{"id":10319,"date":"2024-08-21T20:41:04","date_gmt":"2024-08-21T19:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10319"},"modified":"2024-08-22T09:08:43","modified_gmt":"2024-08-22T08:08:43","slug":"phoenix-2-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10319","title":{"rendered":"Phoenix #2 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>PHOENIX #2<\/strong>
\nWriter: Stephanie Phillips<\/strong>
\nArtist: Alessandro Miracolo<\/strong>
\nColour artist: David Curiel<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Annalise Bissa<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHOENIX:<\/strong><\/p>\n

She’s still running around answering every interstellar distress call she can find, and she’s still terrifying to all the aliens she’s trying to rescue. We’re told that she doesn’t require food, oxygen and so forth, but that she’s still “exhausted” – presumably emotionally, though I suppose it could mean that because she has a human mind, she still needs sleep. She doesn’t much like or trust Corsair, but see below regarding this book’s take on Corsair.<\/p>\n

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Corsair <\/strong>is rescued by Phoenix from a damaged spaceship which is about to explode. According to Corsair’s account – which it’s strongly suggested that we should be very sceptical about –\u00a0 the Starjammers have abandoned him “for no good reason”. This has prompted him to try and become a hero. He started investigating a series of disappearances from Gameworld (the casino planet that featured prominently in Gerry Duggan’s X-Men<\/em> run), and discovered that the captives were being smuggled away by the Black Order to a small moon in a nearby star system. He says that the Black Order shot at his ship, which is why it was damaged when Phoenix found him.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Phoenix is deeply sceptical that the Black Order have nothing better to do than kidnap people from Gameworld. Corsair also claims that he was trying to find Phoenix for help, but that doesn’t quite make sense, because his ship was on the verge of falling apart, and it was a straightforward proximity alert that drew Phoenix’s attention. Nonetheless, the moon Corsair identifies really does have a bunch of aliens help captive by the Black Order, so at least part of Corsair’s account seems to be true.<\/p>\n

This book has a very unusual interpretation of Corsair. It takes his space pirate gimmick literally and thus portrays him as an incorrigible, untrustworthy rogue, a would-be charmer who Jean sees straight through, and someone for whom heroic acts would be a surprising new turn. Cyclops tells us that “He’s a pirate, Jean… He lies and cheats to get what he wants, and I don’t think he’s capable of anything close to remorse.” Phoenix seems to agree.<\/p>\n

The Starjammers’ billing as pirates always implied that they were involved in much dodgier things than they were shown doing on the page. And Cyclops and Corsair have always had a strained relationship based in large part on Corsair choosing not to return to Earth and reunite with his family when he had the chance. Even so, Corsair has been written consistently as a trusted ally of the X-Men for somewhere north of 40 years by this point, and the bottom line is that his depiction in this story feels incredibly out of character.<\/p>\n

Cyclops<\/strong> is still having long-range chats with Jean, as in the previous issue. He’s in this issue partly to remind us that he exists and partly to stress how awful this Corsair guy is.<\/p>\n

VILLAINS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Black Order<\/strong> used to be Thanos’ henchmen, but they’ve largely been off doing their own thing in the last couple of years. For whatever reason, they’re abducting alien civilians to a freezing moon, which turns out to have a lot of dead Asgardians lying around. Only two of the group actually appear in this issue: Proxima Midnight and Black Dwarf. Corsair draws our attention to the absence of the rest.<\/p>\n

Perrikus<\/strong> and\u00a0Adani\u00a0<\/strong>are still off in their subplot, which has yet to tie in with the main plot. Adani buries her father, who was killed by Perrikus last issue. Perrikus then apparently recruits her as a follower and shares power with her. Her narration – which we established last issue is given with years of hindsight – claims that Perrikus only takes an interest in her as a matter of amusement, and that her own motivation is simply to survive.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, if we look at what Perrikus actually does<\/em>, he seems to be advancing an argument against religious belief, which does resonate with Adani’s views. He behaves as if he honestly wants to take her under his wing. In his view, religious people think that belief gives them power, but power is nothing to do with that at all. In his original Thor<\/em> stories from the late 90s, Perrikus was the god of power in his pantheon.<\/p>\n

Perrikus is much more philosophical here than he was in Thor<\/em>. In those stories, he had just escaped from millennia of imprisonment and his main motivation was to get revenge on Thor for an earlier defeat. We never really saw what he was like when he was left to go about his business. The best source on that is Thor<\/em> #9 (1999), which has a flashback to the Dark Gods’ world at the point when the Asgardians first discovered them. In that story, the Dark Gods have a subjugated human-like population worshipping them, and offering up child sacrifices. Perrikus himself doesn’t appear in that flashback, but it makes sense that in his experience, worshipping the gods – including himself – is a dead end.<\/p>\n

OTHER SPECIFICS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Page 10 panel 5: “Let me ask you something, child. Your father … what did he love most in this universe?”<\/strong> Adani’s father was a religious hardliner, as seen in the previous issue – Perrikus’ implication is that he loved God more than his daughter.<\/p>\n

Page 13 panel 5: “And leaving my sons behind on Earth…”<\/strong> Corsair was abducted to outer space by the Shi’ar, as shown in Cyclops’ origin flashback in Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #156. But he could reasonably be referring to his decision to return to space even after being reunited with them.<\/p>\n

Page 17 panel 2: <\/strong>The two aliens in the foreground are Skrulls, obviously. The blue guy in the background with the red fin on his head is a Centaurian, the same species as Yondu from the original Guardians of the Galaxy. The rest seem to be generics.<\/p>\n

Page 23 panel 1: “Is Supergiant around by any chance? Maybe I could fight Corvus Glaive?”<\/strong> Other members of the Black Order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. PHOENIX #2 Writer: Stephanie Phillips Artist: Alessandro Miracolo Colour artist: David Curiel Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Annalise Bissa PHOENIX: She’s still running around answering every interstellar distress call she can find, and she’s still terrifying to all the aliens she’s trying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10319"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10323,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10319\/revisions\/10323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}