He tells Wolverine that he had to take pills because he was so miserable teaching at Xavier’s.

I liked this, because Northstar’s always had a depressive streak — so much so that during the second volume of Alpha Flight, he attempted suicide after being separated from Aurora. I had been toying with a fanfic idea in which he came to realise he was clinically depressed and left the X-men to look for Aurora for quite a while when the issue where he mentions pill-popping came out; it was uncanny, as if Mark Millar had been reading my mind. (Though his Jean-Paul is more bitter and less melancholy than mine.)

Though Nick Fury himself tells Kitty Pryde he has no idea what happened to Northstar, they apparently had him in a deprogramming thingamabob in the last issue of Mike Carey’s X-Men.

Yeah, we saw that in Wolverine as well. The difficulty in deprogramming him is interesting, and I can think of two possibilities: 1) Northstar was never a violent man, so to make him into a killer they needed to deconstruct his mind far more thoroughly than they did with Wolverine; or 2) he never had much of a sense of purpose, and HYDRA gave him one, which he has clung to for fear of going off the rails the way he did pre- and post- suicide attempt. Or possibly both.

Then there is the issue of why Fury lied, but I don’t expect an answer to that any time soon.

I actually really liked his appearance in X-Men #189: he’s being written better than he has been for ages. True, he’s playing the villain, but he’ll get over it. He gets to kick ass and make speeches about death! And he’s back with Aurora! (I do believe that those two are never, ever going to “work” in any way if they’re separated. Again and again they get split up and put into different stories, but too much of their personalities and identities are tied up with each other. They need to be together, both in-story and on a metafictional level.)

(Sorry for the long comment, by the way — Northstar is a character I love with an unholy passion, so I felt the need to give my two cents. He’s a frustrating character to read about, because he’s difficult to write well, and that has nothing to do with his sexuality and everything to do with his personality. A good writer who cared enough and had done his/her homework could make him a very viable prominent hero. But it would take a lot of work.)

And as for two, isn’t it funny how hard we work to try and resolve these things that the writer is paid good money to do for us? I’m nervous about this whole ‘and now he’s brainwashed! Again! Different this time!’ when I just want to see the guy pre-Wolverine-stabbing again. That guy was cool. That guy had some stories in him. Making an all new, all darker version just gets old after awhile.

As for his resistance to SHIELD reworking his brain, I figure there are two things. One, he had died and been brought back, Hand style, which I’d imagine screws with you a bit. Two, Wolverine didn’t actually finish being deprogrammed, and all he did after he was released was kill a bunch of people, which is what he did after HYDRA got him, and what he did before. Northstar doesn’t have that track record, so one might argue that he resisted the treament, feeling this was his punishment for killing for HYDRA. Which wouldn’t explain what’s going on in X-Men, but I’m coming up with this as I type, so it’s bound to have some holes.