PERSUASION
Real Name: Kara Kilgrave
Former Aliases: The Purple Girl
Group Affiliation: Former member of Beta Flight
First Appearance: Alpha Flight #41
Creators: Bill Mantlo & David Ross
Kara Kilgrave led a mostly
normal life up until the time of her
thirteenth birthday... when she abruptly turned purple while at a party.
The young girl quite naturally panicked and ran home.
It seems that about 14 years
before, the mind-controller known as the Purple Man was in upstate New York.
While there he went bar-hopping, and on a whim forced a woman named Melanie to
marry him. However, in time, he came to love his hopeless slave [Sarcasm -
this is Mantlo's work we're talking here - C] and released her. She rejected
him, and he left, heartbroken. However, she was pregnant by that time.
Melanie Kilgrave immigrated to Toronto shortly afterwords. Thirteen years
after giving birth to a normal-looking pink skinned baby, Melanie had to tell
Kara the truth about her father.
Unable to cope with this abrupt
change in her life, Kara ran away.
She ended up attending a professional meet that was featuring the return
to skiing of her idol, Jean-Paul Beaubier. While in the
washroom Kilgrave manifested her mind control powers for the first time,
telling a person who was banging on the door to "go jump off a cliff."
Northstar saved the young lady, in the process revealing his secret i.d.
to the world.
After a number of
misunderstandings with Northstar and the rest of
Alpha Flight, Kara joined them as the first member of a new
Beta Flight, calling herself the Purple Girl. She
also became romantically involved with the next trainee to come along,
Whitman Knapp.
When Knapp left the team to go back to
medicine, that relationship ended, although there has been evidence that
Kara still cares for him deeply. [A relationship that was one of the few
things I liked about the Mantlo era, as a matter of fact. - C]
Kara at one point left the team
in disgust after feeling she'd been
abandoned in the West Edmonton Mall. Goblyn and
Laura Dean, wanting to
try "normal" life, went with her. Kara
had decided to return to Alpha Flight (with a new code-name) when she got
shanghaied into going after Northstar by
Talisman. Kara remained a part of
the Alpha organization from that point until the team was disbanded following
AF v1 #130.
Kara Kilgrave was most
recently seen as a prisoner at the Neverland mutant concentration camp run by the Weapon X
project. This raises a number of questions, foremost of which is: Why hasn't
her mother reported her missing to Alpha Flight?
Kara Kilgrave inheirited her
father's mind-control powers. Through
airborn chemicals called pheromones she can reduce a person to a
near-mindless state. In this state the person becomes extremely receptive
to suggestion and will follow Kilgrave's every verbal command. A side effect
of the pheromones turns a victim purple.
Kara has also shown that she
can create a mindlink with Goblyn. As Kara
has never been shown to produce a link with anyone else, it's my opinion that
the link is more due to Goblyn than Kara.
In the past a victim of Kara's
abilities would recover almost instantly when
cut off from the pheromones by distance, water, a plastic bag, etc. There was
evidence though that Kara's power was getting stronger towards the end of
Alpha Flight v1. It is known that her father's control could last for hours
even when the Purple Man was not present. Upon recovery from Kara's power
her victims usually have a splitting headache.
Marvel lists Kara as a mutant,
even though she inherited her powers from her father, who is not. As well, she is on
Marvel's official list of mutants that kept their powers after M-Day.
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