Psylocke #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
PSYLOCKE vol 2 #1
“Masks”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artist: Vincenzo Carratù
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan
Volume 1, if you’re wondering, was a four-issue miniseries published in 2010, featuring the original Psylocke.
PSYLOCKE.
She’s been taking mercenary work on the side, which she isn’t telling the X-Men about. Specifically, in this issue’s opening, she’s hired by politician Mr Acker (he doesn’t get a first name) to rescue his daughter Mila Acker from kidnappers. Mr Acker is apparently very anti-mutant, but Psylocke has no apparent qualms about taking this mission, since it really is just a genuine hostage rescue. She also wipes everyone’s memories of her involvement. This seems to be Psylocke quietly doing more-or-less heroic things in her own time, or just finding ways to keep herself permanently occupied. Her private missions aren’t solely mercenary, though, since she goes to investigate an AIM MGH event with no client. (It’s possible she would have told the X-Men about this if she hadn’t been benched at the time.)
Cyclops insists on Psylocke taking a week or two off because she never stops working. Notably, he sticks to this line even though he knows she’s just come back from Palmdale, California – presumably, he assumes that she’s been on some sort of private mission that she won’t talk about. Psylocke responds by yelling about how the X-Men need all hands on deck because of the ongoing threat to mutants, but of course the mission she just went on had nothing to do with all that. Cyclops implies that he thinks Psylocke still hasn’t got out of the habit of viewing herself as a living weapon (as she was raised to by the Hand), and that he’s trying to steer her away from that.
Psylocke’s immediate response is to go and hang out with Greycrow, who she regards as a kindred spirit – not only is he someone else who used to be used as a weapon, but he’s non-judgmental about her.
Psylocke is very upset about attacking Greycrow in her sleep (however harmlessly), because she sees it as a sign of how thoroughly violence was ingrained into her, and worries about her ability to transcend it.
When she sees that AIM are selling off mutant children, she’s evidently compelled to step in, despite her plan to keep her head down – it’s clearly reminiscent to her of her own exploitation by the Hand.
SUPPORTING CAST
The X-Men. The rest of the Alaskan team – Cyclops, Temper, Juggernaut, Kid Omega and Magik show up at the start of issue, so that Cyclops can tell her to take some time off. Kid Omega seems decidedly annoyed at Psylocke keeping the team hanging around without explanation.
Greycrow shows up as her supportive partner, in the same cabin that we saw in X-Men #5. These two have been a couple since the Krakoan-era Hellions series. He seems a lot more at peace with his lot than she does.
Devon Di Angelo is a new character, who Psylocke claims to have rescued “from an underground lab in Minneapolis where they were being forced to develop anti-mutant weaponry”. They’ve apparently insisted on allying themselves with Psylocke, who has decided to just go with it. They’re a college student with an extensive presence on “the dark web”, and they’re responsible for taking her mercenary bookings. They also make psychic-themed gadgets for her.
VILLAINS
AIM are longstanding Marvel Universe evil scientists, who tend to bump along at the “slightly more serious than just a joke” level, but it varies from story to story.
In this story, they’ve come up with an improved version of Mutant Growth Hormone, a drug extracted from mutants which has been floating around the Marvel Universe since Alias back in 2002, though various earlier stories with similar plot ideas have been retconned into involving the same thing. Usually, as in this story, it gives humans temporary powers.
Donald Pierce and Skullbuster, both members of the Reavers, are working as security for this event, and were also involved in abducting the mutant children. . The last time we saw Pierce, he was an ambassador for Madripoor’s Homines Verendi government, but apparently times are tight for him now. Skullbuster doesn’t seem to have appeared in an X-book, outside flashbacks, since Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #11 (part of the Matthew Rosenberg run), though he did appear in Ghost Rider vol 10 #5 in 2022. Psylocke kills him here, and feels bad about it – or, more accurately, feels bad about the fact that she doesn’t.
The Hand are shown in flashback training Kwannon; for the purposes of this story, it’s just recapping what we already knew, but somebody called Master Hayashi gets named, and he’s new, so I imagine we’ll hear more.
OTHER REFERENCES
Page 10 panel 3. 3K are the main villain group over in X-Men, and their scheme seems to involve turning adult humans into mutants by somehow altering their bodies.
Page 15 panel 2 is a generic flashback to young Kwannon having killed a bunch of ninja as part of the training with the Hand. There are various flashbacks to her abusive upbringing in the Krakoan-era Fallen Angels series.
Page 19 panels 1-2: “Any sign of AIM?” “That’s the weird thing – I haven’t seen them at all tonight.”Eh? The guy on the door was in full AIM uniform. Perhaps that was an art error, since this is supposed to be a regular hotel – do AIM really have an agent standing in full public view?
This book reminds me a lot of Mackay’s Black Cat. I can see the story developments feeding back into Mackay’s X-Men too – it fits very well into that team where everybody seems to be keeping secrets.
The action art is surprisingly clean and scripted too! A lot of books take shortcuts on fight scenes, but all the fight details here look choreographed and thought-out.
Am I the only one that thinks that Kwannon’s method of rescuing the kids was reckless? She offers to buy the kids for $2.5 million. And then she starts a fight with AIM’s goons while the kids are nearby and could easily be caught in the crossfire! I guess she didn’t have enough money and didn’t have any counterfeit bills. And I guess she’s not skilled enough to create an illusion of the money like Betsy could have? But still, she could have gotten the kids killed!
The continuing redemption arc for Greycrow — for any of the Marauders — is yet another jarring reminder that the X-Men, more than probably any other superteam, are willing to give literally anyone a second, third, or tenth chance as long as they’re a mutant. Even though he murdered countless mutants during his career. At least in his case, it wasn’t overnight, and has been going on slowly for quite a while.
And I’m still a little baffled by hiw powers. At first it looked like he just built guns from his uniform pieces, but later he also demonstrated healing, and now he’s a full-on cyborg who builds guns from his body? But he’s also a full techno telekinetic who once built an airplane? Huh.
It’s a bit of a shame that Kwannon was rescued from the scrap heap of comics history only to get the ‘raised as a child assassin’ backstory. I don’t know if it’s a tidbit that comes from 90s X-Men, but a) it’s generic and b) in X-books it’s a niche that’s been taken by X-23 for the past 20 years.
Of course, Kwannon has another bit of backstory unique to her, the lost Secret child bit, which is just a sad trauma pile-on.
Honestly, her relationship with the artist formerly known as Scalphunter is the most interesting thing about her at the moment.
Here’s hoping Wong finds more. This issue was pretty good.
I liked this but Kwannon felt a bit out of character to me. She was very emotive. Maybe it was the artist who is going to be a star finding his way into the character. Maybe it is a necessary step to go from supporting character to leading lady. But something felt a bit off.
Better than a lot of the relaunch titles but a 7/10 for me.
@Krzysiek- no, she was just described as an assassin in the ’90s. The problem was that the Krakoan-ear writers wanted her to be sympathetic. and there are only so many ways you can make an assassin sympathetic. (And Elektra already has the “I was tricked into killing someone I cared about” backstory.)
@Other Michael: May as well get the power inflation out of the way as quickly as possible.
I just don’t understand the point of this character. It’s been five years since her reintroduction, and it seems like no writer has managed to give her a clear identity.
Everything about her feels like recycled leftovers from Betsy Braddock. Why does this character even exist if she’s just given Betsy’s personality, powers, aesthetic—and now even her old storylines?
Kwannon being addicted to violence is literally the same arc Betsy went through in Uncanny X-Force Vol. 2 and X-Force Vol. 4. Some of the dialogue is almost identical.
To make matters worse, they gave her a cliché backstory reminiscent of Black Widow. No wonder readers struggle to connect with her—she’s just a patchwork of borrowed traits, lacking any identity of her own.
@Amanda-The problem is that Betsy’s body switch is now considered racist- basically yellowface. And for good reason. But Betsy’s Asian look lasted for so long that it’s become iconic. So the solution in the Krakoan era was to put Betsy back in her own body. give Kwannon Betsy’s codename, psi-blade, etc. and turn Betsy into Captain Britain. A lot of people question whether this was an good solution.
The only reason it was “iconic” was because of Betsy’s outfit. Without her running around with her ass hanging out, the character really served no purpose for a large percentage of the fan base. I think the problem is that now neither character is interesting. If Marvel is going to insist on Psylocke wearing a proper costume, no one is going to care about that character anymore, and Betsy being turned into Captain Britain made that character less interesting. Trying to get an ongoing series out of either character at this point is asking for a quick cancellation. It’s best to throw one or both on teams and treat them as another character who worked well under Claremont and has suffered constantly since (like Colossus). The only reason Psylocke didn’t immediately fall into this catergory, as so many other X-characters, in the early-‘90s is the eye candy.
That only takes a character so far though, and by the time they started coming up with things like “the Crimson Dawn”, even those fans decided that lots of T&A shots weren’t enough to hide the fact that the character had little in the way of growth.
@Chris V- But Betsy DIDN’T work well under Claremont. Claremont wrote the first ten issues of Captain Britain- he created Brian and Betsy and wrote them as generically nice characters. But when he wrote them in the late ’80s he decided to darken both of them. So Brian became a headstrong buffoon with a wandering eye and Betsy became a Sociopathic Hero who suggested that the X-Men kill Havok for no real reason and not let Tyger Tiger go even though she was the victim. If you read the letters pages, there was plenty of hate for both of them. In Brian’s case, it was resolved when Alan Davis took over and mostly reverted Brian to his pre-Excalibur personality. But in Betsy’s case. it was resolved when she turned Asian.
I’ll grant that she was one of the less interesting Claremont characters, but she was still a bit more interesting than Betsy became after Claremont. What’s the story that everyone remembers about Betsy (other than Claremont’s “Acts of Vengeance” arc)? When she came out of the water near-naked and randomly tried starting an affair with Scott. It was all downhill for Betsy after that, and that interest was simply because of the g-string bikini and Betsy bizarrely licking car grease off of Scott’s face.
I mean, if you want to argue that Betsy never really worked as a character (as opposed to working briefly as some exaggerated body parts), I’ll agree to that also.
Betsy had a lot going for her in her early X-men days under Claremont: a) an unfortunate debt to Mojo for her bionic eyes, b) no knack for hand-to-hand combat leading to c) an overly offensive posture in the field. (I’m not counting her weird crush on Doug. That’s best left unexplored.)
Arguably, turning her into an (Asian) expert combatant eventually led to her overdoing it with X-Force, but that storyline should have come much sooner. It was interesting when it finally happened, though. In between, her characterization was meh to actively bad.
Now, she has all kinds of foils: her brother, who wants his title back; Kwannon, who may or may not still be resentful about having her body stolen/replicated/whatever; all of Captain Britain’s rogues. But she needs to be surrounded by them to have any narrative juice. Instead, she keeps getting put on teams of people who have next to nothing to do with her. It’s strange.
Frankly, she should probably be headlining her own solo title with Kwannon as support. Racist or not, Kwannon is probably best as not-Betsy with some contrasting (positive) character traits: she had a child, she can conduct a meaningful relationship, she has great leadership skills. Stuff Betsy can be envious of and try to live up to.
@Michael I think the issue is that no writer has been able to treat Kwannon as her own person. She’s just a collection of scraps left over from Betsy. Even other characters, likethe X-Men, Carol Danvers, Steve Rogers, interact with her like they’ve known her for years, instead of treating her as the assassin who murdered innocent people, including women and children, for a crime lord. It’s all so bizarre. She’s essentially Betsy 2.0.
And that’s terrible for her. The Jim Lee-era Psylocke aesthetic might be iconic, but people forget that it didn’t do much for Betsy in the long run. By the late ’90s, she had become so undesirable and shallow as a character that no writer wanted to touch her, leading to her being sidelined and eventually retired from the X-books.
If they can’t give Kwannon a distinct personality and something to set her apart, she’s headed for the same fate—irrelevance. Her Blood Hunt one-shot sold poorly, and I believe her ongoing series will face the same outcome. People might like the idea of her, but not enough to care (or buy her solo series) in any meaningful way.
@Michael: The solution I wish they’d gone with was making Betsy (and Brian) half Hong Kong/Malaysian Chinese. Their parents have been dead since before they appeared and their mom has like four appearances, so it’s not like there are tons of appearances they’d be retconning. It’s also entirely possible for biracial twins to look vastly different from each other.
The sad thing is, “sexy ninja lady with a psychic energy sword” may be incredibly thin characterization, but it’s still probably a more interesting hook than anything else Betsy’s had going for her in the 40+ years she’s been in comics.
Even toned down from the Jim Lee days, the visual design is the most compelling thing about either character, such that I can see why Kwannon’s the one getting the solo title tryout.
@yrzhe I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Excalibur had terrible writing but still managed to run for almost 40 issues, whereas Fallen Angels was both a critical and commercial failure, marking the first major flop of the Krakoa era.
Even though the whole Captain Britain storyline is painfully dull, Betsy still got her own solo book before Kwannon. At the end of the day, Betsy’s rich history will always give her an edge in terms of opportunities. Without the Jim Lee design, Kwannon is just another generic character with nothing substantial to set her apart.
I know I’m showing my age, but for me, the best Betsy looks were her original X-Men “floofy pink” and later “hooded/armored purple in Australia” outfits. And her best defining story was going one-on-one with Sabretooth during the Mutant Massacre. (Yeah, at the time I wasn’t familiar with her initial run in Captain Britain.
She was never the same after being reincarnated by the Siege or becoming Kwannon or any of that other stuff. I get the idea of wanting a more viscerally appealing telepath who could do combat stuff instead of just holding her head and thinking hard at the bad guys, but sexy ninja telepath, while SO 90s, was an unfortunate “kewl” redefinition of the character.
And Kwannon as a separate character suffered first by basically being “the other Psylocke” and then dying of the Legacy Virus, and I don’t think she’s really found the right catch since her resurrection to be truly compelling. But if anyone can do it, it’s Alyssa Wong, who flourishes in writing disaster bisexuals and chaos queers so… um… good luck!
I started regularly reading X-Men just before the issue where Psylocke, Dazzler and Longshot fought Juggernaut. She was the only active psychic at the time. I don’t remember if it was implied in the comic or I just assumed it based on her costume and the butterfly visuals, but she seemed like a very feminine Lady, who really wanted to be an action hero but wasn’t remotely one. So yeah, I thought she was cool back then. I really liked the armour that got barely used, too.
But the Jim Lee costume? It’s almost exactly Elektra’s costume in a different colour. I personally find most of Lee’s stuff all sizzle and no sausage, but to each their own.
Very few mutants work as solo characters. By being defined as Marvel Mutants, they come with expectations that are very difficult to reconcile with the needs of a good, entertaining solo series. More often than not they also come with a lot of X-Teams continuity baggage that makes them generic and difficult to write convincingly at the same time.
Come to think of it, succesful solo books for Marvel mutants come almost exclusively for characters who have no need for a character concept, for various reasons. The line has become too dependent on team dynamics.
Wolverine keeps receiving new series because he never had a functional character concept and no one expects him to. He is a visual key on which loads of conflicting immediate character beats were piled on by Claremont and his successors, and we learned not to mind – or at least not to expect better. At the current point in time, it looks like the (justified) expectation that his solo books will have lots of graphic violence also help in selling the book. Readers come with an expectation and find it to be fulfilled.
Storm keeps receiving new series because she has a fan base that expects her to act regal and proud as if she had a royal title of some sort, continuity and logic be darned.
Gambit and Rogue have occasional new series mostly because there is a demand for seeing more of their couple dynamics, which receives precious little space in team books – particularly since they are rarely together in the same book.
Deadpool (not a mutant, I know, but he is treated as one for all editorial purposes) always has some sort of solo or pair book because he has no need for character concept or character dynamics; he is just a plataform for zany tales with absurd levels of graphic violence and character inconsistency. Readers enter into it knowing what to expect.
But generally speaking it is an uphill battle to write solo mutant books, mostly because you would have to convince readers that they want to go through the trouble of spending some time and money to have more of what they expect to already have too much of. The line tends to be bloated and to encourage the perception that it has nothing new to offer.
Which is why I welcome this wave of seemingly random solo books, even as I expect few of them to survive for long. The alternative is more stagnation. The line needs the opportunity for some combination of writer and character to scratch some itch that has so far gone unnoticed, as once happened with Mark Waid’s Flash or Frank Miller’s Daredevil – or even Grant Morrison’s Swamp Thing. That won’t happen by giving Claremont or Ben Percy a new book about Storm, Wolverine or Gambit.
I may be projecting, but I think Tom Brevoort is all too aware of the difference between loss leaders, traffic generators and cash cows, and is aiming for a carefully curated balance between the three kinds of books. For all I know, he may well have been given a mission by higher-ups to not mind too much about book sales if he can find ways to make a wider variety of Marvel mutants visible and potentially marketable as audiovisual properties. Even if that is not the case, it still makes sense to seek new viability in such a large repository of intellectual properties.
@Luis Dantas — It’s worth a reminder that both Cable and X-Man also enjoyed success with at least one solo volume (even though they’re both essentially the same guy). X-MAN lasted 75 issues and CABLE lasted 107 issues. Neither were technically X-Men members (Cable spun out of NEW MUTANTS/X-FORCE), but the point stands.
In addition to what you mentioned, a key element is also timing, which is hard to predict or plan for. Part of why CABLE lasted so long was because Marvel struck while the iron was hot. In comparison, they waited quite a while for Gambit or Rogue. Of course, in the 90s many books lasted a while. DARKHAWK lasted 50 issues, for heaven’s sakes. Nowadays even volumes of ASM get relaunched well before that.
One problem with trying to set up a memorable “writer/character dynamic” is that the mask is off on Marvel (and DC) and everyone working there knows that IF they did another “Miller run on Daredevil” and recreated an entire franchise, all that would mean is Disney would gain a new IP which could garner a billion dollars, and the creator involved would get nothing (or, at best, a $5,000 non-disclosure “shut up” check).
And so what we have now are creators seeing this writing on the wall and seeing runs at Marvel and/or DC as merely exercises in exposure. They don’t want to “waste” all their creative juices there, so they do their best to eke out solid runs without really bursting their brains for greatness, instead saving that energy and ideas for their Image/Kickstarter runs.
The solution, of course, would be for the big two to realize this and offer more incentives (i.e. compensation) for when these runs get adapted into other media. But that will literally never happen.
So instead we get more solo runs which either stink or are “good enough.” I suppose there is the fluke that Marvel/DC hires a devoted fan/sucker who doesn’t realize this, but that’s becoming less likely. Virtually everyone they hire, at least on the writing side, is really saving their best stuff for indie. Even Kelly Thompson, a former exclusive writer, spat out a few Substack/Image books the minute that contract expired. Geoff Johns has an entire Image imprint now. And so it goes.
Pg 6: “My psi-blades affect the mind, not the flesh.”
Pg 13: “I could have killed you. …I almost put my psi-blade through your eye.”
Huh? Which is it then? Where are the editors with this stuff.
@AMRG- The reason Darkhawk lasted so long was because Fingeroth was the writer and Fingeroth used his influence as the Spider-Man editor to push Darkhawk as the Next Cool Thing. Darkhawk became a member of the New Warriors and the Avengers West Coast. It’s the same reason why Quasar lasted 60 issues- Gruenwald was the writer. He even used his influence as an editor to make sure Quasar joined the Avengers. One of the problems with Marvel in the late ’80s and early ’90s was that editors wrote some of Marvel’s core books for too long- Gruenwald on Captain America, DeFalco on Fantastic Four, Harras on Avengers. By the time they were finished the series were selling the worst in their history but no one had the courage to remove them because they were editors. Gruenwald even got Roger Stern removed from the Avengers because sales on Captain America were disappointing and Gruenwald wanted to boost Cap by making him leader of the Avengers and Stern wanted Monica Rambeau to keep leading the Avengers, which is considered the start of the Avengers’ decline in the late 80s.
That being said, plenty of books in the early ’90s lasted unbelivably long- Morbius lasted 32 issues, Sleepwalker 33 issues, Deathlok 34 issues. Cable’s first ongoing definitely benifited from being launched in the early 90s. Gambit’s first ongoing had the bad luck to be launched two years before Quesada decided to trim the X-Men line- and also after books like Avengers had to recovered from their sales slump in the mid-90s.
I never knew Grant Morrison’s brief Swamp Thing run was considered that important!
My mistake, sorry. Somehow I typed Grant Morrison when I should have thought of Alan Moore.
@Joseph S.: I’d imagine the focused totality of her psychic powers could easily kill someone if if it were totally focused on the right part of their brain. Because something something mind-body problem.