X-Force #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 7 #3
“The Walking Man”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
X-FORCE:
Forge is a little troubled by the fact that Nuklo is causing havoc in Phnom Penh when the Analog says they’re meant to be heading somewhere 100 miles north – but not to the point of shaking his confidence in following the directions from his powers. He’s reassured when the Analog tells him that Nuko is merely connected to the “fracture” that they’re investigating.
Sage is frustrated by the vagueness of what the Analog actually is; she’s reluctant to just trust to Forge’s mutation. Her narration takes a detour to lament the fact that Professor X gives his students a simplistic, “binary” view of the world only for them to find out that it’s more complicated than that. Although she suggests that this was a problem for his other students rather than for her, there’s a fairly obvious subtext that she’s really talking about herself; Xavier sent her to infiltrate the Hellfire Club as a long-term mole.
Captain Britain and Askani spend time meditating together (and presumably in psychic connection) while on the way to the next fracture point. Rachel is getting annoyed that Betsy keeps giving her orders when in action and seems overly protective of her. She has a point, but there’s also an element that, on being coupled with Betsy, Rachel necessarily became the (narratively) junior partner since she was the supporting character in Betsy’s book. In this series they ought to be equals and Betsy is still somewhat acting as if she’s the main character.
Surge, we’re reminded, was not in the original team line-up that Forge’s powers told him was needed. This is correct, but in the issue #1 bonus page, Forge did say that the Analog had identified her as needed once she showed up, which is consistent with his powers having given him the correct starting team. She refuses to stick to the Analog’s guidance and simply breaks off from the group to help the civilians – consistent with last issue, when she said she was joining the team in order to do good and get mutants some good publicity, and wasn’t particularly taken with Forge’s secrecy agenda. She does show up to fight Nuklo when absolutely pressed but really doesn’t like being lectured to by Forge (who is rather condescending about it).
Tank hs two batons which he uses as weapons. For the first time, other characters discuss who he is: Rachel and Betsy both agree that his mind registers as static to them. They assume that he’s an artificial humanoid created by Forge, but they’re not sure.
VILLAINS (?):
Nuklo gets a basic recap on pages 9-10. To flesh that out a bit: Nuklo debuted in Giant-Size Avengers #1 (1974). He’s the son of retired superheroes the Whizzer and Miss America. According to that story, his parents came out of retirement to stop a nuclear power point exploding, and were massively irradiated. Miss America was pregnant at the time, and her son Robert was then born as a mutant with dangerously high levels of radiation. The boy was then placed in suspended animation so that his radiation levels could decrease. Decades later, the Avengers accidentally release the boy, who is now physically an adult but has the mind of a child. He goes on a rampage, somewhat similar to what we see here, until the Avengers stop him. (All of this was, at the time, tied to a storyline in which Whizzer and Miss America were going to be the parents of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch – something that became a footnote in continuity after Magneto was retconned in as their father.)
In Marvel Two-in-One #54-57 Project Pegasus helped to get his radiation under control and started to educate him. In the late 1980s, he was working for the Avengers as a groundsman. As already noted, he then spent some time with the Penance Council, a mixture of Golden Age characters and their children. He doesn’t seem to have done much since then beyond randomly showing up as a prisoner in the Assault on Pleasant Hill crossover.
Previous stories show some confusion as to Nuklo’s mental level. The original idea seems to have been that Nuklo’s innate mental capacity was normal, and he simply lacked any life experience. Sometimes he’s treated as having become more normal with time. Sometimes he’s written as having a mild learning disability. In Vision and the Scarlet Witch #2 (1982), he’s described as autistic. Take your pick. Basically, the character has been written so incoherently over the years that it’s practically impossible to get him wrong.
This story is explicitly resetting him to his debut status, but also makes clear that this appears to have been imposed on him by someone.
As Rachel says, Avengers Mansion is a “weird choice” for the “core” of Nuklo’s mental landscape, though he did work in their support staff for a while; he might perhaps see it as the most normal part of his life.
OTHER SPECIFICS:
Pages 7-8. “I was one of Charles’ first recruits. When he found me, I was living very rough.” This is Sage’s back story as established in X-Treme X-Men #44, where she’s a survivor from a wartorn village and finds Charles Xavier just after he’s suffered the injury that left him unable to walk.
Bill Mantlo’s comics from the 1980s tended to use the term “autistic” in ways that don’t square with current understandings. Some writers treated autism as an acquired and potentially curable condition, a result of environmental factors.
Mantlo offers a similar take in Alpha Flight, wherein the character Laura Dean is described as “autistic,” but its attributed at least in part to her time spent in the Dreamqueen’s dimension. In some of her later appearances in the title, she’s said to be “recovering” from autism thanks to her time socializing with the team members.
I don’t know enough about the history of autism as a diagnosis or autism in popular culture to know if this was just a popularly held idea back then, or if it was a distinctly retrograde view even at the time.
Hard to imagine Tank’s batons having any effect on someone Nuklo’s size. Proportional to a typical human they’re maybe the size of pencils.
Omar-Philip K. Dick wrote Martian Time Slip in 1964, which featured a believable (although romanticized) boy on the autism spectrum which would be recognized in the modern sense. So, no, I think the concept of autism was more developed than Bill Mantlo’s presentation by the 1960s, although PKD (I’m sure) did more research in the field than was the average at the time.
Prior to the 1960s, autism was often grouped as a form of Schizophrenia.
Mantlo, akin to many figures in popular culture until very recently (also not PKD), mistook Schizophrenia for DID.
Note that Forge says that even Omegas have limits to their powers. This seems to be backing away from Hickman’s idea that omegas had limitless powers (which never made sense in the first place because the writers often wrote the Omegas as having range limits to their powers or something similar.)
Note that the fracture seems to be in Cambodia. Forge mentioned the Well of All Things in issue 1, which is located in Cambodia.
Re: Tank’s batons- some people have suggested that Tank is Madison Jeffries, and he created the batons using his power to manipulate machinery.
Jocasta, Falcon and Ms.Marvel are among the Avengers attacking Nuklo. Which is odd because they weren’t among the Avengers he fought. He could have met Falcon while he was the Avengers’ groundskeeper but Jocasta was dead and Carol was Binary while he was the groundskeeper.
Re: Betsy being overprotective of Rachel- the dialogue suggests that there’s something wrong with Rachel’s powers.
Note that seems to be some sort of R symbol on Nuklo- some people thought it was “VR”. It seems to be connected to whoever was responsible for what happened to him.
“Xavier sent her to infiltrate the Hellfire Club as a long-term mole.”
Worst mole ever. Way to give the X-Men a heads up before they were jumped and captured by the club back during the Kitty intro storyline.
I’m pretty sure the OHOTMUDE described Legion as going catatonic then merely autistic, but I can’t recall Claremont using the word in the actual comic. And there were kids in Gaiman’s Sandman comics who were turned autistic by trauma. I don’t know where it all comes from, but it was common back in those days to think of autistic people as emotionless nurcases that don’t understand people.
@SI- in New Mutants 27, Xavier says of Legion “According to Moira, you’ve been autistic–in this schizophrenic withdrawal from reality– nearly half your life”.
The wording in the OHOTMU was as follows:
“By his late teens, David’s catatonia transitioned to autism”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean this is accurate. Anything written in any version of the OHOTMU should be taken with a grain of salt.
I’m a special ed teacher who has worked with autistic children for 25 years. Almost no one working in pop culture got autism even close to right in the ‘80s, and comics were no exception. Even Alan Moore screwed it up when he wrote autistic children in Swamp Thing. While Claremont didn’t write autism well, Sienkiewicz gave Legion some movements and body language that I’ve seen in the autistic children I’ve worked with. The first Big 2 comic that depicted a believable autistic character that I’ve read was in the ‘90s, Legends of the Dark Knight 98, by Paul Jenkins and Sean Phillips.
I don’t blame ‘80s writers for getting it wrong. People still get autism wrong today. Hopefully, we’ll see better portrayals of autistic people in future comics.
Was it Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman who wrote the story about the “autistic” kids? There was one kid who’d accidentally suffocated their sibling, and another whos parents got eaten by some sort of goblin.
There was also the New Mutants revival, in which Sunspot made an uncharacteristically derogatory comment about Cypher and Warlock as the autistic guy and the robot.
Young Cyclops in Champions was written as autistic, though it was never overtly stated. They did a decent job with him.
I might as well mention that I was diagnosed as autistic back around 1980, and it was all the incorrect depictions in the media that helped everyone to think I’d “recovered”, so I didn’t get any support for my glaring problems up until my late 30s. Don’t talk to me about bloody Rain Man. But I kind of catalogued all this stuff in my head over the years.
Was it the Monkey King story, about the supernatural creature which fed on fear where the autistic child named Paul, initially, thought the Monkey King (who killed his parents) was his friend?
To be fair, David Haller literally had a second personality (at least) inside his head – Jemail Karami. A personality that remembers having been killed by him. And both are telepaths.
Diagnostic of mental states is not the most straightforward of pursuits in the best circunstances, and David’s were rather unique.
@Chris V- Yes, it took place at a “Center for Autistic Children” but Moore seemed to treat “autistic” as a synonym for “mentally ill”.
@Chris V:
You are thinking of Swamp Thing #25-27 (1984), are you not? Apparently it was a character first seen in Jack Kirby’s “The Demon” #4, where it was called “Kamara the Fear-Demon”.
In the Swamp Thing stories Paul did not seem to be so much trusting the Monkey King as unaware that he was not supposed to accept the fear and submit to the creature. When he realized that he could, he defeated it.
Still mixed feelings on this book. I’ve been a big fan of Sage since Xtreme and I’m glad that the writers have rediscovered her in the last few years (maybe they watched The Gifted?). And I’ve always liked Forge as well, and I think they do a good job with both characters here.
But the “monster of the week” theme hasn’t really engaged me (indeed, many of the books of this relaunch seen to be episodic stories, and maybe that’s why I don’t love it). I also still don’t buy the rewrite of Betsy and Rachel as a couple, and I’m hoping editorial lets us drop that in a few years.
But more than anything, I’m just having trouble caring about this book – it’s not dealing with mutant issues or mutant problems, and it’s not clear why there needs to be an X-Force to handle these threats.
Also, love the theory that Tank is Madison Jeffries, who hasn’t had a good role since Science Club on Utopia. But if anyone is redundant with this team, it would be him…
Theory: There’s a Monster of the Week theme for a good reason. The Big Bad at the end of the season is actually The Analog, who has fooled Forge into thinking he’s developed a new predictive power, and is sending him on all these quests to achieve … something something something.
Who The Analog is, I couldn’t say, but The Adversary has precedent.
Hi Paul!
Have you written reviews about Claremont’s original 1975-1991 X-Men run? I would be very interested in what you think about that era of X-Men.
Thanks!
Hm. Isn’t Colossus immune or highly resistant to telepathy in his steel form?
@Diana- First I’ve heard of that. Are you sure you’re not thinking of rust?
‘’ Who The Analog is, I couldn’t say, but The Adversary has precedent.”
Coming soon … the x-men v Geppetto. . .
@Diana
Emma is immune to mental powers in her diamond form. Maybe that is what you are thinking about?
“Hi Paul!
Have you written reviews about Claremont’s original 1975-1991 X-Men run? I would be very interested in what you think about that era of X-Men.
Thanks!”
If only…!
RIP X-Axis (.com)
Another example of Mantlo’s… unfortunate imprecision with terminology was Spectacular Spider-Man #39’s Schizoid Man. I remember him getting some criticism for misunderstanding schizophrenia even at the time. He’d be a good OHTTOHOTMU subject if you haven’t already done him.