The last character appeared in the Dark Phoenix trailer is a terrible disappointment, at least for me. The second newcomer in Magneto‘s Brotherhood of Mutants, the tattooed woman with purple hair portrayed by Kota Eberhardt, has been confirmed to be none others than Selene, the terribly powerful Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. Ignoring for a moment the fact that she doesn’t look at all like the original Selene, having her act as a subordinate of Magneto is a terrible waste, considering that she had all the potential of being the big bad of a movie by herself. Just to see what we’ve lost, let’s take a look at the Marvel Universe‘s most ancient mutant, even older than Apocalypse, wrongfully believed to be the first of his species.
Selene was born 17,000 years ago, in what millennia later would have become Romania. As a child, she developed mutant powers, thus being the oldest mutant known to history (definitely the oldest living): she could absorb other people’s life force to extend her own life span, and she inadvertently killed her own mother this way. Her tribe’s elders took her for the incarnation of the moon goddess Selene, and ordered the entire tribe, themselves included, to sacrifice themselves to her, allowing her to live to the Hyborian Age, before any recorded civilization, 
just after Atlantis had sunken to the abyss. Selene, alone and considering herself a deity, traveled the world and studied ancient and powerful magic, even becoming rivals with another powerful sorcerer of prehistory, Kulan Gath, the nemesis of Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja. Selene crossed the millennia, growing more and more powerful with every soul she consumed, and she eventually arrived in Rome, the most powerful city-state the ancient times ever knew. Within the heart of the Roman Empire, Selene, who had already extinguished cities and civilizations, simply craved the hundreds of thousands of souls living in a single metropolis (under Emperor Augustus, the city was inhabited by nearly 2 millions people, a never-before seen record for a single city). She, however, needed help to absorb this many souls, so she seduced a senator, Eliphas, a romantic poet who had just been abandoned by his wife. Eliphas fell deeply in love with the sorceress, and agreed to draw pentagrams in his own blood all around the city as she instructed him to, following the promise of an immortal life with her. Eliphas, however, warned a little girl to move away from Rome as soon as she could, and the girl told her father, who called the guards. Before she knew what was happening, Selene had been captured with Eliphas and tied to a stake to be burnt alive. Using her powers, she incinerated the guards with the same fire they wanted to burn her with, and she cursed Eliphas to an immortal life as a revenant, burying him alive and abandoning him. Then she resumed her wandering.
Selene had always wanted to be recognized as the goddess she knew she was, and she kind of obtained it in South America: by unknown means, she traveled to the area that would have become Brazil shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire, and deep in the Amazon she founded Nova Roma, having the Roman civilization reborn in culture, architecture, and of course in monarchy. She used her psychic powers to drive outsiders to Nova Roma, where they worshiped her as their deity. Selene spent centuries in Nova Roma, even marrying and having descendants. Her latest husband was one of the Nova-Roman senators, Marcus Domitius Gallio, whom she took the surname of. 
Despite her best efforts for keeping her location secret, Selene was found by Eliphas, known in modern times as Eli Bard: still in love with her, he wanted to conquer her back, and for this he brought an offering, one of the witch’s alleged descendants, Amara Aquilla. The kidnapped girl, however, was followed by he friends, the New Mutants, who found themselves quite outmatched against the Dark Priestess of the Amazon. When Amara awakened her latent mutant powers and became Magma, though, the group managed to bury Selene under a volcano, destroying Nova Roma in the process. Intrigued by the New Mutants, Selene broke free and followed them to New York City, where she found many incredible sources of strong life force. She rekindled her cult in the metropolis, then she tried to kill a man she had seduced, Cain Marko, sensing an unlimited life force, but she was prevented so when Marko entered a bar brawl with Colossus. Following the latter, Selene learnt of the X-Men, and she targeted the most powerful of them, Rachel Summers, only managing to kill her boyfriend Nicholas Damiano, though. Fascinated by a world that had changed so much in her absence, Selene used one of her worshipers, Fredrich von Roehm, to access the elitist Hellfire Club, where she won her membership bringing as a gift the defeated Magma and Rachel Summers. Scared by her, the Black King Sebastian Shaw offered her the position of Black Queen, that she gladly took… waiting for the moment the entire world would have known and worshiped her as the only deity.
Selene Gallio is an overwhelmingly cruel woman, an intelligent, patient and wise mass-murderer who devises centuries-long plans to achieve what she’s always wanted: godhood. As the Black Queen, she’s an incredibly powerful psychic vampire, who can extend her life span indefinitely and heal from virtually any wound, even mortal ones, by absorbing all or part of others’ life force; she can also imbue the exceeding life force in inanimate objects, thus exerting a sort of molecular-level telekinesis that allows her to move things with her will or even to shape them into humanoid golems at her orders, or in herself, thus augmenting her strength, speed, stamina, durability and reflexes; she remembers all the lives she has absorbed, and she can take psychic control over the ones she hasn’t drained completely; she’s also a formidable sorceress, powerful enough to be considered a candidate for the position of Sorcerer Supreme by the Eye of Agamotto, and she can cast a number of spells including but not limited to telepathy, teleportation, shapeshifting, necromancy, summoning of Darkforce and many others. One of the most ancient and malicious mutants ever, Selene terrifies friends and foes alike, and the ones who don’t fear her either hate her or love her, in both cases desperately. An evil as old as humanity, Selene sees herself as a goddess among insects, and rightfully feasts on a banquet that has been prepared for her since the dawn of time: the world, of course.
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