{"id":8499,"date":"2022-11-24T21:16:28","date_gmt":"2022-11-24T21:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8499"},"modified":"2022-11-24T21:16:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T21:16:28","slug":"x-force-34-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8499","title":{"rendered":"X-Force #34 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/91CMwwTtEsL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-8500 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/91CMwwTtEsL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/91CMwwTtEsL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/91CMwwTtEsL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg 284w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/a><strong>X-FORCE vol 6 #34<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8220;Blackout&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Writer: Benjamin Percy<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Artist: Chris Allen<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Colourist: GURU-eFX<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Letterer: Joe Caramagna<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Editor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1:<\/strong> Domino, Wolverine, Deadpool and Maverick in space, with the face of Sevyr Blackmore behind, and Beast&#8217;s hidden prison moon in the background.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 2-4.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Sage monologues about her drinking.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A montage sequence in which Sage basically tells us that relentless exposure to trauma in her work is driving her to drink.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a\u00a0<em>lot<\/em> of apparently Krakoan text on these pages:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In page 2 panel 3, the word by her left thumb is DATASET.<\/li>\n<li>The message scrolling over her left hand is DATASET MASTER followed by a third word that doesn&#8217;t seem to be Krakoan at all.<\/li>\n<li>The word to the right of the caption seems to be ARCHIVE, but with the A represented by the symbol that was used in\u00a0<em>Excalibur<\/em> to represent The Artist Formerly Known As Apocalypse.<\/li>\n<li>To the right of that, ARCHIVE again, but with the correct Krakoan.<\/li>\n<li>The symbols on the far right aren&#8217;t Krakoan, but seem to match the third word from the message above.<\/li>\n<li>In page 3 panel 2, both words just say DATASET again.<\/li>\n<li>In page 4 panel 1, the word on the screen seems to be just random symbols, while the symbols floating around Sage don&#8217;t seem to be actual Krakoan text at all. I guess they&#8217;re intended to represent generic text and information overload.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 5.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 6.\u00a0<\/strong><em>The Arakko petal processing facility.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The staff appear to be yet more duplicates of Madrox the Multiple Man &#8211; does he do\u00a0<em>all<\/em> the manual labour on Krakoa? Then again, they don&#8217;t seem to split into further duplicates when punched later in the issue, so maybe these are just uniforms of some sort.<\/p>\n<p>The Krakoan words in panel 3 just read PETALS.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 7-9.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Sevyr Blackmore&#8217;s pirates attack.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Sevyr is making his first appearance in <em>X-Force, <\/em>but he\u00a0previously appeared in\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> #14-16. As indicated, he&#8217;s an Arakkii pirate, though previously he&#8217;s been presented as a seafarer. Presumably he picked up his spaceship from the spaceport on Arakko.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 9-10.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Maverick and the Mercs prepare to fight the pirates.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Another import from Percy&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> book, this is simply Maverick&#8217;s mercenary force. Maverick is a mutant but has no alignment with mutant identity, and has a side deal with the CIA. The Mercs are exactly what they sound like. Previously they were a human force, but apparently Maverick has also been picking up aliens from the spaceport. The horse guy is a Kymellian, the alien race mostly associated with\u00a0<em>Power Pack<\/em>. Percy&#8217;s interpretation of Maverick has him as almost completely amoral save for some residual personal loyalty to Wolverine &#8211; which is not really in line with any previous interpretation of the character, but whatever. At any rate, he&#8217;s working here for the Beast, and while Beast claims later on that this is the best way of keeping Maverick away from potential enemies, it&#8217;s also a case of him hiring someone who shares his lack of moral staandards.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 11.<\/strong> Data page. An exchange of messages from Beast to Sage, the implication being that Beast has at the very least deliberately tried to encourage Sage&#8217;s alcoholism in the hope of stopping her from monitoring his dubious schemes too effectively.<\/p>\n<p>Presumably, the money that Beast diverts here is used to build the prison moon.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Senkanjabin Sharbat<\/strong> is a cucumber mint drink, not actually alcoholic in itself. Which is why Beast is suggesting the vodka.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 12-13.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Omega Red finds Sage unconscious.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Despite his rather unsympathetic demeanour, Omega Red is at least showing some apparent practical concern for Sage. The running subplot here has been Sage seeing Omega Red as a vicarious exercise in breaking addiction.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The skull base<\/strong> was created by Beast in\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> #27. Apparently it hasn&#8217;t raised any eyebrows among the Quiet Council yet, though we know at least Emma is sceptical about Hank.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;I first met Xavier in Afghanistan.&#8221;<\/strong> In\u00a0<em>X-Treme X-Men<\/em> #44 (2004). Quite what Sage was doing in Afghanistan in the first place isn&#8217;t spelled out, since other issues of\u00a0<em>X-Treme<\/em> establish that she&#8217;s from the Balkans. But she&#8217;s fighting in a war in the Hindu Kush &#8220;perhaps 20 years ago&#8221; &#8211; at the time of publication, this would have meant the Soviet-Afghan War. The flashback seems to have her shooting at UN peacekeepers, but it&#8217;s also expressly a flashback distorted by the influence of <em>X-Treme\u00a0<\/em>villain Elias Bogan, so it&#8217;s not entirely reliable. Presumably she was a mercenary of some sort. At any rate, she finds Charles Xavier in the aftermath of the encounter with Lucifer where he lost the use of his legs, and helps get Xavier to safety.<\/p>\n<p>Sage interprets herself as having been brought into the margins of the X-Men to do Xavier&#8217;s dirty work (which was also hinted at in the\u00a0<em>X-Treme<\/em> story), and implies that she&#8217;s repeating the cycle with Omega Red.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 14-16.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Maverick defeats Sevyr.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Sevyr&#8217;s power is to bleed acid, which is why Maverick doesn&#8217;t want to just shoot him.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a bit of a disconnect between the art, which shows the Mercs as a miscellany of alien races, and Sevyr&#8217;s dialogue, where he seems to see a force of mostly ordinary humans.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 17-19.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Domino gets killed because Sage is unconscious.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This seems to be just a generic mission against XENO, the anti-mutant alliance from the early issues of the series. We haven&#8217;t heard from them in a while.<\/p>\n<p>The Krakoan in page 19 panel 1 reads RECEIVING.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 20.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>The Mercs bring the pirates to the prison moon.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Sevyr rightly points out that this does not accord with even the Krakoans&#8217; rudimentary standards of justice. Maverick is clearly aware that it&#8217;s a black ops site, but note that he seems to believe it was commissioned by &#8220;X-Force&#8221;, not simply by the Beast alone. If so, Maverick may believe that Wolverine is on side with this.<\/p>\n<p>Curiously, the Krakoan word in the background of panel 2 is SHIELD.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 21.<\/strong>\u00a0Data page: Beast explains that he&#8217;s built a secret prison where he can experiment on the prisoners without the Quiet Council finding out. This doesn&#8217;t seem like it can end well.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 22-24.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Solem rescues Sevyr.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Solem<\/strong> was stolen and raised by Sevyr and eventually turned on him, as covered in\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> #15. They&#8217;re not friends, hence Sevyr&#8217;s understandable scepticism about Solem&#8217;s motivations. Also, as numerous issues of\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> have established, Solem is completely untrustworthy in general.<\/p>\n<p>We last saw Solem in\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> #25, which ended with him voluntarily leaving for Hell with the Hand&#8217;s Hellbride. We don&#8217;t know how or why he returned, but he does allude to that story here (&#8220;having spent some time in Hell&#8221;), so it hasn&#8217;t been forgotten. Solem claims that his main interest in bringing down the prison is to get rid of it before he ends up there himself, but he also claims that after his stay in Hell, his &#8220;sympathy&#8221; lies with the sinners rather than their torturers. If so, this is a level of empathy and morality we haven&#8217;t seen from him before (which is to say, more than zero).<\/p>\n<p>The T-shirt on the back of the prisoner no page 22 says SUBJECT at the top, so maybe the symbols below are numbers. The same word appears in the Beast&#8217;s display on page 23 panel 4.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 25.\u00a0<\/strong>Trailers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-FORCE vol 6 #34 &#8220;Blackout&#8221; Writer: Benjamin Percy Artist: Chris Allen Colourist: GURU-eFX Letterer: Joe Caramagna Editor: Mark Basso COVER \/ PAGE 1: Domino, Wolverine, Deadpool and Maverick in space, with the face of Sevyr Blackmore behind, and Beast&#8217;s hidden prison [&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-8499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8499","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=8499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8501,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8499\/revisions\/8501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}