[ID: A comic panel of Sheena sitting on a bench.
Sheena: Everything that was like, your identity as a person [is gone]. I had this… amazing awesome hair, that was my thing, when people thought of me they’d think of my super-long beautiful heavy metal Rapunzel hair. Now when I look in the mirror, I just… I don’t see myself, I see… a pig. And now everyone else sees me like that, too. End ID.]
Oughhhh I think of Sheena and how much of a lost opportunity she is to explore a different perspective of the mutant experience. Obviously we have Jennika too but I want to see more of Sheena and how much the change of her self image changes her.
With Jenny I feel like we see a lot of how, after breaking free the conditioning of the Foot Clan and becoming mutated, she was finally able to mourn her past life… Something that was a form of catharsis for her. She was never going to be able to get that life back, and she didn’t want too. It was traumatic, it led her into the arms of the Foot when she was vulnerable, and now her mutation has opened up a new community for her and has allowed her to dedicate herself to helping others and rewriting a narrative for herself.
Sheena doesn’t have that. A lot of her character still feels unresolved because it was the ACT of mutating that stole her life from her. Jennika had her life stolen from her a completely different way, and being saved by the turtles allowed a path of healing for her… but Sheena doesn’t have that same experience.
[ID: A comic screenshot. Leo and Sheena look on as Casey Jones fights a mutant in the fighting ring as they talk about Jennika.
Leo: And I can see why you don’t want Jenny to know about all this.
Sheena: Yeah… Maybe she would be cool with it, though? I think me and her both have similar backgrounds… We both come from the same sort of world, you know? Anyway, it’s just a good way to blow off steam and meet new people and test out my new training! End ID.]
It’s hard to know what Sheena’s life was like before Mutant Town. She says that she and Jennika have similar backgrounds, and we can assume this means Sheena was a delinquent in the past, but how *hard* this was for her is kind of up in the air.
[ID: A comic screenshot. Sheena, without a wig, raises a boulder above her head with tremendous strength. Then she starts to beat one of Dr. Barlow’s mutant experiments to the ground. She is blinded by a red rage and smashes the mutant in, with the graphics of it offscreen. She only snaps out of it when someone yells her name and grabs her by the arm.
Even though we don’t need the details, Sheena carries a lot of rage with her that seems to indicate at least, somehow, a lot of unresolved trauma in her past. Being trapped by Dr. Barlow is plenty traumatic in its own right, but there is enough clues to Sheena’s background to indicate that she also struggled a lot with internal conflict before her mutation.
Her attachment to her hair is rife in internal struggle. It’s almost as if her transformation into a pig mutant is affirming fears that she had all along, where people will see her a certain way if she loses control over her appearance. It’s not that she just feels insecure without her hair, she doesn’t even feel human. The image of Sheena beating another mutant to death without a wig on is so striking because we don’t usually see Sheena like that. She never allows herself to be angry, never allows herself to be seen without a wig, and she has never shown such a big show of strength.
[ID: A comic screenshot. Sheena, without her wig on, storms out of the room with a stony expression. Alopex, Jennika, and Don watch her go.
Alopex: What happened? What’s her problem?
Jennika: Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.
Jennika follows Sheena out, who still has a cold expression as she fixes her wig. Her expression is uncharacteristically hard.
Jennika: Sheena, hey, wait up. You okay?
Sheena: No, Jenny… I’m not. I just… I don’t want to be seen like that, you know what I mean? End ID.]
Actually, Sheena doesn’t like to have herself to be seen in any way she can’t control, if she can help it. Even when her wig first comes off, she doesn’t look embarrassed or distressed. She just looks mad. She doesn’t immediately let herself be vulnerable, and she only opens up to Jenny because she trusts her.
And that goes back to Sheena’s experience with mutation being different from Jennika’s. Mutation did not open up a path of discovery for Sheena, but instead it appears to have stunted her growth. She doesn’t let herself to be seen in certain ways, and as a mutant, the additional baggage of losing her humanity and her hair makes it all the more important for her to make sure she can have control.
[ID: A comic panel. Sheena in all punk makeup as she sings into a microphone, looking confidently onward as her hair sways with her movement. End ID.]
Her punk persona seems all the more integral to her confidence and being able to sustain her self image when you consider how she appears on stage. On stage is when she puts on wigs with long hair, hair that matches the length of her hair before mutation. She carries a completely different presence on stage because she holds herself to such a high standard of confidence. She only lets people see what she WANTS them to see.
And Sheena still seems… sort of lost. She seeks out band performances to feel confident, but also fight clubs and sketchy plastic surgeons to also build that sense of confidence that she felt she lost when she lost her hair… but I think her struggles with body image go a little deeper than that.
Sheena attaches herself so closely to the person she was with long hair that it begins to feel like she didn’t know who she was OUTSIDE of that. Even her persona on stage requires her to have the longest hair possible so she can actually feel that confidence. Again, Sheena only lets others see what she wants to see, and the fact she can’t control that other people see her as a pig seems to bother her more than she lets on in her short conversation with Jennika.
She holds a lot of rage that she doesn’t allow herself to let go until her life is literally being threatened by an evil doctor’s experiment. She doesn’t dwell too much on her own feelings or her background or really anything too personal about herself, including to Jenny. Jennika doesn’t seem to know Sheena very well.
But, as the Nightwatcher comics show, Sheena seems to understand Jennika a lot more than what Jennika chooses to offer her.
[ID: A series of comic panels of Nightwatcher with Sheena narrating over them.
Sheena: She’s looking for a purpose, I think. Something to distract from herself. After all, when simply existing never seems to fit you, if you give up all you are to become what you think the world needs you to be… if you don’t have to be anymore… what could you become? End ID.]
Jennika doesn’t seem to have told Sheena her background as a delinquent, but Sheena says to Leo that she thinks they came from the same background. The Nightwatcher comics go a step further in how they utilize Sheena as a character. Despite Jenny not calling Sheena back during the comic’s run and Jenny generally not being too keen on cluing Sheena in on how or what she’s doing, Sheena talks about Jennika with a surge of confidence.
I think existing never worked for Sheena either, as we see in her characterization in the 2011 IDW run. Sheena was looking for a purpose, too, not knowing too much of who she was but revolving her path of discovery around her appearance and how she cane off to others. What the world needed from her was a punk rock chick. She didn’t need to be anything as long as she lost herself to the world’s perception of her.
If she had gone through with Barlow’s transformation of her, what could she have become?
[ID: A comic screenshot. Sheena has her arms crossed and eyes closed, and Jennika is sitting on the couch with her hands folded against her head. The distance between them is emphasized. Sheena looks to a picture of the two of them and begins to talk.
Sheena: The singing thing. It’s been good. Great even, in the last… four months? You just weren’t really there for me to tell you, that’s why I kept calling. I really tried to be the girlfriend who understands. And I do. I figured there’s things in your mind I’d never understand and it was best to let you process it and be there if you needed. But I guess you didn’t need me. End ID.]
[ID: A comic panel. Sheena closes her eyes and cries with a smile.
Sheena: It’s cool. Figured as much, right? Got important things to do! It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me. I can’t have any more sleepless nights worrying. End ID.]
[ID: A comic screenshot. Sheena looks at Jennika, the background colored pink.
Sheena: Rent is paid through next month. And I’ll keep taking care of it until I come back and we decide what we’re going to do. Heh. I think this might be the smoothest talk I’ve ever had! Weird, huh?
Jennika looks down, speechless, the background yellow. End ID.]
Sheena still feels lost here. She doesn’t know what to do about their relationship. She’s still swimming aimlessly and gasping for breath, and she finally realizes that she needs to do something so that she isn’t stuck in one place. She decides to go on tour. She still asks Jennika to come with her, as a last hope, and Jennika says no. She tells Jennika she hopes whatever it is happens to be worth it.
Sheena steps up to be the bigger person here, but it’s clear that she still doesn’t really understand and hasn’t decided what she’s going to do when she comes back home. She and Jennika are both lost, but Sheena is used to this. Jennika has lost her community, the Splinter Clan is gone, and she has put herself back on the streets to fall into old habits without that structure and community. Sheena knows what that feels like, but she also has been familiar enough with the feeling for more consistent time than Jenny. She can’t wait anymore for her.
Sheena lets herself cry for a moment, but then wipes the tears away and reverts back to the blank expression she had at the start of the conversation. Even now, when telling Jennika she’s going on tour, she has a hard time being vulnerable or letting her guard down for too long.
It’s like Jennika has fallen back into the feeling of loss that defined her life for so long, but Sheena has never escaped it. She has greater wisdom to give and understands more about Jenny than Jenny ever has thought to share because she has gone through similar things with a lot less guidance than Jenny had before losing it.
Jenny goes through one more journey with the guidance of someone else, and she no longer feels lost. It leads her back to Sheena, who still has a ways to go, too.
[ID: A comic panel. The sun sets on a city far away from NYC. Nightwatcher’s face appears in the clouds above the music venue. Jennika wears a hiking backpack with the eyes of the Nightwatcher peaking out and Sheena stands on steps to a tour bus. They look at each other. Text at the bottom of the panel says “THE END.” End ID.]
That brings us to where we are now, with Sheena and Jennika reunited and unsure about their future together. It’s hard to say Jennika has actually caught up to Sheena, and Sheena still stands on the top of steps that Jennika hasn’t taken, but Jennika is still chasing up to her and trying to catch up.
I still wish we got to see more of Sheena, though, and I hope in the future we get a spinoff with her… but that seems a little unlikely. I feel like Sheena has so many emotions and parts of her journey that have gone unresolved, while still simultaneously picking up the pieces of Jennika’s. I want to see the two of them flourish, but more than anything I want Sheena to find the catharsis she has been looking for.
