{"id":11160,"date":"2025-06-20T23:58:28","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T22:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11160"},"modified":"2025-06-20T23:58:28","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T22:58:28","slug":"psylocke-8-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11160","title":{"rendered":"Psylocke #8 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>PSYLOCKE vol 2 #8<\/strong>
\n“Into the Snow”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Alyssa Wong<\/strong>
\nArtist: Mois\u00e9s Hidalgo<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Ariana Maher<\/strong>
\nEditor: Darren Shan<\/strong><\/p>\n

PSYLOCKE<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

John Greycrow.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

Devon Di Angelo.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

Shinobi Shaw. <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Psylocke<\/em> vol 1 #4.<\/p>\n

Mitsuki. <\/strong>The merged-body ghost thing which is following Psylocke around claims to be Mitsuki, her childhod training partner.\u00a0Her 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>; a tengu, which is indeed associated with mountains<\/a>;\u00a0 and a nobiagari, which is a sort of shape-changing thing that stretches up to confront people<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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

Master Hayashi.<\/strong> 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.\u00a0That 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<\/em> among of posturing.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The thief of the Equinox Blade. <\/strong>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.”\u00a0The Equinox Blade previously appeared in the Legend of Shang-Chi<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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

PSYLOCKE vol 2 #8 “Into the Snow” Writer: Alyssa Wong Artist: Mois\u00e9s 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 […]<\/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-11160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160","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=11160"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11162,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160\/revisions\/11162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}