Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl Halftime Outfit Draws Comparisons To X-Men’s Dazzler

When Lady Gaga took to the stage at Super Bowl LI tonight, wearing a sparkling unitard and eye makeup to match, you may have been thinking, “Wow…she kind of looks like Dazzler.”

You weren’t alone.

While it’s unlikely that it was intentional (although not impossible), Twitter lit up with dozens of responses referring to the mutant superhero.

Back in 2013, Lady Gaga was briefly rumored to have been cast as Dazzler in X-Men: Days of Future Past, although that turned out to have been the result of an April Fools Day joke gone wrong by the film’s director, Bryan Singer.

Last year, the character of Dazzler was actually referenced in X-Men: Apocalypse, although only her album art was shown, and the character herself was not depicted. During the run-up to that film, there were persistent rumors that Taylor Swift would play her.

Dazzler first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #130 in February 1980. She was commissioned by Casablanca Records in the late ’70s to be a cross-promotion in the mold of KISS, who had starred in two successful comic book tie-in super-specials by that point. Marvel Comics would develop a singing superhero, while Casablanca would produce a singer who could perform while in character and wardrobe. Marvel’s then-Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter wrote a treatment for a feature film based on the character.

She never reached the desired level of popularity to get a movie — and of course, it probably didn’t help that by 1980 her “disco queen” persona wasn’t quite as hip as it might have been a few years earlier — but she’s been a regular member of the X-Men universe ever since, with the occasional musical genre-switch and a much-publicized move toward a darker and edgier look in 2014.