X-Force #39 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #39
“Internal Affairs”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: Guru-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Colossus and Wolverine (Laura) in action.
PAGES 2-7. The Quiet Council discuss the Beast.
Wolverine‘s appearance here is a direct repeat of page 11 of Wolverine #32. In the original scene, Wolverine has just marched into the Quiet Council chamber and dumped the body of the Beast (complete with the fungal boobytraps seen earlier in that issue). Wolverine complains about Beast being given “carte blanche”, and refuses Professor X’s request to talk about it privately. That scene ends with the first three lines of dialogue here. Wolverine’s brief exchange with Sage as he leaves the room is new.
The Quiet Council. As in Wolverine #32, Nightcrawler and Mr Sinister are both missing, without explanation. This avoids the need to address their status quo changes in Legion of X and Immortal X-Men.
MGH. Mutant Growth Hormone. I think this is referring to stories suggesting that MGH was somehow derived from the serum that Beast used to turn himself furry during his 1970s Amazing Adventures solo series – which is a bit of an odd thing to criticise him for.
Legacy Virus. Again, a slightly odd thing to focus on. Back in Uncanny X-Men #390, Beast developed a cure for the Legacy Virus which (through an incredible plot contrivance) required someone to die in order to activate it. None of this is that dodgy.
“Traitor to the X-Men, ally to the Inhumans”. Again, this is a bit of a stretch. During the period when Marvel was desperately trying to push the Inhumans as the new X-Men, there was a storyline where the release of Terrigen Mist into the atmosphere was causing mutants to fall ill. Beast did go to work with the Inhumans to work on a cure, in Uncanny Inhumans #1, but that was with Storm’s agreement. Emma is probably referring to the fact that Beast tried to warn the Inhumans that the X-Men were planning to attack in Inhumans vs X-Men.
Terra Verde. The micronation that he took over with organic tech earlier in this series; apparently we’re still going with the idea that the entire population of this state have all agreed to play along and not tell anyone about the time they and all their friends were mind controlled by a foreign power.
Threnody. This is a better example – in X-Men vol 2 #27, Beast makes the decision to leave the vulnerable Threnody with Mr Sinister on the grounds that he might be able to make use of her to find a cure for the Legacy Virus. This is something you can sensibly point to as a forerunner for his recent characterisation.
#XSpoilers is a hashtag used for discussion of new X-Men comics on the declining social media network Twitter. If you’re reading this in the future, hi! Remember Twitter? It was weird, wasn’t it?
“Tessa.” This is the name Sage used when she was working as an undercover agent at the Hellfire Club; she hasn’t used it much in years and it isn’t her real name. The implication seems to be that Xavier is a bit out of touch with her.
“You all received the psychic briefing.” Presumably referring to page 11 panel 3 of Wolverine #32, where Emma is certainly doing something telepathic, though it reads more like she’s reading Wolverine’s mind than communicating to everyone else.
“Is Beast an enemy of Krakoa?” This, of course, is a different question from “Is he a bad guy?” Plenty of bad guys are allied with Krakoa, and Beast isn’t in any conventional sense an enemy of Krakoa. He might well be a dangerous liability, but that’s a different question. At any rate, Xavier, Emma and Shaw all seem to be of the view that as long as Beast is out there attacking enemies of Krakoa, it’s probably in their interests to let him keep at it. The idea that these operations are diplomatically deniable seems a bit of a strain, though. Beast has previous appeared in public as a Krakoan official.
“He killed Wolverine.” In Wolverine #27.
“Wolverine responded with a crime of his own.” In Wolverine #30; it’s fair to say that Wolverine deliberately kills Beast, who isn’t attacking him at the time, without making any attempt to subdue him.
Colossus, of course, is still under the psychic influence of Chronicler, and thus the indirect control of his brother Mikhail. Thus, putting him in charge of the Krakoan security apparatus – even under the more sensible leadership of Sage – is a disaster waiting to happen.
PAGE 8. Data page – another passage from Chronicler’s writing, which he uses to control Colossus from a distance.
The “stones that listen to whispered conversations” are the bugs created by Beast and Forge earlier in the series.
PAGE 9. Recap and credits.
PAGE 10. Sevyr Blackmore decides to release Beast’s experiments.
Blackmore seized control of Beast’s black ops prison in issue #35, though it was presented in that issue as more of a riot and prison break. You’d have thought that X-Force would have gone back to try and liberate the place, but… no, apparently not.
PAGES 11-13. The new X-Force headquarters is created.
This is replacing the giant skull thing that Beast marched into the sea with in Wolverine #31. Sage is obviously going for something a bit more friendly.
PAGE 14. Data page. Sage assures us that her X-Force is going to have at least some proper moral values to underpin its actions, even as she acknowledges that varying degrees of dodgy behaviour will be unavoidable.
PAGES 15-19. Sage recruits Wolverine (Laura).
So apparently Logan is leaving the team here, rather than sticking around to help Sage sort it out.
The characters playing Sage’s drinking game are Juggernaut, Blob and Strong Guy, all of whom are much bigger than her. I suppose we’re going with the idea that healers are so prevalent on Krakoa that these characters are happy with a bit of casual maiming, which seems kind of out of character for all three of them, honestly.
Wolverine presents herself as a loner, but the answer to “what have you been doing with that power lately” is that she was a member of the X-Men, and then she was in X-Terminators.
“Quentin goes missing.” Quentin Quire vanished while defeating Cerebrax in issue #29 and hasn’t been seen since.
“Jean quits.” Way back in issue #10.
PAGES 20-23. Beast’s bio-experiments crashland on Krakoa.
Or at least, that’s presumably what these things are. Are we really doing “Wolverine learns the pleasure of being greeted as a hero?” After she spent a year with the X-Men? Come on.
PAGE 24. Kid Omega returns.
Well, obviously Quentin has been away for a while. This isn’t quite the costume he was wearing when he disappeared, but it’s fairly similar – the omega designs have become less prominent, though. He seems to be carrying some sort of Soulsword type thing, again with an omega design built into the base of the blade.
PAGE 25. Trailers.
I guess Laura’s introductory scene here isn’t QUITE as stupid a misreading of character as when Percy had Wolverine and Daken stabbing themselves in the brain for laughs, but it’s in the conversation.
Oh, I’m going to have a problem with Percy’s handling of Laura.
It comes down to writing her as ‘Logan with tits’, but somehow other writers who went down this path didn’t have her drinking heavily and engaging in recreational violence, which makes it immediately much worse for me.
And she’s my favourite character from this cast, so. That’s going to be fun for me.
It feels very telling about Percy as a writer that his attempts to warp Beast into always having been extremely immoral involved at least 3 things that just straight up don’t match what actually happened in those stories.
I’ve said it before but Morrison handled Beast as a flawed character so perfectly and even Bendis, who I have extremely little tolerance for, at least tried to have something a little more balanced than what Percy has been trying. Feels like Beast’s arc has been representative of all the worse aspects of Krakoa-era stuff.
Re: the Legacy Virus- I think the reference is to the time when Cyclops had Beast use the Legacy Virus on the Skrulls, even though they had an antidote. THAT arguably qualifies as shady, but Scott deserves a lot of the blame as well.
Re: Threnody- Threnody’s problem was that her powers were causing uncontrollable explosions and she couldn’t be around people without risking hurting them. Threnody agreed to go with Sinister if he’d fix that, although she wasn’t very lucid at the time due to her powers causing her to feel deaths, and Sinister did help with that, which Beast didn’t think the X-Men could do. And Beast did go back later to check on her and she didn’t regret her decision to go with Sinister. But turning a black homeless woman over to a British mad scientist to experiment on does have Unfortunate Implications.
Re: Wolverine killing Beast- Beast had just shot Wolverine’s friend Jeff and he knew that Beast could be resurrected. Arguably it’s no different than a hero tying up a villain who has just committed a murder. Certainly not comparable to Beast’s behavior.
Note that Beast isn’t just attacking the X-Men’s enemies- he put Maddie Bannister in a coma. Of course, the X-Men also gave Lilandra a slap on the wrist for nearly killing Maddie Pryor and didn’t care that Storm almost drowned Maddie Pryor. Clearly, the X-Men’s code against killing doesn’t apply to people named Maddie.
I think the problem with the Colossus subplot is that the Ukraine war hasn’t just created the perception of Russia as cruel- it’s caused people to perceive them as cruel and INCOMPETENT. See their taking months to capture Bakhmut and accidentally bomibng their own city for the most recent examples. The audience is probably half expecting Colossus to escape because Mikhail forgot to supply Chronicler with paper or something like that.
How could any reader still support Krakoa and think they were the good guys after reading this stuff?
Baffling.
Laura casually stabbing Cain and Guido while playing drinking games suggests that Percy doesn’t quite get any of those characters. Just… why and what? And why?
I don’t buy any of these:
Beast’s actions “are *truly* deniable operations” as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
Wolverine’s “crime” in response to Beast’s crime complicates the question of Beast’s guilt — “no easy answers”.
“Wolverines don’t do teams.”
Indeed, Karl_H. Those are ludicrious claims.
I’m starting to shift this from ‘not caring because it’s dumb’ to ‘actively disliking’. To be slightly fair to him about Laura, Logan also has a history of fairly sudden mood swings between near-psychotic violent madness and cuddly school headmaster but yes, if he wants to write a darker Laura the answer isn’t to go through a script of typical Logan antics and just do a cut-and-replace on his name for hers.
This entire issue read like Ben said to himself, “what if I write this like X-Men Red, Immortal X-Men, Adjectiveless X-Men, but then just made each scene about 35% dumber?”
With regard to the Legacy virus, Hank opposed using it against the Skrulls. He was against violence in the IvX book. You can say it was cowardly, but it was the opposite of how he is in X-Force.
One could bring up how he was some kind of representative of the Hydra-affiliated mutant nation of New Tian, so at best he was turning a blind eye to all the nazi stuff going on in the US for a chance to carve out a mutant kingdom (out of… California, was it?), and at worst he was actively collaborating with said nazis.
But of course to do that would invite people to remember that it was Emma, evil after the stupidity of IvX, who was maybe secretly the puppet master of New Tian.
And, of course, doing anything of the sort would require bringing up Secret Empire, and I think we all pretend it didn’t happen.
On an unrelated note, what is it with the x-office bringing up Tian again and again?