{"id":8649,"date":"2023-01-04T22:55:53","date_gmt":"2023-01-04T22:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8649"},"modified":"2023-01-04T22:55:53","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T22:55:53","slug":"x-force-36-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8649","title":{"rendered":"X-Force #36 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 #36<\/strong>
\n“The Methuselah Complex”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Benjamin Percy<\/strong>
\nArtist: Robert Gill<\/strong>
\nColourist: GURU-eFX<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Caramagna<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nProduction: Joe Caramagna<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong>\u00a0The Man With the Peacock Tattoo poses with a scalpel; the faces of the cast appear in the “eyes” of the peacock behind them. Well, them and a few random X-characters to make up the numbers – that’s Gentle in the bottom right, Professor X and Forge just under the logo, and Rogue, Magik and Havok running along the top. You can’t see her clearly on the published version, but that’s Storm obscured by the cover box.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong>\u00a0Omega Red and Deadpool prep Domino for her mission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Presumably Domino knows perfectly well how to apply make-up to herself, so I can only assume she’s indulging Deadpool. Quite why\u00a0Omega Red<\/em> is playing along with this, when he literally decapitated Deadpool on a whim in issue #30, is harder to fathom. Maybe Deadpool’s joking about him having chosen the clothes himself.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PAGE 3.<\/strong>\u00a0X-Force are no longer speaking to the Beast.<\/em><\/p>\n

Seriously? Last issue read as if they were arresting him for his weird space prison, but… we’re back to “we don’t trust you”?<\/p>\n

Obviously the arc here is that Beast is losing control of the team and is so arrogant that he doesn’t really understand why. But the basic problem here is that Beast’s evil schemes are both so over the top and so persistently unsuccessful that the team (and the entire Quiet Council, except the outright villains) wind up looking gullible and spineless. The balance is way, way off and the escalation isn’t working. Running a black ops prison and experimenting on the prisoners, for example, is not obviously an escalation compared to enslaving an entire nation.<\/p>\n

Wolverine is still absent, due to the storyline in his own book where Beast has tried to enslave him as a mindless soldier.<\/p>\n

PAGE 4.<\/strong>\u00a0Domino goes into the meeting.<\/em><\/p>\n

The person wearing a hoody in the last panel is wearing a XENO mask. The guy on the bike two panels earlier is presumably a separate XENO thug, since we seem them again on page 8 panel 2.<\/p>\n

Domino’s cover identity, “Beatrice Domini”, is her real first name and a slight variant of her codename. And she’s surprised when she gets caught. Is she auditioning to be a Silver Age Batman villain?<\/p>\n

PAGE<\/strong> 5.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

Methuselah<\/strong> is a Bible character who supposedly lived to 969. The title presumably links to the Xeno members in the restaurant arguing that humans are evolving inexorably towards immortality, and that it’s just a question of using technology to catch up with the mutants.<\/p>\n

PAGES 6-7 and 9.<\/strong> Xeno begin their sales pitch to Domino.<\/em><\/p>\n

The claim implicitly being made here is that it is\u00a0<\/em>biologically possible to live forever, and that exploiting Wolverine’s powers will enable humans to do so.<\/p>\n

Lobsters.\u00a0<\/strong>It’s true that lobsters show no signs of ageing. That doesn’t mean they’re immortal, though. Eventually, they either die from exhaustion in the course of a moult, or they die from infection or injury because they haven’t moulted. But true enough, they don’t\u00a0age<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Tortoises.<\/strong> They can certainly live a long time. The oldest confirmed lifespans are around 190, but there’s some evidence of at least one tortoise making it to 250.<\/p>\n

PAGE<\/strong>\u00a08 and 10.\u00a0<\/strong>XENO attack Deadpool and Omega Red.<\/em><\/p>\n

Omega Red is being a lot more tolerant of Deadpool’s blather than he was in issue #30.<\/p>\n

PAGES 11-13.\u00a0<\/strong>X-Force fight XENO.<\/em><\/p>\n

“The last time I got cornered by you freaks, I ended up carved up on a laboratory table.”<\/strong> In issues #1-2. Domino knows that this happened, but she doesn’t remember it – we’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n

PAGE 14.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page. Cecilia Reyes comments on the Wolverine heart and the bio-engineered XENO agent.<\/p>\n

The Heart.<\/strong>\u00a0For once, the Beast’s comment is actually useful. The Man With The Peacock Tattoo does indeed get his hands on a bloody tissue discarded by Wolverine during the Legacy House auction in\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> #9. It’s in page 13 panel 6.<\/p>\n

The Body.<\/strong> The Beast takes the opportunity to justify his secret experiments on prisoners from the last few issues. Presumably he doesn’t copy these comments to Cecilia.<\/p>\n

“The child stolen from the<\/strong> Bowery.”<\/strong> XENO surfers stole a child from Krakoa in issues #25-26. It hasn’t come up since, but presumably either the Krakoans have had no leads, or Beast doesn’t care.<\/p>\n

PAGE 15.\u00a0<\/strong>Domino returns home.<\/em><\/p>\n

The scroll shows a mutilated Domino in a containment tank, as she appeared in the cliffhanger of issue #2.<\/p>\n

The next scene strongly implies that Colossus left the scroll for her, under the influence of Chronicler. By way of recap, Domino was traumatised by her experiences at the hands of XENO and spent the next few issues being very upset about it, but also maintaining that she wanted to retain her memories of the incident. In issue #8, she dies on a mission, and specifically tells Colossus before she dies that she wants to remember everything that happened to her. Colossus lies to the Five and has them remove those memories when they resurrect her. Although this violates Domino’s autonomy, it does in fact massively improve her mood and mental health and she accepts the assurance that she requested the edit.<\/p>\n

For some time now, Colossus has been under the influence of Chronicler, the aide of his brother Mikhail who can control people by writing stories about them (but only within the parameters of what he believes they would do). This storyline hasn’t come up since issue #24, after which Colossus joined the Quiet Council and disappeared from the book. I rather assumed that either the story had been handed over to\u00a0Immortal X-Men<\/em>, or a decision had been taken to park the whole arc about Mikhail’s Russian nationalist mutants, in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But apparently we’re going back to it after all.<\/p>\n

PAGES 16-18.<\/strong>\u00a0Domino confronts Colossus.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kayla<\/strong> was murdered by Colossus, under the influence of Chronicler, in issue #24. Apparently nobody’s spotted and resurrected her yet. Sucks to be a bit part character, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

Since this scene is described in the next data page, presumably Colossus is under Chronicler’s control at this point. X-Force<\/em> has been ambiguous about how much free will Colossus actually has at the moment, but in\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> #28 he tells Magik that he’s suffering from blackouts, presumably covering at least some of the period when he’s under Chronicler’s control. He seems to be resisting to some degree at the end of the scene, after Domino leaves, which is also after the section that Chronicler writes.<\/p>\n

PAGE 19.<\/strong> Data page. Chronicler’s version of the scene we’ve just seen. Chronicler is a very reluctant ally of Mikhail, and in his first draft – unless the guy types at superhuman speed, his powers presumably don’t involve controlling events in real time – he attempts to get Colossus to sound the alarm. The bloodstains suggest that Mikhail was less than keen on that version.<\/p>\n

PAGES 20-21.<\/strong> Beast addresses X-Force.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

XENO did indeed use Domino’s DNA to give similar super powers to one of their creations, as seen in issue #8. Once again, Beast seems to completely misread the room; presumably he thinks that reminding Domino of her abuse will motivate everyone, but even Deadpool seems appalled, and everyone turns to Sage for leadership. That said, the next scene indicates that they went with Beast’s plan.<\/p>\n

PAGES 22-24.<\/strong> Legacy House auction off a Krakoan egg.<\/em><\/p>\n

Evidently provided to them by X-Force. This is very weird, since the Krakoans are normally paranoid about protecting the details of resurrection; but Beast’s judgment is reliably terrible in this book, so fair enough. Oddly, he claims the egg is “unfertilized”, but there’s clearly a fully developed humanoid body inside. Do X-Force actually realise that?<\/p>\n

Unless I’m missing something, the kid is new.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong> Trailers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-FORCE vol 6 #36 “The Methuselah Complex” Writer: Benjamin Percy Artist: Robert Gill Colourist: GURU-eFX Letterer: Joe Caramagna Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen Production: Joe Caramagna Editor: Mark Basso COVER \/ PAGE 1.\u00a0The Man With the Peacock Tattoo poses with […]<\/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-8649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8649","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=8649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8651,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8649\/revisions\/8651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}