X-Force #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
Oh, and this week’s last set of annotations – X-Factor #4 – should be up on Saturday.
X-FORCE vol 7 #5
“One Second Later”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramanga
Editor: Mark Basso
X-FORCE:
Surge heroically sacrifices herself to stop Nuklo, and we see a body.
Sage is very unhappy that Forge hasn’t come up with a way to avoid this, but both Forge and Surge seem to accept that this isn’t within his control. The basic idea seems to be that Forge’s power comes up with a solution to the problem that he’s identified, but he doesn’t consciously understand why that solution will work (unless, presumably, he can work it out using regular human intelligence). So, although he knew that Surge’s involvement would solve the problem, he didn’t know that she’d die in the process. That in turn means that he couldn’t use his powers to avoid that outcome, because he didn’t know that it was a relevant question to be asking himself. Sage is not prepared to accept this line of reasoning, and quits.
Captain Britain, Askani and Tank are also here, but don’t do a great deal.
GUEST STARS:
The Avengers are still around. It’s a little unclear whether this team is actually the Avengers team from the New Warriors #11-13 storyline “Forever Yesterday” or a completely different team from another world of mainly-black heroes, and it probably doesn’t matter:
- Tempest, a Storm counterpart. She was identified as Storm in the original New Warriors storyline, but evidently we’re trying to be less confusing. Apparently her world’s Forge abandoned her and their child several months ago, and she isn’t very happy about it. She apparently dies fighting Nuklo.
- Horus, the Egyptian god, who was also in the original storyline.
- Captain Assyria, the Captain America equivalent.
- Iron Knight debuted last issue and gets named here. He appears to be a War Machine analogue – Tempest calls him “Sir Rhodes” on page 21, and it would fit with the grey colour of his armour. He apparently dies fighting Nuklo.
- Fenris also debuted last issue and gets named here. He’s wearing what looks like a white version of the Black Panther’s costume, but given his name and his references to Norse mythology, he appears to be serving as this team’s token white member. (In the original story, Nova took this role.)
In “Forever Yesterday”, these Avengers were loyalists to the Sphinx and on the aggressive side, but they do seem to be broadly “violent heroes” rather than “villains”, at least within their own worldview.
Rachel says that Earth-9105 “met a version of my mother”, but I’m not aware of any story where that’s happened – it seems to be new information. They address Rachel as the “Bright Lady”, her name as an Askani leader.
The X-Men show up in a one-panel cameo, fighting the monster that turns up on their doorstep. Cyclops’ whole field team, plus Beast, apear. (Temper is top left, mostly obscured by the caption.)
ANTAGONISTS:
Nuklo showed up on the Avengers’ world too, causing similar problems. He continues appearing and disappearing for no apparent reason. According to Forge, Nuklo is somehow trying to link three dimensional nexus points, which will lead to monster portals being permanently open around the world. Why? No one knows, but it’s maybe worth remembering here that issue #1 had someone monitoring the team right at the end, and apparently manipulating them.
Assorted monsters show up across the world, all fairly generic.
REFERENCES:
Page 5 panel 1: “One picosecond after she dies, I’m thinking. Of course, I am. I’m always thinking.” Versions of this narration from Sage appear at the start of issues #1, #2 and #4. Presumably “she” is Surge.
Page 7 panel 3: “And they have something else in common.” Presumably the fact that they’re all black – though the skin of Fenris or Iron Knight isn’t visible.
Page 14 panel 1: Tufani is apparently Horus’ nickname for Tempest – it’s Swahili for “stormy”.
Page 15 panel 4: Sage is apparently running through the list of known stable portals in the Marvel Universe, but I have no idea what the “Russian gate” or the “Chinese whirlpool” are.
Page 16 panel 1: Somehow or other, Sage concludes that of the various known portals, Nuklo is going after the one that Loki created in the X-Men / Alpha Flight miniseries in 1985. The plot of that series didn’t turn on a portal so much as a “Fire Fountain” which channelled magic from Alfheim to create a localised paradise. Alpha Flight #50 and X-Force & Cable ’97 both show related portals to Asgard and Svartalfheim on the site.
Pages 18-19: Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke did indeed say this in his 1871 essay “On Strategy”. The usual modern paraphrase is “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” And Mike Tyson did say something very similar to the quote here while promoting a fight in 1987, although the wording has evolved over time – what he actually said was “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.”
I’ve only just read the first issue of this. There’s a big question mark above Tank’s identity, right? Because they just seem like a big red robot in that issue, and it doesn’t seem that I’m meant to care about them at all. Is the question of their identity mostly driven outside of the comic?
They look like someone got the original Captain Britain’s flag costume and spraypainted it red though, which is kind of annoying because I can’t unsee it.
Yeah, this is certainly a thing.
I’m still not a fan of, having removed Krakoan resurrection from consideration, immediately pivoting back to killing off existing characters. It would have been super nice to have even a brief moratorium on that theme.
These Avengers definitely feel like knockoffs of the original “Assyrian Avengers” team, given the lineup and dynamic. Close, but not quite. Probably a good thing given how pointedly unsustainable the world from the New Warriors storyline really was–that was more of a cosmic overlay than a full-fledge AU.
I expect the Russian gate and Chinese whirlpool are just generic concepts which might prove relevant in later storylines, since to my knowledge they’ve never been specifically referenced before. Though it makes sense that secret science experiments in other countries would produce such things… they could be manmade or supernormal phenomenon, who knows.
Tufani would have been a better codename for the character than Tempest, considering there is a character named Temper in the sane story.
Also, any name would have been better than Fenris, since there are already two of those in the Marvel Universe. Fenrir, Vargr, or Ulfr. Anything.
@Si- Strangely. in issue 3 Rachel and Betsy discuss whether Tank is human or a robot. Weirdly, neither of them thinks just to ask Tank.
Forge has never interested me as a character. But that spin on his powers seems pretty intriguing. He as an Achilles heel which undercuts his powers just enough.
Why didn’t the assembled team start shooting electricity at Nuklo from a safe distance? Surge’s death was underwhelming, but could have been prevented if the alt-Avengers launched their attack away from Nuklo.
Did random monsters appearing add anything to the story? I thought those pages were filler.
This is the last issue of D-Force I’m spending any money on, unless I hear it gets significantly better.
I was pretty okay with this one. First, I’m glad we get to wrap up what Sage keeps talking about in the first page of every issue.
But more than that: death is back on the menu. I really enjoyed Krakoa and the new status quo, and would have been okay with another five years of it. But if we can’t have that, let’s rip the band-aid off and kill some minor characters to make it clear that this is a thing that can happen now that resurrection is gone, and it sucks.
I do enjoy this take on Forge, and feel it explains some of his earlier actions. That one Astonishing arc where he was, especially, the villain, works a lot better if his power causes him to do horrible things without realizing it. And it’s starting to feel more like an X-Force if they’re doing the right thing in the wrong way.
I expect Sage will un-quit, since the interplay between her and Forge is the most interesting thing in this book (they’ll tell us who Tank is eventually, right?). Plus she can help keep him honest or at least regret his actions.
> Assorted monsters show up across the world, all fairly generic.
So, that’s probably the generic, red monsters that were shown in the preview for Exceptional X-Men #3 then.
@JCG- Those monsters looked more like Limbo demons or Sinister’s creations to me.
There’s three related issues with characters dying in comics in general, X-Men comics being maybe the worst offenders, that led to the whole gold egg nonsense being seen as a breath of fresh air.
1) Characters would come back to life, often without explanation, whenever someone wanted to use them.
2) Characters would be killed off almost as punctuation. The core characters would barely even notice.
3) It happened so often that it lost all shock value. Some writers are notorious for killing a few name-list characters per storyline.
Of course, the Krakoan resurrections made a lot of this worse, not better. But while Surge dying seems to be quite central to the plot and not easily forgotten, it does signal that it’s business as usual, don’t get attached to any character, don’t stress if they’re dead, don’t care at all.
Can anyone more specifically place the various Kirby-esque monsters that pop up in Taiwan/Alaska/Gulf of Guinea/Canada? They look familiar but I don’t have enough 1960s-Marvel in my head to say from where.
Fenris might be the White Wolf, T’Challa’s adopted brother from Priest’s run on Black Panther.
I used to like Nori back in the Academy X days – her telling Xavier to leave the kids alone was one of the highlights of Messiah Complex – but she fell completely by the wayside basically immediately after. And to be honest the character killed off here doesn’t read like her. She’s not bitchy, she’s not bossy, just vaguely heroic and young/naive? And even that is stretching what’s actually on the page.
If you plan to kill a team member, make the team and/or the readers care about it. And I don’t reasons for either.
…and I don’t SEE reasons for either.
Since no one else has stepped up:
Taiwan – These I actually recognized. The Stone Men From Saturn, who were the antagonists in the first Thor story, Journey Into Mystery #83, 1962.
Alaska – Looks to be Rommbu, originally from Tales to Astonish #19, 1961.
Gulf of Guinea – Original? Doesn’t look like a Kirby design to me. The only real distinguishing features are those sunken cats-eyes, and I haven’t found anything that looks like a match.
Canada – Many are too small to make out. The green guy at far right looks Kirby-ish, but I can’t find a close match. None of the others looks like Kirby to me, nor do I recognize them from anywhere else.