you could pick any episode you want to prove my point, but it was the Baba Yaga episode from Season 2 that clinched it for me. You may recognize Solo from an episode of Nikita, or her part in Natalie Portman's Black Swan, but Solo would be an excellent Ilyanna.

Of course, now we'd have to talk about how Magik would appear on screen.

Assuming that The New Mutants are among the characters FOX has snatched up for the forseeable future, my hope is that she'll appear in the X-Men: Days of Future Past sequel as the full-on Darkchylde version, before appearing at the end as a young girl.

I would love for the New Mutants to be their own spin-off franchise, but it would have to be the originals, Cannonball, Sunspot, Wolfsbane, Karma and Mirage...with Magik joining later....

...played by Solo, of course.