Psylocke #8 annotations
PSYLOCKE vol 2 #8
“Into the Snow”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artist: Moisés Hidalgo
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan
PSYLOCKE
She’s returned to the bamboo forest where she and Mitsuki used to train as children. Her apparent aim is to hunt down and kill Master Hayashi in order to free the ghost of Mitsuki. However, when she reaches the compound, she finds a likely hallucination of an adult Mitsuki who greets her as an old friend.
More training flashbacks include Kwannon and Mitsuki being despatched to kill a Hand traitor (more of him below). This seems to be a different mission from the one in the previous issue, as they look a little older and Mitsuki’s relationship with yokai is more clearly established between them. Kwannon doesn’t know at this stage about her psychic powers, but they seem to emerge briefly during the fight with theoni.
She used to regard her scars from her training as a reminder of her childhood (apparently in a positive way), but they’ve been lost through resurrection. That might have been a deliberate choice, since Krakoan resurrection generally preserved such things. Perhaps she simply didn’t want to volunteer their significance to her and allowed the Five to assume that they were merely injuries.
The ghost Mitsuki burned a mark into Kwannon’s wrist last issue, which I assumed was just some sort of injury. This issue clarifies that it’s similar to a tattoo that Matsu’o Tsurayaba had, and it also appears on the door of Master Hayashi’s compound at the end of the issue.
SUPPORTING CAST
John Greycrow. Psylocke hasn’t told him about Matsu’o, or about Mitsuki, despite their importance in her life. He ultimately resists rising to Shinobi’s bait and insists that he’s confident that Kwannon truly loves him.
Devon Di Angelo. They insist on tagging along with Greycrow’s search for Psylocke, despite a lack of combat experience. Greycrow is quite reasonably concerned that Devon seems to believe that a taser is going to make the difference. He seems more willing to give Devon the benefit of the doubt on his claimed hacking skills. As so often in comics, Devon claims to be able to publish stories “on the biggest news sites in the world” in the event of his death.
Shinobi Shaw. If Devon is to be believed, Shinobi anonymously donates to a dozen orphanages, but in order to preserve his reputation he’s literally killed people to stop that from becoming public. For some reason, Devon believes that the threat of automatic publication of this information would dissuade Shinobi from killing them, even though this would involve Shinobi (1) being aware of that theat and (2) believing it, neither of which seems like a terribly safe bet.
As in issue #3, Shinobi enjoys winding Greycrow up. This time, he goes out of his way to talk about Kwannon’s relationship with Matsu’o Tsurayaba and suggest that he was the true love of her life. He recaps the cliff-top fight between Kwannon and Matsu’o, which ended when Kwannon fell into the sea – this was shown in X-Men vol 2 #31. It led to Matsu’o bringing in Spiral to save Kwannon’s life, which in turn led to the body swap with Betsy Braddock. Shinobi suggests that Kwannon threw the fight to spare Matsu’o, but that seems to be intended mainly to annoy Greycrow.
Shinobi claims that Matsu’o’s body is in the custody of the Hand. He correctly identifies that Betsy, the original Psylocke, killed Matsu’o in Psylocke vol 1 #4.
Mitsuki. The merged-body ghost thing which is following Psylocke around claims to be Mitsuki, her childhod training partner. Her affinity for yokai, which came up last issue, is mentioned again. This time we get a nekomata, which is indeed a type of cat spirit; a tengu, which is indeed associated with mountains; and a nobiagari, which is a sort of shape-changing thing that stretches up to confront people. She can borrow power from friendly yokai. When young Kwannon suggests that Mitsui use her powers to deal with the oni, Mitsuki is very reluctant to do anything of the sort.
VILLAINS
Master Hayashi. According to Psylocke, the Hand psychics identify students with potential special abilities and hand them over as infants to Master Hayashi. Hayashi tortures his students and tries to break them, claiming that the survivors will become “something magnificent.” The flashbacks that we’ve seen are broadly in line with that. That said, in one flashback here, having told the girls to fight until one of them is “incapacitated or dead”, he does in fact step in as soon as Mitsuki has Kwannon defeated, so there might be a slight among of posturing.
We see him clearly for the first time in this story: he wears a red costume with a hood, a hat, and a demon mask over the lower half of his face. He has a scar over his right eye.
According to Hayashi, if his charges succeed, they will “joint the elite assassins who target the Hand’s otherworldly enemies” – apparently meaning that their role will shift from regular old ninjas to the Hand elite who deal with the magical thing.
The thief of the Equinox Blade. A flashback shows Hayashi despatching young Mitsuki and Kwannon to go after “a traitor who stole an important treasure from the Hand – a soul-devouring sword called the Equinox Blade.” The Equinox Blade previously appeared in the Legend of Shang-Chi one-shot in 2021, also written by Alyssa Wong. In that story, it was an ancient sword said to have driven its swordsmith mad and taken his soul. Shang-Chi destroyed it, but Lady Deathstrike has a remaining piece of it.
In the flashback, the Hand ninja who stole the sword has apparently been corrupted by it, and is turning into an oni (basically a demon). He seems to be committing murders in order to absorb new victims into the sword’s collection of souls.
“Shinobi suggests that Kwannon threw the fight to spare Matsu’o, but that seems to be intended mainly to annoy Greycrow.”
I think we’re supposed to take Shinobi’s suggestion seriously- it’s implied that she threw the fight with Mitsuki this issue.
Psylocke is not in the September solicits- the rumors are it’s been cancelled. If that’s the case it’s not surprising- Kwannon is not as high profile as Jean or Storm.
“there might be a slight among of posturing”
That should be.”a slight AMOUNT of posturing”.
Not as high profile as Jean, but still selling better than Phoenix. Psylocke has been losing readers, as with most of the X-books, but is still selling a lot better than Phoenix, Hellverine, and Wolverine & Deadpool. So, Marvel isn’t allowed to cancel a Stephanie Phillips comic is what I gather? Did Tom Brevoort pay her way through law school (with apologies to Bill Mantlo)?
Ah yes. Psylocke. Who looks just like the Asian ninja-telepath who’s been a mainstay of the X-Men since the 90s, but who’s actually an entirely different person, and here’s her almost entirely unknown backstory…
I like Wong’s writing, but this comic was always going to be something of a tough sell for most audiences. From the Ashes really wanted to attract those readers from the X-Men heydey of the ’90s that they’d lost, with titles, logos, lineups, and characters they’d recognize, while still try and keep their current readers…
Also, 10 issues is about all most of these new titles get. They really should just go ahead and plan them as such. “Write for 5-10 issues. No, really, there’s no such thing as a guaranteed X-Men ongoing.”
Even in the early-‘90s, at the height of Psylocke’s popularity, Marvel wouldn’t have had any idea how to come up with enough story to maintain a Psylocke solo series, and it would have ended up failing. The majority of those Psylocke fans would have said, “I can ogle her just fine once a month in X-Men, thanks.” When Marvel did try to give Psylocke her own plot, it ended up being the “Crimson Dawn” nonsense, which helped kill the popularity Psylocke had in the ‘90s with its boringness.
The sad thing is, pre-ninja Betsy was interesting. Model, spy, psychic, failed hero, unwitting mole for Mojo. Any combination of these elements could have fueled a good story. So much of that was lost in making her a sexy Asian ninja.
Lady invites a wandering samurai to her home, turns out she’s really a ghost (and the house is decrepit/doesn’t exist) is a common Japanese folktale, or at least that’s what I gather, considering it’s the basis of about five to ten separate Usagi Yojimbo stories.
Don’t get attached to Mitsuki, is what I’m saying.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Psylocke got the chop – Wong made the same mistake Thorne and the Hivemind did, setting up a long-form, muddled storyline instead of short, concise 2-3 issue arcs that actually make a case for caring about the character’s continuing adventures.
IIRC, Kwannon’s body was resurrected twice before the Krakoa era, so she could have lost her scars there.
“Wong made the same mistake Thorne and the Hivemind did, setting up a long-form, muddled storyline instead of short, concise 2-3 issue arcs”
I’m starting to suspect that none of the writers were told going in that there was a new “you’ll probably only get 10 issues” policy that turned out to be a hard limit for so many series, and so they wrote like it was definitely going to be an ongoing as opposed to a stealth limited. Because there’s no way -all- of these writers, who are reasonably experienced, would have made the same sort of mistake.
I mean sure, they should have been prepared for the possibility, but this feels like a lack of communication.
It feels like every issue of this book just retells the same story over and over and we still learn nothing new beyond vague mentions of harsh training with the Hand. No wonder it got canceled.
@The Other Michael: It’s entirely possible – so far only Geoffrey Thorne has gone on record to say that he wasn’t told about the potential cutoff at #10, and that he was writing under the assumption that he’d have at least 15 issue guaranteed (which explains both the overall pace of X-Force and why the finale turned out the way it did). But I wouldn’t be surprised if Lanzing and Kelly, Russell and Wong similarly had the rug pulled out from under them.
If only there was someone at Marvel whose job it was to make sure writers stayed informed about things like company policies…
The Other Michael> I’m starting to suspect that none of the writers were told going in that there was a new “you’ll probably only get 10 issues” policy that turned out to be a hard limit for so many series, and so they wrote like it was definitely going to be an ongoing as opposed to a stealth limited. Because there’s no way -all- of these writers, who are reasonably experienced, would have made the same sort of mistake.
On the flipside, have they seen Marvel’s record over the past decade? A minimum of 10 (well, unless you crash and burn to the levels WXM apparently did) is higher than for most of that time. Short of explicit instructions, they should have been aiming for ta largely coherent wrap-up, if truncated, wrap at #5/6 and a “season finale” that could have been a “good” final issue at #10/12.
Tbh I think this series has done a good job of fleshing out Kwannon further and been an interesting run.
I just think that like most X-characters, they benefit from having all the others in the book due to the close character relationships, which is what the readers want. So they all tend to fall over when solo and outside that context.
I have to say Kwannon seems the more popular Psylocke, based on what I see on the internet. Poor Betsy is now doomed to be off panel in the way that Dazzler and Longshot from her era were shuffled off stage left. This despite the Psylocke character becoming popular enough to headline X-Force and Uncanny for several notable runs. Oh well! That’s marketing for you (and I say this as a Betsy fan).
@SanityOrMadness: That’s just it – they very clearly haven’t. The only writer whose first seven issues deliver multiple short arcs that introduce you to the cast and premise is MacKay’s X-Men, and that’s the flagship title, it was never going to be in danger of cancellation. Why Thorne thought he could do a 15-issue slow burn to the reveal of Moses Magnum is utterly beyond me