{"id":4884,"date":"2019-11-28T22:25:44","date_gmt":"2019-11-28T22:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4884"},"modified":"2019-11-28T22:25:59","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T22:25:59","slug":"x-force-2-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4884","title":{"rendered":"X-Force #2 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>As always, page numbers go by the digital edition, and this will be full of spoilers.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Kid Omega and Wolverine fighting lab-grown thingies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 1-2.<\/strong> <em>The mutants of Krakoa gather around the fallen Professor X, and Magneto gives a brief eulogy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;This was your plan, your island, your future.&#8221;<\/strong> Or such is the official line, anyway &#8211; this seems to have been at least as much Moira&#8217;s plan, but that&#8217;s secret. Naturally, Magneto makes the point that if Xavier can be brought back from the dead, nothing will change. The problem is that, as shown in <em>House of X<\/em>, Professor X himself has been essential to the process of restoring the backed-up minds from Cerebro, and no other telepath has been taught how to do it yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Professor X<\/strong> is seen without his Cerebro helmet for the first time in the Hickman run, outside flashbacks. Previous stories even went out of their way to avoid showing his face when he was unmasked, but there seems to be nothing unusual about his appearance here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The gathered mutants<\/strong> are mostly people we already knew were on the island. The recognisable ones are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Starting at the top and working broadly left to right (ignoring a few uncostumed randoms at the back), a volcano\/lava woman who&#8217;s presumably <strong>Magma<\/strong>, though she normally doesn&#8217;t look this rocky, and it begs the question of why she isn&#8217;t with the New Mutants.<\/li><li><strong>Gentle<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Archangel<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Selene <\/strong>(the former Black Queen)<\/li><li><strong>Gambit<\/strong>, presumably appearing here between <em>Excalibur<\/em> #1-2<\/li><li><strong>Strong Guy<\/strong> from X-Factor<\/li><li><strong>Shark Girl<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Callisto<\/strong>, former leader of the Morlocks<\/li><li><strong>Cable<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Warpath<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Banshee<\/strong><\/li><li>Three of the <strong>Stepford Cuckoos<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>The Beast<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Jubilee<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Havok<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Forge<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Feral<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Wolverine<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Apocalypse<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Black Tom Cassidy<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Firestar<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Cyclops<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Shatterstar<\/strong> (who&#8217;s surely an alien rather than a mutant?)<\/li><li><strong>Psylocke II (Kwannon)<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Bishop<\/strong>, presumably returning from Taiwan through a gate in response to the news.<\/li><li><strong>Anole<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Aurora <\/strong>and <strong>Northstar<\/strong>, who were indeed mentioned as being on the island in <em>X-Men<\/em> #2<\/li><li><strong>Nightcrawler<\/strong><\/li><li>Jumping to the bottom tier, some less likely characters, and some hard to identify ones. The guy with the pony tail on the left beneath Magneto&#8217;s cape is <strong>Gideon<\/strong>, an X-Force and Cable villain. He was last seen in <em>Cable<\/em> #153 (2018).<\/li><li>Below him, the guy in the funny shaped hat is <strong>the Changeling<\/strong>, wearing his Factor Three costume! Changeling died all the way back in <em>X-Men<\/em> #42 (1968), per a later retcon which revealed that he had been impersonating Professor X at the time (in other words, they killed off Xavier, and used Changeling to explain it away when he was brought back two years later). This is the first time we&#8217;ve been shown that Cerebro has back-ups of characters who died <em>that <\/em>far back. <\/li><li>Below him, the elephant guy is <strong>Mammomax<\/strong>, who was briefly a member of Exodus&#8217;s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants during the Chuck Austen run. He was eaten by a monster in <em>New X-Men<\/em> #34 (2007).<\/li><li>I don&#8217;t recognise the person with the black ponytail.<\/li><li><strong>Daken<\/strong>, easily recognisable from his tattoos.<\/li><li><strong>The Blob<\/strong><\/li><li>Somebody with energy effects on the hair and hands, who I don&#8217;t recognise.<\/li><li>A green guy who I don&#8217;t recognise.<\/li><li>Somebody in another funny shaped helmet and a cape.<\/li><li><strong>Xorn<\/strong>.<\/li><li>Someone with long hair and a purple cape.<\/li><li>Since the guy in the leather jacket can&#8217;t be Chamber (who&#8217;s in space in <em>New Mutants<\/em>), it&#8217;s probably meant to be <strong>Wither<\/strong> from the 2003 <em>New Mutants <\/em>run. He was killed in the X-Necrosha storyline in 2010.<\/li><li><strong>Rockslide<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Pixie<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>Dr Nemesis<\/strong> <\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 3-4.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;Long live the king&#8221; <\/strong>refers, obviously, to &#8220;The king is dead, long live the king&#8221;, which <em>normally<\/em> carries the implication that the role of monarch has transferred seamlessly to the heir. In this case, of course, it&#8217;s more literal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The title is <strong>&#8220;The Sword of Damocles&#8221;<\/strong>, which traditionally refers to the idea that people in positions of power face the ever-present threat of catastrophe (the original sword hung over a throne by a hair). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 5-6.<\/strong> <em>The X-Men get to work on resurrecting Professor X.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This, of course, involves trying to get the back-up system working without him. The obvious plot question is why this hasn&#8217;t been tried during his lifetime when it seems so essential &#8211; and why Xavier was putting himself in harm&#8217;s way as he did last issue, by going out to hostile locations without proper guards. Beast specifically draws our attention to all this (&#8220;I could never understand why the Professor would make himself so vulnerable&#8221;) in a way that rather suggests it&#8217;s a plot point. (Although of course it was a classic strategy in the nineties to hint that something would be explained and then hope it deferred the problem long enough for everyone to forget about it&#8230; so we&#8217;ll see.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;At any time, only one version of Cerebro can be live.&#8221;<\/strong> Why? Is this a rule of practice or a physical limitation? What&#8217;s to stop someone else building one?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGE 8.<\/strong> Data page on the assassination, largely recapping the previous issue. The main new point is that it flags the similarity between the assassins and the Reavers, which wasn&#8217;t explicit in last issue&#8217;s story, although it was in the script. Curiously, the Reavers are described as &#8220;believed to be disbanded&#8221; &#8211; in fact, they were last seen in <em>Astonishing X-Men<\/em> #17 (2018) when they were defeated yet again by the X-Men and arrested by ONE (who probably let them go).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We&#8217;re also told that a daily EMP blast will be used to wipe out all traditional electronics on the island. This seems a bit harsh on the mutants with cyborg limbs but perhaps they can pop through a gate. It also begs the question of how much contact the inhabitants of Krakoa have with the outside world, at least if they choose not to go through a gate &#8211; where do they get their news from?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 9-11.<\/strong> <em>Cecilia Reyes autopsies the Reavers<\/em> <em>and catalogues their many enhancements.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Reavers are clearly very enhanced humans, of the sort that Hickman&#8217;s mythology warns us to be very worried about. As strongly hinted last issue, they got past Krakoa&#8217;s defences by confusing it using skin grafts from Domino.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wolverine seems to suggest that the stored memories in Cerebro can only be accessed through a resurrection, which would <em>slightly<\/em> alleviate the privacy implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sage<\/strong>.<strong> <\/strong>The woman in yellow is Sage &#8211; not actually named clearly in the dialogue, and not in her usual outfit, but the recap page makes clear that it&#8217;s her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 12-14.<\/strong> Wolverine investigates at the Seoul airport where the Reavers&#8217; flight took off, and runs into Kid Omega.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Kid Omega.<\/strong> Quentin Quire was introduced in <em>New X-Men<\/em> #134 (2003) and has hung around ever since as the X-Men&#8217;s resident troublesome radical brat. Despite starting off as a villain, he&#8217;s broadly a good guy these days, albeit a hugely obnoxious one. He was last seen as a member of the West Coast Avengers, of all things. For years, his trademark has been slogan T-shirts, but he&#8217;s gone back here to the black and red stripes from his earliest appearances. Kid Omega is not normally as mutant-supremacist as he is here, although it would have been more in character for his earlier years. But he&#8217;s upset about Xavier&#8217;s death, which could be part of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;<em>Meomchwo<\/em>&#8220;<\/strong> = &#8220;Stop it!&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGE 15.<\/strong> <em>Beast and Marvel Girl work on the back-up Cerebro.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;Deliver our souls from the sword.&#8221;<\/strong> Another Sword of Damocles reference. Beast describes this as coming from a prayer. It&#8217;s actually from Psalm 22 (the one that starts &#8220;My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?&#8221; and ends by praising God for His belated deliverance). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 16-17.<\/strong> <em>Wolverine and Kid Omega trace the bad guys to a printing press.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The sign in Korean outside the plant just says it&#8217;s a printer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;The gods of their future&#8230;&#8221;<\/strong> Kid Omega has taken on some of the pro-mutant rhetoric that Magneto was bandying about in <em>House of X <\/em>#1. He was a big fan of Magneto in his early <em>New X-Men <\/em>appearances too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 18-20.<\/strong> <em>Sage and Marvel Girl continue examining the Reavers, and Jean tries reading the survivor&#8217;s mind, getting a hazy image.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s an image of the mask and peacock-design tattoo of the bad guys&#8217; leader from issue #1, but Jean doesn&#8217;t know that. Mostly, this scene continues making the point about how post-human the Reavers are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;I&#8217;m good at reading code, Jean. Not minds.&#8221;<\/strong> Um. Sage&#8217;s basic power is meant to be that she has a supercomputer brain &#8211; in other words, she&#8217;s great at anything that involves crunching data. But she <em>is<\/em> a telepath &#8211; that was introduced in <em>X-Men <\/em>#29 (1994), quite possibly as an error, but it&#8217;s stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGE 21.<\/strong> Data page about Domino&#8217;s investigation in to &#8220;Phineas Hook&#8221;, who turns out with hindsight to have been a trick to lure her in. Hook as in Line and Sinker, presumably. The name doesn&#8217;t seem to have any other significance, though Phineas Hook was the name of the villain in the 1936 film <em>Song of the Saddle<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 22-25.<\/strong> <em>Wolverine and Kid Omega find Domino, who&#8217;s in suspended animation and not looking great.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wolverine picks up on the fact that Kid Omega is repeating Magneto&#8217;s &#8220;gods&#8221; rhetoric, and makes clear that he doesn&#8217;t agree. Meanwhile, Kid Omega&#8217;s psychic powers turn out to be blocked here &#8211; though apparently not mutant powers in general &#8211; which gives him the chance to get a kicking for his mutant supremacy angle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 26-27.<\/strong> The trailer reads NEXT: LOST AND FOUND.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, page numbers go by the digital edition, and this will be full of spoilers. COVER \/ PAGE 1. Kid Omega and Wolverine fighting lab-grown thingies. PAGES 1-2. The mutants of Krakoa gather around the fallen Professor X, and Magneto gives a brief eulogy. &#8220;This was your plan, your island, your future.&#8221; Or such [&hellip;]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4884","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=4884"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4886,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4884\/revisions\/4886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}