X-Force #34 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #34
“Blackout”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Chris Allen
Colourist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Domino, Wolverine, Deadpool and Maverick in space, with the face of Sevyr Blackmore behind, and Beast’s hidden prison moon in the background.
PAGES 2-4. Sage monologues about her drinking.
A montage sequence in which Sage basically tells us that relentless exposure to trauma in her work is driving her to drink.
There’s a lot of apparently Krakoan text on these pages:
- In page 2 panel 3, the word by her left thumb is DATASET.
- The message scrolling over her left hand is DATASET MASTER followed by a third word that doesn’t seem to be Krakoan at all.
- The word to the right of the caption seems to be ARCHIVE, but with the A represented by the symbol that was used in Excalibur to represent The Artist Formerly Known As Apocalypse.
- To the right of that, ARCHIVE again, but with the correct Krakoan.
- The symbols on the far right aren’t Krakoan, but seem to match the third word from the message above.
- In page 3 panel 2, both words just say DATASET again.
- In page 4 panel 1, the word on the screen seems to be just random symbols, while the symbols floating around Sage don’t seem to be actual Krakoan text at all. I guess they’re intended to represent generic text and information overload.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
PAGE 6. The Arakko petal processing facility.
The staff appear to be yet more duplicates of Madrox the Multiple Man – does he do all the manual labour on Krakoa? Then again, they don’t seem to split into further duplicates when punched later in the issue, so maybe these are just uniforms of some sort.
The Krakoan words in panel 3 just read PETALS.
PAGES 7-9. Sevyr Blackmore’s pirates attack.
Sevyr is making his first appearance in X-Force, but he previously appeared in Wolverine #14-16. As indicated, he’s an Arakkii pirate, though previously he’s been presented as a seafarer. Presumably he picked up his spaceship from the spaceport on Arakko.
PAGES 9-10. Maverick and the Mercs prepare to fight the pirates.
Another import from Percy’s Wolverine book, this is simply Maverick’s mercenary force. Maverick is a mutant but has no alignment with mutant identity, and has a side deal with the CIA. The Mercs are exactly what they sound like. Previously they were a human force, but apparently Maverick has also been picking up aliens from the spaceport. The horse guy is a Kymellian, the alien race mostly associated with Power Pack. Percy’s interpretation of Maverick has him as almost completely amoral save for some residual personal loyalty to Wolverine – which is not really in line with any previous interpretation of the character, but whatever. At any rate, he’s working here for the Beast, and while Beast claims later on that this is the best way of keeping Maverick away from potential enemies, it’s also a case of him hiring someone who shares his lack of moral staandards.
PAGE 11. Data page. An exchange of messages from Beast to Sage, the implication being that Beast has at the very least deliberately tried to encourage Sage’s alcoholism in the hope of stopping her from monitoring his dubious schemes too effectively.
Presumably, the money that Beast diverts here is used to build the prison moon.
Senkanjabin Sharbat is a cucumber mint drink, not actually alcoholic in itself. Which is why Beast is suggesting the vodka.
PAGES 12-13. Omega Red finds Sage unconscious.
Despite his rather unsympathetic demeanour, Omega Red is at least showing some apparent practical concern for Sage. The running subplot here has been Sage seeing Omega Red as a vicarious exercise in breaking addiction.
The skull base was created by Beast in Wolverine #27. Apparently it hasn’t raised any eyebrows among the Quiet Council yet, though we know at least Emma is sceptical about Hank.
“I first met Xavier in Afghanistan.” In X-Treme X-Men #44 (2004). Quite what Sage was doing in Afghanistan in the first place isn’t spelled out, since other issues of X-Treme establish that she’s from the Balkans. But she’s fighting in a war in the Hindu Kush “perhaps 20 years ago” – at the time of publication, this would have meant the Soviet-Afghan War. The flashback seems to have her shooting at UN peacekeepers, but it’s also expressly a flashback distorted by the influence of X-Treme villain Elias Bogan, so it’s not entirely reliable. Presumably she was a mercenary of some sort. At any rate, she finds Charles Xavier in the aftermath of the encounter with Lucifer where he lost the use of his legs, and helps get Xavier to safety.
Sage interprets herself as having been brought into the margins of the X-Men to do Xavier’s dirty work (which was also hinted at in the X-Treme story), and implies that she’s repeating the cycle with Omega Red.
PAGES 14-16. Maverick defeats Sevyr.
Sevyr’s power is to bleed acid, which is why Maverick doesn’t want to just shoot him.
There’s a bit of a disconnect between the art, which shows the Mercs as a miscellany of alien races, and Sevyr’s dialogue, where he seems to see a force of mostly ordinary humans.
PAGES 17-19. Domino gets killed because Sage is unconscious.
This seems to be just a generic mission against XENO, the anti-mutant alliance from the early issues of the series. We haven’t heard from them in a while.
The Krakoan in page 19 panel 1 reads RECEIVING.
PAGE 20. The Mercs bring the pirates to the prison moon.
Sevyr rightly points out that this does not accord with even the Krakoans’ rudimentary standards of justice. Maverick is clearly aware that it’s a black ops site, but note that he seems to believe it was commissioned by “X-Force”, not simply by the Beast alone. If so, Maverick may believe that Wolverine is on side with this.
Curiously, the Krakoan word in the background of panel 2 is SHIELD.
PAGE 21. Data page: Beast explains that he’s built a secret prison where he can experiment on the prisoners without the Quiet Council finding out. This doesn’t seem like it can end well.
PAGES 22-24. Solem rescues Sevyr.
Solem was stolen and raised by Sevyr and eventually turned on him, as covered in Wolverine #15. They’re not friends, hence Sevyr’s understandable scepticism about Solem’s motivations. Also, as numerous issues of Wolverine have established, Solem is completely untrustworthy in general.
We last saw Solem in Wolverine #25, which ended with him voluntarily leaving for Hell with the Hand’s Hellbride. We don’t know how or why he returned, but he does allude to that story here (“having spent some time in Hell”), so it hasn’t been forgotten. Solem claims that his main interest in bringing down the prison is to get rid of it before he ends up there himself, but he also claims that after his stay in Hell, his “sympathy” lies with the sinners rather than their torturers. If so, this is a level of empathy and morality we haven’t seen from him before (which is to say, more than zero).
The T-shirt on the back of the prisoner no page 22 says SUBJECT at the top, so maybe the symbols below are numbers. The same word appears in the Beast’s display on page 23 panel 4.
PAGE 25. Trailers.
What the hell is Percy’s endgame even meant to be with Beast? Did the X-office sign off on a full-on “there is no redemption for Henry McCoy” arc or something? (Because we know how well those stick – hi Emma) Anything else is going to be trite at this point.
McCoy doing his best to make Pym the morally superior Hank despite both of them having done vile things
JFC.
Beast really is just doing a bad guy speedrun.
I mean, when you get to the point when literally every X-Men (mutant) villain is more sympathetic and less unhinged than him… (Including Magneto, Apocalypse, Sabretooth, Sinister, Omega Red, Selene, the Marauders, Juggernaut, Black Tom, Emplate…)
Is that it? Did they defang so many villains that their only option is to position previously heroic characters like Moira, Beast, and Karima as the new baddies?
Sinister.
Nimrod, outside of mutant circles.
I was thinking that maybe the current actions of Beast may be related to Sinister’s plan. Some sort of payoff to the mainly forgotten Hickman reveal that Sinister had years to sabotage Krakoa. It’s probably unrelated to the “Sins of Sinister” though.
As I recall, Steve Orlando said the reason he dug up Brimstone Love was because he had trouble finding a mutant villain who wasn’t undergoing a Krakoan redemption arc.
So yeah, apparently so.
“… but note that he seems to believe it was commissioned by “X-Force”, not simply by the Beast alone.”
Didn’t Beast recently say something like “I am X-Force”?
I’m willing to see where Percey is going with this. He’s had a ~15 year long arc of morally questionable behaviour, so it’s not like it’s a heel turn. Whereas Colossus has been stuck in sad-more for ages, Beast has actually consistently been put in situations that seem to validate an ends justify the means mentality. But his self-righteousness is more often the cause of problems than a solution.
Percy said he wanted X-Force to be the mutant CIA, and maybe he’s actually going to live up to that. After all, CIA abuses were widely exposed in the 1970s (the Church Committee was 1975), and that didn’t really seem to curb misbehaviour in the five decades since, eh? Or more importantly, public perception. (A 2019 Gallup poll found ratings of the CIA at 60% and the FBI at 57% positive job ratings, with a recent dip mostly tied to T***p supporters). The Chicago PD runs a black site in the middle of Chicago. A significant proportion of the population is happy to sign off on all kinds of abuse to preserve the illusion of safety.
Beast’s cynical, amoral utilitarianism here is only a slight caricature. I won’t be surprised if there’s a reset button of some sort, but at least his character arc seems to be building to something. In fact, a lot of the line is starting to feel like they’re teeing up an act change.
What’s the latest on Dark Beast? Because my head cannon right now is that this Hank is Dark Beast. Perhaps literally, perhaps through some botch in the resurrection process.
I liked the idea of it being Dark Beast, until that exact thing was done in House of 92. Surely they wouldn’t lampshade it in a novelty comic like that.
But at this point there’s no two ways about it, that can’t possibly be the (ahem) real McCoy. At the least he’s mind controlled or something. At first his immorality could be dismissed as shoddy writing, but I can’t see the powers that be allowing a founding X-Man and A-list property be turned into Mengele. That’s a bit beyond redemption.
Mike Carey, who’s run I generally adore, turned Cyclops into a literal war criminal (he ordered Beast to use the Legacy Virus against the invading Skrulls).
It just doesn’t come up.
Emma killed thousands of random Inhumans. It just doesn’t come up. (And, back to normal, nobody cares about the Inhumans).
Beast set off nuclear bombs – I think I’m correct it was multiple times? Certainly he atomic bombed a whole secret city of some kind of enemies whilst being an Avenger (a Secret Avenger, but still). Captain America told him it was okay in the next second.
And I think there was another nuclear bomb he used against a dimension the deranged Forge was bringing to Earth in Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men?
Come to think of that, I think both of those stories were by Ellis.
It just doesn’t come up.
So whilst what’s happening now is egregious… and technically beyond redemption…
…it might just not come up later.
Like nobody (in the comics, anyway) mentions Bishop wiped out life on a future Earth, whilst going after a newborn/toddler/adolescent/teenager.
*whose
My horse for an edit button, or something to that effect.
Percy’s been teeing up Beast for a full-tilt heel turn since X-Force #1, and equally been teeing him up for being brought low by his hubris. I can see the logic that since Krakoa’s redeeming so many X-villains, some of the heroes should go bad to balance things out. And Beast was a long way down that path already.
I could also see a scenario where modern Beast is put down by X-Force, and then they deliberately resurrect 90s Beast, with an old copy of his mind and his 70s-90s design, in the hopes that it’s the events that shaped him into a monster, and given a fresh-ish slate, he won’t turn out evil again. It’s very morally suspect to just decide to erase decades of a person’s life experience, but hell, it’s X-Force, ends justify the means. So the decade-plus arc of Beast going bad gets a proper payoff, but then we get classic Beast back in time for the new cartoon.
Ever since Percy made a point of Beast losing an eye, I’ve been wondering what the gimmick will be with his inevitable next resurrection. In a series big on dismemberment and body horror, a semi-permanent injury like that stands out. (And also positions him as a mutant Nick Fury, obviously.)
“I could also see a scenario where modern Beast is put down by X-Force, and then they deliberately resurrect 90s Beast, with an old copy of his mind and his 70s-90s design, in the hopes that it’s the events that shaped him into a monster, and given a fresh-ish slate, he won’t turn out evil again.”
Hey, have you heard about this awesome* 90s Avengers crossover called The Crossing? They did that with Teen Tony, and it lasted about a year until Onslaught.
*It was most definitely NOT awesome.
Yes, I remember. And how his first story was about getting lost on his college campus. Early Jim Cheung art, if I recall correctly. And the hideous short-lived alien War Machine armour. The only thing that was awesome about the Crossing was the sheer contempt radiating off the page as Busiek retconned it into dust.
That said, nobody had any affection for Teen Tony (who wasn’t really a pre-existing character) and nobody wanted adult Tony gone, much less the inept way they handled it. Whereas modern amoral Beast is controversial at best, while basically everyone liked old-school Beast. Percy’s escalated this to the point that either we’re all-in on Beast being evil, or there’s a reset button coming up.
It’s always a question of “is there one action that will forever taint the character?” For Hank Pym, he was unstable for years, but hitting Jan was the event that rendered him unsalvagable. That probably wouldn’t have stuck if it weren’t for a) it was violence against his wife and b) it was an act against a fellow hero. Even then while there was an immediate downturn for the character, it was years later that it actually came to sink him. Recall that the Hank Pym, Scientific Adventurer era took place after that and more or less forgot about it for his time on the West Coast Avengers.
Hank McCoy has been on the ethically dubious side for years, but his terrible behavior has yet to be aimed at another important character. All those examples for multiple characters that Krzysiek Ceran gave were for more or less nameless and faceless characters. Add on Jean Grey with Dark Phoenix’s destruction of the D’bari’s planent, but since those were unnamed characters, she has gotten a pass.
With Beast, I feel his tempting Sage into alcoholism could be the shove that pushes his reputation down the hole to never recover. It may pale in comparison to some of the other deeds, but it’s against a named character. It’s probably also something that will take about 5-10 years for people to declare it as being beyond the pale.
Hank Pym is odd, because there are other characters that have hit or tried to kill their (named) significant others but it’s been forgotten about. Peter hit a pregnant MJ, Reed slapped a panicking Sue, Ka-Zar hit Shanna, Flash hit Sha-Shan, Scott nearly killed Jean with his optic blasts in Simonson’s X-Factor, Storm stabbed Forge without hearing his side of the story, Rogue tried to kill Gambit, and Xavier started using his powers to mind-control Amelia Voght into changing her mind about leaving him. Oh, and Emma zapped the Hellions with her powers when they screwed up a training excercise and abused Firestar. For some reason, Hank Pym is the only one that it stuck to.
In any case, now that Beast has basically made Wolverine his slave, and forced him to kill people,I doubt that Hank’s reputation will recover from that.
I still think they have an easy out for Beast- blame his sociopathic actions on his current orc looking form and have him evolve/devolve into a different look again.
I think wife beater Pym became a meme before memes, so it stuck in a weird way the other people’s shtick mostly hasn’t.
Writers like Roger Stern, Steve Englehart, & Kurt Busiek have worked to make Hank Pym a viable character, and it never sticks. It’s probably for the best that he’s currently off the table.
I’m okay with Beast transitioning into irredeemable villain mode. He’s too far gone. All I want is to see his comeuppance. Will his actions bring down Krakoa? Someone upthread pointed out that the CIA hasn’t been shut down, and the US didn’t dissolve when its deeds came to light. Since this is the MU and Krakoa is populated by mutants, Beast’s attempts to preserve the nation might destroy it.
Oh, and to answer Serendal’s question, Dark Beast is very dead, having been killed by Magik during Rosenberg’s Uncanny run immediately pre-Krakoa. She teleports him partially into the ceiling partway, which cuts off his head. He also didn’t look anything like current Beast so it’d have to be that this is current Beast’s body with Dark Beast’s mind for some reason. But that doesn’t track with all the data pages, where Hank’s being self-righteously delusional about doing the wrong thing for the right reason, while Dark Beast absolutely would not care.
Whether the victim was “important” (which is already callous and cruel enough) is just one piece of the puzzle of when stigma endures.
The other piece is whether we want to excuse the perpetrator. Look at these comments – Hank is as good as half-excused already, we’re just waiting for anyone to give us a reason to.
(The real horror is that this comment applies equally to both fictional and real victims and perpetrators)
On the subject of Beast/possible Dark Beast: his resurrection after X-Force #18 seems like it would have been an opportunity for somebody with access to Cerebro to tinker with his backup a bit… and he’s always been Xavier’s choice to do the dirty work…
If we want to figure out “why Hank P.?” and not the others, it might help to think about the problem in terms of scapegoating. You want a single individual to absorb the blame for everyone’s actions, obviously, but who do you pick?
They need to be high profile enough to matter (in this case, an original Avenger), but not such a big deal that you can’t do without them (so not Captain America level). That way, they can always be at the edges of the story providing negative contrast to the other shining heroes.
They should also be someone with a history of instability you can exploit. Even in the ’60s, Hank and Jan were a difficult couple, if I’m reading my comic book history correctly. He once punched her out to save her from a fight? She tricked him into marrying her while he was dissociating? Not great. But a perfect justification for blame: he was always crazy!
Having Hank P. bear the full brunt of “miserable wife beater” gives Marvel leeway with their other characters. They’ve already got that angle covered, thanks. They don’t need another character/storyline to duplicate it. And you can’t shoulder Spider-man or Cyclops with that kind of burden because they’re beloved by children! Cyclops leads a team!
Hank’s not nearly as popular as those guys or as central to his own team as he was before, so: Sorry, buddy, you’ve found the character beats that you’re going to play out again and again even if some writers try to redeem you.
Maybe if some writer seriously tries to take Cyclops to task for his treatment of Madelyn, we can find a new scapegoat for this problem. But until then, it seems Hank Pym owns “spousal abuse” in the Marvel universe, at least in the comics.
Allan M said: Oh, and to answer Serendal’s question, Dark Beast is very dead, having been killed by Magik during Rosenberg’s Uncanny run immediately pre-Krakoa. She teleports him partially into the ceiling partway, which cuts off his head. He also didn’t look anything like current Beast so it’d have to be that this is current Beast’s body with Dark Beast’s mind for some reason.
True, though the Rosenberg’s run was was an exercise in killing off loads of characters with the behind-the-scenes knowledge that none of it was going to stick owning to the upcoming Hickman run and the resurrection plot device.
But that doesn’t track with all the data pages, where Hank’s being self-righteously delusional about doing the wrong thing for the right reason, while Dark Beast absolutely would not care.
I suppose the extra-clever fix would be to say that Dark Beast, like most other villains on Krakoa, has bought in. The even easier out is to tie this in to Sinister, who has a tangled history with Dark Beast; maybe the resurrection mixup could be explained as Sinister’s meddling?
I remain bemused that the Krakoan-era X-books decided to play Hank McCoy this way, and not, say, Dr. Nemesis, who is right there, has always been played as a somewhat amoral mad scientist, and entered Marvel continuity from Golden Age obscurity as a literal Nazi scientist.
Crossing was terrible, but it wasn’t the only time Iron Man has been rebooted — he was also rebooted during his Dark Reign arc to pre-CW, IIRC, and nobody has complained about that as much.
The Dark Beast speculation doesn’t really track with Percy’s run. Dark Beast hasn’t appeared or been referenced as of yet, and Percy is mainly only playing with the toys he’s already set out for himself. The out for McCoy is something that’s already appeared in his story, and I think if you re-check it’s pretty obvious that it’s Chronicler.
Before the Russia arc disappeared for the last year, the Chronicler was shown as manipulating people through writing, specifically, speechwriting for Putin, novel-writing for Colossus. I think he’s the one behind the weird-as-hell soliloquies Beast has been giving about how he’s so good at being bad or the ends justifying the means or whatever.
If you re-read X-Force 23 & 24, I think there are some clues pointing to Beast also being influenced, as well as Putin and Colossus. The “what if I were a Russian nesting doll” monologue from Beast certainly sounds like some Russian novelist wankery, and the other arc in the story, Beast having his body compromised by the doll, is being paralleled strongly to Colossus having his mind compromised. But there’s no actual reason both couldn’t be getting manipulated.
The other major, and important, reason I assume Xeno is playing Beast is because Beast is simply bad at his job at the X-CIA director. Many of the missions he’s sent the team into — running into a Xeno trap deliberately, Terra Verde — have been disasters, but he never seems to recognize his own failure.
@Msthias X- the problem is that the dialogue makes it clear that the Chronicler can only control Peter because he has a close relative nearby- i.e. Mikhail. I can’t imagine Beast’s mom or dad helping the Chronicler.
He doesn’t say his power requires a close relative nearby — it just says he needs a muse as a focusing agent. “Something … that I study from every angle and know the shadowy corners of even better than I know myself.” He then says that “Through his brother, I know him as a brother.” Chronicler needs some kind of muse or something he can study, not definitively a blood relative and possibly not even a person, just an agent he can “study from every angle.” This is a loose enough definition may well be sufficiently inspired by an old trading card or football cleats to write about Beast.
“True, though the Rosenberg’s run was was an exercise in killing off loads of characters with the behind-the-scenes knowledge that none of it was going to stick owning to the upcoming Hickman run and the resurrection plot device.”
I still LOATHED that run. Not only was it miserable and mean-spirited, it presented some characters woefully off-model in terms of presentation and treatment. It was murder porn and even knowing (afterwards) that they were all going to come back didn’t erase the fact that we sat through a mutant snuff film from a writer who didn’t always seem to get the characters.
Something I haven’t seen anyone point out: The black cable stabbing Forge and jacking him into the phantasm talk with Darwin — Serafina also uses a black cable as her main power signature during the Mike Carey run.
Forge’s “fake world” trap for the Children is also very similar to the fake lifetime she made Cannonball live. I don’t think that conversation with Darwin was real at all, or if it is, Serafina was part of it.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/f1e644c87973c4298648d5599996bf8c/tumblr_nxlslmWsDo1rvm5qqo1_540.jpg
(disregard that, meant to post to the thread for X-Men)
Cyclops dying from the Terrigen cloud seemed to bypass the need for him to redeem himself when he came back and if Krakoa did one good thing then it least it derailed the ‘Emma goes evil again because she lost her man’ arc that was going on.
I wonder if the fact that no-one has wanted to go back and explain exactly how things went from the post-Rosenberg/Age of X-Man setup to the Krakoa era still matters or whether it’s just that there’s not really a story there?
Anyway, I reckon this is the ‘real’ Beast, he’ll probably die and come back at some point in the future and there won’t be any fundamental change to his status quo or how people see him, he is, after all, a ‘Well Intentioned Extremist’ and not a ‘Crazy Broad’ like Wanda.
Except there was very little for Cyclops to redeem himself from. Well, the murder of Xavier, but really, if Jean gets to eat a planet, Scott can have a little patricide as a treat when under the influence of Dark Phoenix.
And the whole ‘everybody hates Cyclops’ thing from the Inhumans Everywhere era was incredibly stupid as finally revealed in Death of X.
Now, I think I’m more positive about the Rosenberg run then most here. But whatever else it may be, it finally ended Schism and brought Logan and Scott back as two guys who respect each other and can work together, even if they sometimes hate each other.
As for the pre-Krakoa to Krakoa transformation – there would have been a story there, if Hickman played with the status quo as it was at the time instead of disregarding it completely. Jean set up the concept of a UN-recognised mutant nation in X-Men Red (a nation without a homeland at the time). Xavier was having a new dream as of the end of Soule’s Astonishing X-Men – and was working behind the scenes without revealing himself to the X-Men as being alive again.
There was a way to get from that to Krakoa organically, but that would require Xavier working with Jean. Instead Jean was kept in the dark and Krakoa happened because Xavier, Magneto and Moira made it so.
And I think that doesn’t gel. And there’s no point in going back and trying to make it gel.
How did Jean and Betsy get their powers switched, anyway?
@Krzysiek-
“Except there was very little for Cyclops to redeem himself from. Well, the murder of Xavier, but really, if Jean gets to eat a planet, Scott can have a little patricide as a treat when under the influence of Dark Phoenix.”
Scott also tried to destroy the world when he was Dark Phoenix. Admittedly, Rachel also tried to destroy the world during Secret Wars II and everyone forgot about it a few years later, so it looks like the X-Men consider trying to destroy the world when you’re the Phoenix no big deal.
The Krakoa setup has exacerbated a deeper issue in superhero books, which is that long-term characterization has become really easy to throw out.
At this point, we’ve got so many ways a character might be behaving strangely, from the X-book standard version of mind control to dying in Otherworld and coming back wrong to turning out to be someone’s programmed clone or someone being restored from an outdated backup or they’re really someone’s alternate-timeline doppelganger.
In a couple of cases, past characterization is shaded by the retcon that they may have been part of Moria’s big plan, or just that they’ve connected with a powerful influencer on Krakoa (i.e., Rictor, apprentice mage to Apocalypse).
And powers can shift at a whim: it was a secondary mutation! They made a deal with Mother Righteous!
Now, in theory, that’s quite possible in any superhero comic — witness Spider-Man’s years of problems with clone switches and Mysterio-based retcons and deals with Mephisto and so forth.
But the current X-titles have so many of these things in play at once that any character mysteriously acting differently or starting to go too far could have just about any explanation, and a character can utterly change in core concept pretty quickly.
Wherever this all goes next, my sense is that quite a lot of these plot devices will have to be written out or rolled back.
Michael said: Scott also tried to destroy the world when he was Dark Phoenix. Admittedly, Rachel also tried to destroy the world during Secret Wars II and everyone forgot about it a few years later, so it looks like the X-Men consider trying to destroy the world when you’re the Phoenix no big deal.
In fairness, “trying to destroy the world when you’re the Phoenix is no big deal” turned out to be the premise of Avengers Vs. X-Men and its follow-up titles.
@Michael
I say this with tongue in cheek, but it’s only a problem for a character if they succeed in blowing up the world. Trying, well, there are loads of villains who try and it’s rarely held against them.
@K
It wasn’t my intention to excuse anything the characters did, only to admit that I have no confidence in anything they do will “stick” to the character. It takes years of external pressure for that to happen, and it isn’t clear to me on what sort of event will really do it and what the community gives a pass.
I don’t think there’s any value in telling a story to bridge the end of Rosenberg and Krakoa. That run of Uncanny and Age of X-Man was a calendar filling buffer to bridge Disassembled and HoXPoX because Hickman and co weren’t ready to launch. That gap is for the better.