{"id":6497,"date":"2021-03-18T20:56:35","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T20:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6497"},"modified":"2021-03-18T20:56:35","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T20:56:35","slug":"x-force-18-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6497","title":{"rendered":"X-Force #18 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-FORCE vol 6 #18
\n“Shadows of the Mind”
\nby Benjamin Percy, Garry Brown & Guru-eFX<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE<\/strong>\u00a01. \u00a0<\/strong>Kid Omega… um, crying psychic energy, I suppose. Explosively.<\/p>\n

PAGES 2-4.<\/strong>\u00a0Black Tom is attacked.<\/em><\/p>\n

Obviously, this is the psychic creature that XENO created using Kid Omega’s body. It’s not really clear to me how we’re meant to read this scene – whether Black Tom is cut off from part of Krakoa, or whether he’s connected to Krakoa but Krakoa can’t sense the psychic entity, or whether being unable to sense something on Krakoa has become something nightmarishly wrong for him.<\/p>\n

The opening line, with Tom talking in his sleep, refers to his long-running partnership with Cain Marko, the Juggernaut. There are some stories that portray them as extremely close friends.<\/p>\n

We’re told later on that the psychic entity’s attacks are tied to “the unguarded mind”, which usually means a strong emotional state. In Tom’s case, however, it seems to be just sleep.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PAGE 5.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 6-7.<\/strong>\u00a0Sage gets attacked.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pretty straightforward. We’re told later on that she’s developing a drinking problem, and I’m racking my brains trying to think of anything that would really lay a basis for it. Nothing’s coming to mind, to be honest. At any rate, her vulnerability to the psychic attack seems to be just because she’s drunk.<\/p>\n

PAGES 8-9.<\/strong>\u00a0Wolverine and Jean Grey in the Summer House.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wolverine is referring to the ongoing vampire storyline in his solo book.<\/p>\n

PAGES 10-13.<\/strong> Quentin and Phoebe discuss the situation with Sage.<\/em><\/p>\n

When we left Quentin and Phoebe last issue, they were just being attacked by Jumbo Carnation (again, under psychic attack). We’re offhandedly told that they snapped him out of it pretty easily. That’s hardly surprising – they’re two rop-tier telepaths and he’s a non-combatant. It’s not the sort of fight scene we really needed to see.<\/p>\n

Phoebe believes that the danger is linked to Quentin and affects those around him, but from the look of it they’ve just got back to Krakoa – if so, attacks were happening without them.<\/p>\n

Sage clearly doesn’t like being described as cold, though it’s not too far removed from her standard personality. Note that although Phoebe will claim later that Quentin lacks empathy, he’s the one who seems to have a better grasp of (at least) how to deal with Sage.<\/p>\n

PAGES 14-16.<\/strong>\u00a0Beast’s flashback.<\/em><\/p>\n

He gets attacked while he’s asleep, and experiences a dream where the psychic attempts to get him to reveal secrets about Krakoa. Presumably his resistance to this attack is what causes his stroke. Phoebe’s reaction to the dream sequence seems a bit over the top – on the grand scale of cruelty in X-Men villains, giving somebody an anxiety dream about school seems pretty low down, and doesn’t really seem to merit her response. The story appears to want us to believe that this creature is some sort of acute exploiter of emotional vulnerability, and I’m really not seeing it.<\/p>\n

PAGES 17-18.<\/strong> X-Force discuss what they’ve seen.<\/em><\/p>\n

Quentin recognises the psychic entity as a version of him. With traditional self-loathing, he concludes that the creature is evil and exploitative\u00a0because<\/em> of the features it took from him, rather than because of the influence of whoever expropriated it. This could be seen as a rather self-centred reaction (and one that doesn’t want to acknowledge that a version of him isn’t in control). That said, Phoebe’s reaction suggests that we’re meant to believe that Quentin was like this himself at some point, and feels his past is catching up on him. I wouldn’t say that exploiting vulnerabilities been a central feature of Quentin’s behaviour but I guess you can find some examples, such as him making public figures reveal personal secrets on television in\u00a0X-Men: Schism<\/em>. Still, this feels like a story that has to reach a long way back in order to work.<\/p>\n

The Pale Girl is a villain from the current\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> run (and Quentin fought her over there).<\/p>\n

Sage and the Beast apparently have a deal to just kill each other when they get injured, instead of trying to heal. The reasoning isn’t terribly compelling: killing them loses potentially several days of memory, and by Marvel Universe logic you’re still left with a dead body with valuable memories in it.<\/p>\n

PAGE 19.<\/strong> Data page. Sage explains the plot. Reasonably enough, she worries that there might be effects on her mind from her encounter with the psychic attacker even if they aren’t noticeable. It might be argued that Sage doesn’t disclose these worries to Quentin and Phoebe, but they seemed to figure out for themselves that she had had an encounter with the entity, so it’s not like she’s actively concealing it either.<\/p>\n

PAGES 20-23.<\/strong>\u00a0Quentin enters the psychic plane.<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s a pretty strong suggestion that Jean Grey could wind up returning to this book as part of an arc when Beast’s bad ideas finally come home to roost.<\/p>\n

Quentin’s claim that he doesn’t need Jean is maybe not phrased all that convincingly – he doesn’t need her, “the same way you don’t need Emma or the Cuckoos”. Maybe Phoebe doesn’t\u00a0need<\/em> them, but she’s a lot stronger alongside them, and pretty strongly attached to them.<\/p>\n

What Quentin witnesses here is presumably a version of the XENO lab where his copy was created. Again, this creature is keen to exploit Quentin’s fear that its evil is just a reflection of him.<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.<\/strong> Data page.<\/p>\n

More about Sage’s drinking. I have serious difficulty with the idea that she’s spent any significant amount of timing dancing to Mariah Carey or, indeed, anyone else. As for the “number of landmines I almost stepped on as a child”, this refers to her back story from\u00a0X-Treme X-Men<\/em> which has her growing up in the Balkans; thanks to sliding time, this fits well enough with the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: HEADACHE.<\/p>\n

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

X-FORCE vol 6 #18 “Shadows of the Mind” by Benjamin Percy, Garry Brown & Guru-eFX COVER \/ PAGE\u00a01. \u00a0Kid Omega… um, crying psychic energy, I suppose. Explosively. PAGES 2-4.\u00a0Black Tom is attacked. Obviously, this is the psychic creature that XENO created using Kid Omega’s body. It’s not really clear to me how we’re meant to […]<\/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-6497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6497","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=6497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6499,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6497\/revisions\/6499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}