This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

Wolverine Enemy, Lady Death Strike, has long been one of my favorite characters in X-Men comics.

While I was never much of a comic book reader as a kid, I of course encountered her on X-Men, the animated series, and in the 1994 video game Wolverine, Adamantium Rage. A decade later,

Kelly Hugh played a modified version of Lady Death Strike in the film X2. The character's

physical appearance is that of a Japanese woman with long reddish hair,

a form-fitting samurai-inspired costume, and long, razor-sharp edamanteum talons that extend

from hands that are themselves sometimes depicted as relatively human, other times oversized,

elongated, and truly monstrous.

Her biography makes things even more complicated, however.

Born Yuriko Oyama, Lady Death Strike's father, is said to have originated the

adamantium skeletal bonding process that so famously enhanced Wolverine.

Death Strike, however, obtained her own adamantium claws and bones

after her father's death in the Mojoverse. This is where the character's spiral not only

gave her the full adamantium treatment, but also transformed her into a full-blown cyborg. As such,

depictions of Lady Death Strike often include circuit-like glyphs on her skin and other

cybernetic flourishes.

So coming back to her monstrous hands, part of this is the fact that she can extend her

forearms via her cybernetic enhancements, but we also might conjecture that additional

musculature in the hands and forearms is simply necessary to

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