{"id":6364,"date":"2021-02-11T19:59:25","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T19:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6364"},"modified":"2021-02-11T19:59:25","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T19:59:25","slug":"x-force-17-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6364","title":{"rendered":"X-Force #17 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>X-FORCE vol 6 #17
\n“Omega, Reconsidered”
\nby Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara & Guru-eFX<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Kid Omega and Phoebe of the Stepford Cuckoos, blissfully together wile X-Force do X-Force stuff behind. The comic in the bottom left shows the cover of issue #15.<\/p>\n

PAGES 2-4.<\/strong>\u00a0A montage of Kid Omega’s deaths.<\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t think any of these are meant to be specific scenes that we’ve seen before; we might or might not be intended to take them literally, and it doesn’t really matter.<\/p>\n

The Commander Islands are a group of sparsely populated islands in the Bering Straits – they belong to Russia, but they’re pretty close to the outlying islands of Alaska. No bears live there, cyborg or otherwise, but they do have a lot of seals and guillemots.<\/p>\n

Another of Quentin’s deaths comes from a poisoned bunch of flowers from the Church of Humanity, the Chuck Austen-era religious extremists.<\/p>\n

The suggestion here is that Quentin is particularly prone to getting killed on X-Force missions. That’s not really borne out by the series to date. Quentin has been killed three times in this series, which doesn’t particularly stand out in the context of Benjamin Percy’s writing. He was decapitated in issues #4-5 when XENO shut down a portal while he was going through it; he was killed by telefloronics in Terra Verde in issues #9-10; and he was run through with the Cerebro Sword by Mikhail Rasputin in issue #11-12. As against that, he went on perfectly successful missions in issues #2-3, #6 and #16, and he doesn’t appear at all in issues #1, #7-8, #13-14 or #15. So this opening flashback is trying to set up a fall-guy gimmick that really hasn’t been established in the previous issues.<\/p>\n

PAGES 5-7.<\/strong> Kid Omega boards a cruise ship and sees something awful.<\/em><\/p>\n

The presence of things like cruise ships makes stories feel weirdly detached from reality, over a year into a global pandemic.<\/p>\n

At any rate… Quentin is trying to be a good soldier here, but there’s a lot of trying to convince himself of his own hype too.<\/p>\n

PAGE 8.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGE 9.<\/strong> Data page. Beast concludes that the attack on the cruise ship was part of an anti-mutant propaganda campaign involving a group called SAPIENS. He pretty much accepts that some of the allegations directed at mutants are in fact within their technical capabilities and are things he would absolutely do in the right circumstances – he doesn’t outright say that he hasn’t done so.<\/p>\n

PAGES 10-11.<\/strong>\u00a0Kid Omega is resurrected and reunited with Phoebe.<\/em><\/p>\n

The logic of this scene is a bit wonky; Kid Omega should only be missing the memories after his last backup, so he ought to remember the time that he and Phoebe had spent together. Let’s take it that she’s reminding him of it. Still, Quentin understandably feels that having so many gaps in his memory (in which he died but doesn’t remember it) is an unpleasant feeling.<\/p>\n

PAGE 12.<\/strong> Data page. Kid Omega has been taking the opportunity presented by his frequent resurrections to ask the Five to improve him. While we’ve been told that the Five are indeed willing to modify people’s bodies and improve them (consciously or otherwise), Kid Omega’s highly specific and fiddly requests are just annoying them. It’s hard to believe that Quentin, as a telepath, doesn’t know this full well. Actively annoying the people responsible for his resurrection feels like either an attempt to impose his authority on the proceedings, or just part of his self-destructive streak.<\/p>\n

PAGES 13-14.<\/strong>\u00a0Kid Omega and Phoebe visit the cruise ship survivors in hospital.<\/em><\/p>\n

Again, the plotting here is a bit wonky. We were specifically told that the cruise ship was near to Krakoa – that was essential both to justify Kid Omega being there, and for the anti-mutant propaganda angle to work. But Krakoa is in the Pacific. So why have these desperately ill survivors been taken to a hospital in New York?<\/p>\n

Presumably, the Kid Omega-related weapon that attacked these people is whatever XENO cloned from Quentin’s body after it was provided to them by Mikhail Rasputin in issue #12.<\/p>\n

PAGES 15-17.<\/strong> Kid Omega and Phoebe talk afterwards.<\/em><\/p>\n

Phoebe reassures him that he definitely didn’t commit the attack during one of his memory gaps. She basically tells him that his persona – which we’ve seen running even in his internal monologues – is holding him back with its self-loathing elements, and encourages him to confront the private parts of his mind that have something to do with this.<\/p>\n

“You all used to hate me. You all used to call me a freak.”<\/strong> The Stepford Cuckoos were quite scathing about Quentin in their early appearances back in\u00a0New X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“But what if we’re not?”<\/strong> Quentin rightly observes that his persona has always involved the sort of mutant superiority angle which, in the Krakoan age, has now become the dominant mutant culture. Note that instead of asking whether\u00a0he’s<\/em> no better than everyone else, he asks whether\u00a0mutants as a whole<\/em> are no better. He’s doubting the mutant-nationalist premise of Krakoan society here.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-19.<\/strong> Kid Omega’s flashback.<\/em><\/p>\n

Basically, he tells us that prior to his powers properly emerging, he killed his own parents who he describes as being in some degree abusive. It’s left ambiguous precisely how abusive they were, and how conscious any of this was on Quentin’s part.<\/p>\n

The fact that Quentin was adopted is not new. He mentioned it in New X-Men<\/em> #137, when he suggested it had something to do with his motivation for trying to build himself up as a gang leader – though in fairness, that was part of a drug-fuelled incoherent ramble.<\/p>\n

PAGES 20-24.<\/strong>\u00a0Quentin gets his new costume.<\/em><\/p>\n

The gag of the falling piano would work better if this sort of thing had actually been happening to him more in the series.<\/p>\n

It’s a little debatable whether it’s necessarily a good thing for Quentin to retool himself to look more like everyone else on Krakoa. But his persistence in not dressing like the other mutants would be doubly obnoxious in the Krakoan context, and besides, it’s very dated. If your character has had the same youth-themed dress sense for a decade plus, well…<\/p>\n

Presumably Quentin wasn’t paying attention to the shop sign, because he seems to be surprised to find Jumbo Carnation in his own boutique. We’ve seen the mutant fashion designer frequently in\u00a0Marauders<\/em>, but I think this is his first appearance in\u00a0X-Force<\/em>. Poor old Jumbo is presumably attacked by the XENO copy of Quentin, with the still-anonymous XENO leader monitoring int he final panel.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong>\u00a0Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: NIGHTMARE VISIONS.<\/p>\n

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

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-FORCE vol 6 #17 “Omega, Reconsidered” by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara & Guru-eFX COVER \/ PAGE 1. Kid Omega and Phoebe of the Stepford Cuckoos, blissfully together wile X-Force do X-Force stuff behind. The comic in the bottom left shows 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":[31,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6364","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=6364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6366,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6364\/revisions\/6366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}