The main villain for X-Men Red’s first arc stands revealed and it’s none other than Charles Xavier’s evil twin Cassandra Nova!

Spoilers ahead for X-Men Red # 1 by Tom Taylor and Mahmud Asrar.

So in this issue, Jean Grey gets this grand idea that she needs the UN’s support for. So she gets the help of both Black Panther’s Wakanda…

… as well as Namor and Atlantis…

Jean Grey meeting Namor again (X-Men Red # 1)

She presents her idea to the United Nations…

… and gets a bit of a stand-off with the British representative for the UN; but ultimately gets public support from both Wakanda and Atlantis.

Later outside, the same UN representative talks to Jean Grey, goes all crazy and ultimately gets her head blown off.

And because this was done in public, security gets involved with the goal of arresting the newly returned Jean and put her on trial eventually. But that doesn’t happen because Namor, Wolverine and Honey Badger are all in the crime scene as well.

Nightcrawler then takes the team away and they end up here.

That’s a pretty believable reason too to make a new X-Men team considering that there are already two X-Men teams running around the Marvel Universe. There are now a lot of things that make sense including why Gentle’s on the team (Because Black Panther sent him along to either be an envoy or representative of Wakanda’s mutants).

We still don’t have a clear reason for Trinary and Gambit joining the team though. Maybe we’ll get that in a few weeks?

But wait, who is Cassandra Nova in a nutshell?

As I mentioned earlier, she’s Xavier’s evil twin that he “killed” while in the womb…

Xavier vs Nova

She’s got the same telepathic powers as the founder of the X-Men but she opts to use this for selfish means including taking over the Xavier School during Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run…

She’s also responsible for launching that Sentinel attack that killed 16 million mutants in Genosha.

When she took over Charles Xavier’s body, she went to space and infected the minds of the Shi’ar to target Earth…

Eventually she was stopped by the combined efforts of the X-Men lead by Jean Grey…

She has appeared a number of times as well including that one story arc from Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, where she was one of Emma Frost’s demons.

I bet they’ll bring this new rivalry to different lengths. Plus its great to see one of the few deadliest members of the X-Men’s rogues gallery back in business and giving these heroes something worth fighting.