{"id":10811,"date":"2025-02-21T17:41:45","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10811"},"modified":"2025-02-21T17:41:45","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:41:45","slug":"x-force-8-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10811","title":{"rendered":"X-Force #8 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

There are a ridiculous number of new titles out this week \u2013 eight ongoing titles in total, plus one miniseries \u2013 so I won\u2019t be doing annotations for all of them.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>X-FORCE vol 7 #8<\/strong>
\n“The Devil’s Lesson”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Geoffrey Thorne<\/strong>
\nArtist: Marcus To<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Erick Arciniega<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Caramagna<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

X-FORCE:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Forge.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

Captain Britain.<\/strong> She can make magical protection wards using her sword.<\/p>\n

Askani.<\/strong> The psychic regulators that Forge gave her last issue seem to work well.<\/p>\n

Tank.<\/strong> He’s the first to attack “Colossus”, although the guy has<\/em> 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<\/em>).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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

Sage.<\/strong> 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.)<\/p>\n

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

La Diabla. <\/strong>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<\/em>. The full passage is:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut 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?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Colossus.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

Dr Howard Avery.<\/strong> He’s a character from Journey into Mystery<\/em> #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<\/em> #33 (2015). He’s being coerced here by La Diabla.<\/p>\n

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

Title: The title “The Devil’s Lesson” follows “The Devil in Heaven” in issue #7 and “The Devil is a Liar” in issue #6.<\/p>\n

Page 4: Symkaria is the home country of Silver Sable. Starcore is (or was) a space station associated with Dr Peter Corbeau.<\/p>\n

Page 12: Betsy was indeed a model back when she was a supporting character in\u00a01970s\u00a0Captain Britain<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 eight ongoing titles in total, plus one miniseries \u2013 so I won\u2019t be doing annotations for all of them. X-FORCE vol 7 #8 “The Devil’s Lesson” Writer: Geoffrey Thorne […]<\/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-10811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811","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=10811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10815,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811\/revisions\/10815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}