X-Force #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
There are a ridiculous number of new titles out this week – eight ongoing titles in total, plus one miniseries – so I won’t be doing annotations for all of them.
X-FORCE vol 7 #8
“The Devil’s Lesson”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
X-FORCE:
Forge. La Diabla spells out fairly directly the criticism that I figured the book was making of Forge: he has undue faith in his ability to create machines, and doesn’t pay proper attention to whether he’s building the right machine. In other words, he has such faith in his ability to come up with the answers that he doesn’t think carefully enough about whether he’s asking the right question.
Captain Britain. She can make magical protection wards using her sword.
Askani. The psychic regulators that Forge gave her last issue seem to work well.
Tank. He’s the first to attack “Colossus”, although the guy has threatened to kill everyone. Forge seems to think that Colossus should be of particular interest to him, though. He uses his weapon-creation powers to summon up knuckledusters to punch Colossus with; they seem to have some sort of energy attack. He remains mostly silent until directly challenged by Colossus to speak, at which point he expresses disdain for people who talk a lot, and insists quite confidently that this Colossus is an impostor. You could obviously read this as a hint that Colossus is inside the costume (though remember, we’ve also seen him playing long distance chess in X-Men).
SUPPORTING CAST:
Sage. She has a shoulder injury in the real world from being stabbed in VR by La Diabla in issue #6. (This was visible in one panel of that issue, but it wasn’t particularly drawn to our attention.)
VILLAINS:
La Diabla. She regards Colossus’ attack as a “lesson” for Forge, and tells Forge as much very directly; in previous issues, her motivation seemed to be to force Forge to embrace his use of magic. She quotes Nietzsche at him, from Thus Spake Zarathustra. The full passage is:
“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
So it’s a “destroy and rebuild” thing, coupled with a suggestion that Forge is his own worst enemy. She wants rid of X-Force because they’re “inhibit[ing]” Forge, but apparently has no other issue with them. Being an alchemist villain, she can summon up earth, air, fire and water elementals, which are mindless.
Colossus. He’s aligned with La Diabla, unsurprisingly, so he’s the third in her series of attacks on X-Force. The telepaths can’t read his mind, and Askani describes him as “empty inside” – it’s not clear whether this means they’re being blocked (perhaps by the headband he’s wearing) or whether he’s under some sort of outside control. He talks, though, and seems to have a personality – though all of his dialogue seems to be him shouting threats, telling the heroes how stupid they are, and challenging his opponents to “entertain” him.
La Diabla teleports Colossus away from his fight with Tank; Tank says that he vanished “like Nuklo”, presumably meaning his sudden disappearance mid-fight on page 14 of issue #5 (rather than his final defeat later in the same issue).
Dr Howard Avery. He’s a character from Journey into Mystery #65 (1960), where he was a skinny scientist who developed a serum to make himself big and strong in order to impress a girl. He accidentally turned himself into the monster seen at the end of this issue – the Brute That Walks. He’s occasionally shown up over the years in cameos on Monster Island, the most recent being in the Bendis-era Uncanny X-Men #33 (2015). He’s being coerced here by La Diabla.
FOOTNOTES:
Title: The title “The Devil’s Lesson” follows “The Devil in Heaven” in issue #7 and “The Devil is a Liar” in issue #6.
Page 4: Symkaria is the home country of Silver Sable. Starcore is (or was) a space station associated with Dr Peter Corbeau.
Page 12: Betsy was indeed a model back when she was a supporting character in 1970s Captain Britain.
Page 18: Chemistry is the child of alchemy in the sense that modern chemistry emerged from alchemical experiments; this fits with La Diabla’s view of herself as having a balance between magic and science, while Forge is completely science-based.
So, this is cancelled at #10. Expect a rushed wrap-up – the writer posted on CBR that he was working on the assumption he would get at least another five issues before the ending, which would have seemed optimistic even if cancellation wasn’t confirmed.
I wonder how many other titles will soon be joining X-Force.
Didn’t Brevoort state that every new title would be given at least one year before Marvel would decide if it should be cancelled?
Howard Avery destroyed his notes and repented of becoming “the Brute that Walks” at the end of that JiM story. Bendis ignores things like that, of course. I suppose he could have remembered his formula, and there are always other women he’d want to impress then gain revenge against…
I think that “the Brute that Walks” had a previous cameo on Monster Island during Jim Starlin’s Warlock & Infinity Watch.
I hope that the early cancellation of the series does not mean that plans for the eventual return of Surge are shelved…
Colossus being Tank is such a red herring that I have half a mind that it’s being so obvious to make you think it’s a red herring… as a red herring?
The “X-Force” title can certainly benefit from taking a rest for now. Supposedly, Weapon X-Men could be taking its place.
Brevoort actually said “10 issues”, which is exactly what X-FORCE & NYX seem to have gotten (and the solicits for X-FACTOR #10 sound like it could be done too). Still better than “You may get cancelled after 5 issues” that Marvel used to practice. Now new series get at least two trades’ worth.
I’m more surprised that PHOENIX is making it to #11 and getting another arc.
> You could obviously read this as a hint that Colossus is inside the costume (though remember, we’ve also seen him playing long distance chess in X-Men).
We also saw Tank playing chess in the last issue…
OK, thanks for the Brevoort clarification.
Wow, if X-Factor gets cancelled (likely), I’ll solely be reading Immortal Thor as far as Marvel books (and no DC books right now). I was reading FF, but dropped it as I don’t care about the “One World Under Doom” cross-over, which will most likely lead into a relaunch with a different writer for the movie.
The description of the Colossus the team fights as “empty inside” might also suggest some kind of mind/body split. Colossus’s body may be an empty vessel, while his mind is piloting Tank.
@Chris V — for what it is worth, Brevoort is also the editor of FF and for the past 2 issues he’s gotten letters from fans begging him (and Marvel) not to either replace North and/or relaunch the series with a new #1 for the movie this year.
Now, I wouldn’t expect Brevoort to confirm or deny anything on a public column. But rather than play coy, he deliberately writes replies which smugly treat the letter writers who theorize this as being ill or crazy and is implying Marvel never does these kinds of things which is…dishonest and smug beyond mere brand management. He would have been better off just not publishing those letters than risking coming off as an arrogant liar about it.
Marvel is a company that relaunches every title, even ones that sell well like ASM, like clockwork every 2-4 years, with or without a movie coming. FF is nearing the 3 year mark so any fan who has paid attention since 2015 knows the drill. To nakedly lie to their faces and then make fun of them in print is, well, a very bad look for a senior editor for me.
Tom Brevoort is the Phil Jackson of Marvel, for anyone who gets the NBA reference. He’s coasted on the coattails of the talent ahead of him, not by any ideas or innovations of his own, since he has none. When left without a Bendis or Aaron level talent, all he has is “throw it against the wall” stuff like the From The Ashes era. And any fan off the street could do that.
What Omar said. Though why the split and who’s piloting Colossus’s body?
I actually like where most of the books are going. But outside of Storm, Phoenix, and X-Men, there’s almost no forward motion on the other books and the pacing on them is atrocious.
Exceptional is exceptionally slow and the threat in X-force should’ve been revealed by 5-6 with La Diabla showing up by 3-4. I see why they’re getting cancelled unfortunately.
Also this issue was apparently the first we’ve gotten sage full name, Teresia Karisik. Presumably, it was Xavier saying it. I always find it insane that it takes this long for some writer, any writer to give a character a name. Rogue was one of the worst examples with her first name and last being created separately after something like 30 years.
The Dr. Santini Sage mentions in the last page is presumably Jose Santini, a minor Lee and Kirby creation who hasn’t been seen since 1969. That fits with Thorne’s clear fondness for digging up old Silver Age characters.
@NS: with Rogue, at least, I got the sense that Claremont wanted to emphasize her confused sense of identity as a consequence of her permanently absorbing Ms. Marvel’s powers and memories.
By the time she got that fully sorted out via the Siege Perilous, Claremont was at a stage where he saw many of his characters as something outside of ordinary civilian names. Few of the characters he introduced after X-Men #200 really have meaningful secondary identities.
Gambit and Mister Sinister are enigmas that Claremont intended to connect to a high-concept character. The Marauders, the revised Savage Land Mutates, and the Reavers are largely defined by what they do and their real names — where any are given — are an afterthought for the Marvel Handbooks. Zaladane gets tied to Polaris via the contrivance of making Zala’s codename a real name, but we learn nothing about who she was before she became a cult leader in the Savage Land. Gateway is presented as a mystery figure, the kind who isn’t going to get a name besides “Gateway.”
Most of the other characters he introduced in this period either don’t have codenames or are increasingly nonhuman threats. As he got further into his “Mutant Wars/Shadow King” ideas, he seemed to see the characters as defined largely by their “professional” identities, caught up as they were in a totalizing power struggle.
I guess Marvel settled on making Sage’s ethnicity as Bosniak. I think it took so long for Sage’s birthname to be revealed due to the question as to her location of birth. She was first met by Xavier in Afghanistan, and she only revealed she was born in a “war-torn country”. I don’t think Marvel knew where to place Sage’s origins.
Wasnt expecting to hear the words “DC/Marvel crossovers” today
Two opposing companies coming together to make money in a declining comic book market. I’m here for it.
Admittedly I’m reading these comics 3 months later than the reviews, but I still don’t understand the why of Tank. Why are the characters just accepting this mystery on their team? Has anyone straight up asked Tank or Forge what the deal is? If it’s Colossus, then why? He seemed ok last time we saw him. What circumstances happened between panels to make a simple man decide that he wanted to keep superheroing, but incognito with a bunch of people he’s barely associated with? Why is there hardly anything in the comic itself that makes a casual reader like me say “who is this mystery figure?” He comes across as just a generic big robot. If I didn’t read this blog I wouldn’t even think about it. Are there clues I haven’t noticed? It all just seems so pointless and uninteresting.
Tessa lists several teleporters who she could use in this story- Solo, Manifold, Kestrel, Lila Cheney, Magik and Nightcrawler. Kestrel is John Wraith, who will be appearing next issue.
I keep forgetting how much Nightcrawler’s maximum teleportation distance has increased since his rebirth- my first reaction on hearing that list was “Kurt can’t teleport as far as the others”.
@NS- Agreed that the reason this book got cancelled is the slow pacing. The first five issues just seemed to be the team facing off against a series of unrelated threats. It should have been made clear that the same person was causing the threats by issue 2 or 3. Even this issue was basically a big fight scene.
OTOH, Rachel and Betsy really are developing a reputation as book-killers. The last 3 series they were cancelled in less than 11 issues. I hope this doesn’t make writers reluctant to use them.
@Omar, M- the problem is that the hand of the person Illyana was playing chess with in X-Men 5 clearly looked like Colossus. So if Tank is Colossus, he would have to be in Colossus’ body.
Remember, Diablo’s potions can bring inanimate objects to life.
If Diabla has his potions, she could bring anything to life. This could be a Colossus statue or a Colossus robot brought to life.
@NS- Regarding, Sage’s name, apparently there was some confusion over whether Tessa was her real name or a name Shaw gave her. Thorne seems to have compromised by making Tessa an Americanized version of her real name.
@Si- the first clue was in issue 1, where Tank hurls Deadpool in a Fastball Special.
As with so many of the relaunch’s books, I wanted to like this more than I did. The actual premise of Forge assembling a team to fix problems before they became too big to fix sounded great.
I think maybe if it had leaned into that more, with a small core cast and a rotating cast of guest-stars to address each specific crisis, while building towards the larger underlying issue (the systematic problem causing the smaller problems) it might have worked better. (Kind of like the AvengE.R.S in Orlando’s book). I don’t know why Tank is even a mystery. It’s a shame this book got Surge killed (or IS she dead? Hmmm?).
I think Betsy and Rachel still struggle to find distinct identities and relevance in a landscape where one’s not even allowed to -be- her current identity (if you’re Captain Britain, work with it!) and the other doesn’t even HAVE a consistent persona.
(See my prior comment about repurposing them as psychic lesbian secret agents… James Psychic Bond?)
Sage has long felt like a character who writers find unduly more interesting than she really is, going all the way back to Claremont himself, when she went from Shaw’s bondage-maid assistant to Xavier’s computer-brained super-spy/undercover agent. Her run in Percy’s X-Force didn’t do her any real favors.
And in the end, this title just doesn’t even suit the X-Force name in any of its various manifestations. (I think this could have been X-Factor, a name which has been just as diluted but feels appropriate for a problem-solving team.) (And yes, X-Force could have been given to the government team in echo of the Milligan run…)
@The Other Michael- I’ve heard Sage described as Claremont’s Mantis and the analogy fits. Steven Englehart created Mantis and she was his pet character, even defeating Thor. He dragged her into everything he wrote- Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, even stories at other companies. No other writer than Englehart used her much until she was revamped during Annihilation.
And that pretty much fits Sage to a T. Claremont constantly reminded us how awesome Sage was. He dragged her into everything he wrote, such as New Exiles. Between Claremont’s last use of her in Sword of the Braddocks and Percy’s X-Force she only had about 20 appearances. And she’s been used more (mostly by Percy and Thorne) since Percy put his spin on her.
Except, Mantis was kind of interesting.
Sage had nothing interesting about her. She was introduced in a minor role by Claremont, then suddenly, in X-Treme X-Men she had turned into the “bestest character who ever existed”, with no build-up or concrete background or characterization.
Englehart might have overdone it on Mantis, and I can see why some readers were annoyed with her, but the “New Age madonna” role was, at the very least, different.
Sage was just a very boring blankslate that the creator kept telling us was “the most awesomest ever”.
Sage is barely recognizable as the same character who first appeared in the Dark Phoenix Saga decades ago.
She’s kinda the Bobbi Morse of the X-books.
Perception sure can be subjective.
I just counted and Sage has more than 40 appearances before X-Treme X-Men #1, going back to X-Men #132 early on the Dark Phoenix saga.
But she was indeed a background character for the most part. My first issue of X-Men was 1983’s Uncanny #169, which turned out to be my introduction to Callisto, Caliban, Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost and Sage. She gets about as much panel time as Caliban, in a two-pages scene between her, Shaw and an unconscious Emma. It was her fourth appearance, and it was rather ambiguous. Shaw treats her in a way that can be seen as bossy, but also as businesslike and respectful. You have to pay a bit of attention to realize that she is all but said to be a telepath herself.
I don’t particularly value Claremont as a writer and I happen to think that his character work is enormously over-rated, but he did try. A lot, if often with dubious results. Factually, he did give us bits and glimpses of Sage for just over 20 years before making her a main character in X-Treme X-Men. It was a lot more and much more subtle and convincing than what he attempted to do with Wolverine, but somehow readers accepted Wolverine anyway and Sage just isn’t as big a name.
I like Englehart as a writer, but his handling of Mantis certainly wasn’t anywhere as subtle or gradual as Claremont’s of Sage.
As for “X-Force” as the title for an ongoing…
I just don’t see the point. Never did. It was presumably a black ops book back in the 1990s, but all that meant in practice was that Charles sometimes pretended not to know what they were doing and got away with it.
Far as I know, all that it takes for a team of mutants to be entitled to call themselves “X-Force” is not being too averse to firearms, not being too much of a mutant supremacism team, not liking publicity very much, not having a clear, demonstrable link to Scott or Charles, and the name not being currently in use by another group of belligerent mutants and supporters. And I think every single one of even those generous parameters has actually been breached at some point, except perhaps for the firearms bit.
“X-Force” is just a nostalgia name that hopes to tap into memories of a time when a book of the same name created new stars while claiming to not be just another X-Men book. The attempt to recreate those conditions has been made time and again, but it is not clear that it even makes sense now.
@Luis- Claremont didn’t intend for Tessa to be a telepath. He intended her to have some power to “analyze and evaluate”. For example, in Classic X-Men 7, Shaw asks Tessa if someone is planning to betray them and Tessa points out evidence in favor of his being deceitful and in favor of his being loyal. If she was a telepath, she would have simply been able to read his mind and determine whether he was planning to betray them.
Tessa was first shown to be a telepath in X-Force 49, written by Jeph Loeb. In issue 50, she describes herself aa a novice telepath. There’s no further explanation. Jeph Loeb’s X-Force run was notorious for throwing things in without explanation. The last issue of Nicieza’s run featured Dani and X-Force facing off against a Sunspot who’s been transformed into Reignfire. The first issue of Loeb’s run featured Roberto inexplicably back to being Sunspot and Dani nowhere to be seen. Loeb’s run was also famous for the hints that Shatterstar was Benjamin Russell, which resulted in a notoriously confusing explanation in the last issue of Loeb’s run. Supposedly the last issue was rewritten by the editors but I can’t think of an explanation that could explain everything Loeb hinted at- one issue Shatterstar’s DNA was said to be identical to Longshot’s, a few issues later his fingerprints matched a mental patient.
The idea of Tessa being a novice telepath was contradicted about a year later in an issue of X-Man where Tessa notes that she and Emma telepathically felt Madelyne Pryor die circa Inferno. But that was completely inconsistent with what we saw after Inferno- in New Mutants 74-75. .the Hellfire Club members talk amongst themselves about the X-Men dying in Dallas with Maddie before inferno. If the Club knew that Maddie survived, wouldn’t they realize the X-Men survived as well?
There was another issue that seemed to show Tessa using telepathic powers even earlier but she wasn’t named as Tessa! In an Uncanny X-Men Annual by Matt Fraction, we see a flashback before the Dark Phoenix Saga where Shaw’s aide Selene uses her telepathic powers. Of course, Shaw didn’t know Selene before the Dark Phoenix Saga. Fraction meant to use Tessa but got her name wrong.
Claremont only grudgingly accepted the idea of Tessa being telepathic.
As for why people didn’t accept the idea of Sage, what the readers hated was the idea that Sage was supposedly Xavier’s secret mole in the Hellfire Club but Xavier never knew when Shaw was going to attack.She would have to be the most useless spy in the history of espionage.
You mistake “random” and “haphazard” for “gradual” and “subtle”. Telling the reader a creation’s background, motivations, and characteristics near the start (Englehart’s Mantis) isn’t a mark of poor writing.
Claremont’s usage of Tessa was akin to Stan Lee returning to write Spider-Man and revealing that Joe Robertson had been being paid by Peter Parker to spy on J. Jonah Jameson for him (a ret-con which isn’t necessarily a mark for or against Robertson’s characterization), but Lee doesn’t stop there and also throws in that Joe Robertson is actually stronger than the Hulk and smarter than Reed Richards. We’re just supposed to accept this on faith and realize that Joe Robertson is the greatest character Lee ever wrote. However, make it even worse by removing all the background and characterization that Lee put into Robertson’s personal life beforehand, and imagine that Robbie had been a background character at the Daily Bugle in all of his prior appearances.
I could accept a ret-con that Tessa wasn’t solely what she seemed in her Hellfire Club appearances, or that she was secretly spying for Xavier and that Sage was now going to be one of the X-Men. That’d be fine. Instead, Claremont decided to yell at us throughout X-Treme X-Men and his return to Uncanny X-Men that Sage was the “smartest best fighter in all of comics, deal with it”. It was all unearned.
The difference with Logan is that the fans began to latch into Wolverine as their favourite character. Claremont (or Marvel) was responding to the market. He wasn’t trying to shove Logan down peoples’ throats. If the fans decided they were sick of Wolverine in the 1980s, I doubt Claremont would have continued to use the character in the way he did.
Like I said, I can understand why some fans were annoyed by Mantis, but Englehart had a purpose for the character, outside of her simply being “so damn cool”, and it was something unique.
@Luis Dantas X-Force didn’t become a black ops book until the 2008 series spinning out of Messiah Complex. (So, vol 3 iirc).
The original series was New Mutants turning into a proactive fighting group under Cable and later splitting from him. Basically young adults finding their way in the world.
They weren’t even that into guns, apart from Cable himself. And Domino.
I’d say one of Sage’s big problems as a character is the vagueness of her ‘computer brain’ power. As @Michael points out, Claremont didn’t make her a telepath, but how does having a computer brain let her activate latent mutants, heal people, or give Rogue temporary control of her powers? How did being possessed by an alternate personality let her fly?
@MasterMahan: Maybe they’ll start saying she has a quantum computer mind.
If there’s one thing I learned from turn of the millennium comics, it’s that you can justify anything by putting the word “quantum” in front of it.
Especially in Quantum and Woody.