What’s Cassandra Nova Done in the Comics Since?

Although Cassandra was defeated and, for all intents and purposes, “dead,” no one ever really stays dead in comics. She’s only re-appeared a handful of times though, in spite of her status as an extremely infamous X-villain. Five years later in Astonishing X-Men, Cassandra briefly returned having purportedly placed a psychic trigger in Emma Frost’s mind just before she was transferred into Stuff’s form, eventually forcing Emma to turn on the X-Men and force her way back into existence by possessing Kitty Pryde.

That failed, but Cassandra went into hiding, eventually returning in the pages of X-Men Red in 2018, where it was revealed that she was behind an uptick of anti-mutant hate crimes and nano-organisms called “Sentinites,” similar to the microscopic virus she first unleashed in New X-Men, that she could use to send people into violent rages when detecting the presence of mutants. The recently reborn Jean Grey managed to put a stop to her, and turned Cassandra’s Sentinites on her, reprogramming them to make Cassandra feel empathy and atone for her history of horrors.

Most recently, Cassandra Nova made an appearance during the Krakoan Age of X-Men comics, playing a major role in the second volume of Marauders. Recruited by Kitty Pryde for a dangerous mission, Cassandra tried to turn on the Marauders while they were sent two billion years in the past to explore the previously unknown origins of an ancient mutant civilization called Threshold—but she was trapped there as part of Kitty’s plan, her fate left unknown even as Threshold faced its own cyclical story of extinction and rebirth, one seeded with genetic information recovered from the victims of the Genoshan Genocide.