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Jan 30

Psylocke #3 annotations

Posted on Thursday, January 30, 2025 by Paul in Annotations

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

PSYLOCKE vol 2 #3
“Lady-Killer”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artist: Vincenzo Carratù
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

PSYLOCKE:

Her first instinct is to call Devon to get an analysis of the weird cyborg robots, even though she’s actually in the Factory. Presumably most of the X-Men are off on a mission, but we know that the Beast’s in the building. Either she’s turning to Devon as a first port of call generally, or she wants to keep this separate from the X-Men because it involves Greycrow – but she has no apparent qualms about bringing him to the Factory for medical treatment, so it’s probably the former.

She recognises the butterflies left in the Factory from the display in Shinobi’s apartment, and naturally sees him as the next lead. In the circumstances, she’s surprisingly restrained in challenging him on it, although she doesn’t seem to attempt to read his mind once she’s in range – instead she confronts him and demands “to know what your game is”. (Maybe she figures that Shinobi has decent psychic defences and that she’s not the greatest stealth telepath in the world.)

She takes a bit of prompting to give Greycrow a hug after she finds him alive, but not much. He’s clearly much more in touch with his emotions than she is – which makes it a little odd that she takes the opportunity to lecture him and Shinobi later in the issue when they squabble over her. (This may just be a misjudged scene. Although they’re clearly rivals in some sense, the main reason they fight is that Greycrow grabbed Shinobi from behind and held a knife to his throat, which by all appearances is what Greycrow and Psylocke had planned. Did she not expect Shinobi to defend himself? For that matter, how was this ever a remotely sensible way to ambush a guy with phasing powers?)

On learning that Ty Haniver is apparently targeting Greycrow in order to lure her to meet him, she becomes concerned about the other people he might go after – a list that consists entirely of Devon and the kids from the previous issue. She doesn’t actually know anyone else who isn’t a superhero. She insists on going to face Haniver alone; Greycrow expresses concern that he’ll “undo all your progress”, and given their conversations in issue #1, he presumably means that he’s worried she’ll succumb to the urge to kill Haniver.

Her romantic past with Shinobi, alluded to last issue, apparently started at the first-night party on Krakoa.

She has Sherlock Holmes-style observational skills when it comes to picking up the details of the aftermath of a battle, something that was drilled into her by the Hand as a child.

The latest gimmick made for her by Devon is “homing kunai”, though “homing” apparently means “mind-controlled”. A kunai is a kind of trowel which is supposed to be used by ninja as a weapon.

SUPPORTING CAST:

John Greycrow. Don’t worry, kids, he’s fine. His missing arm has regrown thanks to his healing factor, and he can also use his “technoformation” powers to disable Ty Haniver’s cyborgs. I don’t think we’ve ever seen him use that hazily-defined power for anything more than building tools in the past, but I guess it makes sense that he can use it to interfere with machinery at close range.

Having had time to regroup, he’s surprisingly calm and relaxed when Psylocke catches up to him, in marked contrast to his slightly more insecure behaviour when Shinobi’s around. He has no apparent objection to being taken to the Factory for treatment, so while he doesn’t want to live with the X-Men he’s evidently not in hiding from them.

According to Shinobi, his body is entirely metal from the waist down… which begs questions about how this whole limb-regrowing thing works. Are we to take it that he’s not actually a cyborg, and that the apparently metallic parts of his body aren’t prosthetics but his literal body, transformed in some way?

Devon Di Angelo. Researches butterflies. Later, we get a single out of context panel of the butterflies stalking them.

Shinobi Shaw. He’s still flirting with Psylocke and trying to wind up Greycrow. Nonetheless, he’s perfectly co-operative with Psylocke’s requests for information. He says that he only met Ty Hainver a few times as a child, and always found him creepy

The Beast. He treats Greycrow’s wounds.

Mitsuki. Kwannon’s childhood friend is in the background in the brief Hand training flashback.

VILLAINS:

Ty Haniver. A member of the wealthy Haniver family, who have a “long history” with the Shaws. According to Shinobi, Ty has “a rare fatal genetic condition” and has been kept isolated to protect his health. He bred a weird strain of mutant butterflies as a kid, which are used as his motif in this story. Butterflies were also a motif of the original Psylocke, which feels like it can’t be a coincidence, but nobody flags it here.

Shinobi describes Ty as death-obsessed, “the kind of kid who’d keep a freezer full of missing neighbourhood pets” and “a deranged taxonomist” (don’t ask me what the classification of animal species has to do with it). Although Shinobi doesn’t seem to tell Psylocke and Greycrow about this bit, in the flashback where Ty gives Shinobi a dead butterfly, he seems to have a three-headed cat on his lap, with visible stitching on at least one neck.

Ty evidently wants to meet Psylocke, but beyond that his motivations and plans are (intentionally) obscure. He seems to have sent the butterfly display to Shinobi in the expectation that Psylocke would see it, which is remarkable planning.

He lives in the family mansion and is confined to a wheelchair, but has cyborg animals that he sends into the outside world. In the final panel, we get a relatively clear view of what’s either two wolves or one double-headed wolf, and a sheep, of all things. The animals are covered in Frankenstein-style stitching.

The rest of the issue seems to be trying very hard to keep his cyborg animals in shadow, which is not altogether successful because the poor artist is also being asked to draw them in action scenes, at least one of which takes place in a well lit room. From what we can see of them, they look like weird mixtures of animal or bird parts with clunky-looking machinery, a bit like Brute Force. Nonetheless, they can take out Greycrow in a fight, and somehow they’re able to get into the Factory (Psylocke makes sure to tell us that his is mysterious, and not a plot hole). Several of them are apparently destroyed by Psylocke and Greycrow and left lying around in the vicinity of the Factory. Let’s assume Psylocke asked Beast to take a look at them and he didn’t find anything of use.

Master Hayashi, the Hand trainer from issue #1, again appears in Psylocke’s childhood training flashback.

Sebastian Shaw shows up in Shinobi’s flashback to meeting Ty as a child.

FOOTNOTES:

Page 9: The title of this story is “Lady-Killer”; the title of the previous issue was “Ladykiller.” Make of that what you will.

Page 10 panel 1: Greycrow “told [Psylocke] I could heal if you stabbed me by accident” in issue #1 (in a slightly odd scene that seems to assume that her psychic blade is a physical weapon rather than a psychic attack).

Page 15: Psylocke broke in to Shinobi’s apartment in the previous issue as well. Shinobi’s display of mutant butterflies was indeed in his apartment last issue – it’s in several panels of page 11, without any particular attention being drawn to it.

Page 17 panel 2: The “wild, magical party the evening Krakoa was born” is from House of X #6.

Bring on the comments

  1. Midnighter says:

    They seem to have confused the term “taxonomist” with “taxidermist”…

    I like this series, Kwannon is a character that despite visually having great popularity is pretty much a blank slate on which to write anything. I find it appropriate to introduce new villains and allude a bit to his past. There is potential there.

  2. The Other Michael says:

    I continue to be baffled at this treatment of Greycrow, who has drifted considerably from his earliest depictions. From relentless childkiller to romantic interest. From “dude whose power is making guns with the crap strapped to his outfit” to “has amazing healing factor, also might be partially cybernetic and/or turns his body into metal bits?” I’d like some clarification on what the deal is.

    Sure, he’s been on a redemption arc for a long while now, and one can argue that he’s multiple clones removed from his Mutant Massacre days, but it still makes me wonder.

  3. Chris V says:

    That is a great mistake though. I am imaging a Grant Morrison villain who really is a “deranged taxonomist” now. What would he be doing? “He won’t stop organizing species. They’ve already been classified, but he just doesn’t care. He keeps doing it over and over. He says he’ll reclassify and organize every living species on the planet if he’s not stopped.”

  4. Michael says:

    It makes no sense for Kwannon and Shinobi to have started their romance during the first-night party in House of X 6. Shinobi died in Uncanny X-Men 20 during Rosenberg’s run. He was resurrected by the Five in Marauders 3. Admittedly, that was a flashback to “a few weeks ago” but Sebastian Shaw tells the resurrected Shinobi that not all nations have accepted Krakoan sovereignty. So it presumably takes place after Krakoa has been around for a while and after the first-night party. Also, in the flashback, Pyro gets into Logan’s whisky stash- the stash Kitty brought to the island in Marauders 1.
    Greycrow being metal below his waist is just odd- he died and was resurrected on Krakoa. Couldn’t the Five have fixed that? Unless he’s been like that since his power manifested?

  5. Si says:

    I could imagine a crazed taxonomist doing things like studying the quagga and saying “is it a subspecies? A hybrid? A discrete species? This is impossible to quantify, I’ll just have to extirpate again.” And then he reaches for his flamethrower.

  6. MasterMahan says:

    Perhaps the Taxonomist was driven mad by people referring to mutants as a separate species, and now intends to teach the world the definition of species by force.

  7. SanityOrMadness says:

    Michael> Greycrow being metal below his waist is just odd- he died and was resurrected on Krakoa. Couldn’t the Five have fixed that? Unless he’s been like that since his power manifested?

    They could have fixed Karma’s leg too. They chose not to.

  8. Luis Dantas says:

    I would love to read that, @MasterMahan

  9. Michael says:

    I just thought of something- in Magneto 6, Magneto cuts off Scalphunter’s legs and then cauterizes the wounds to keep him from regrowing them. How could Magneto “cauterize” the wounds if he’s metal below the waist?.

  10. Midnighter says:

    “How could Magneto “cauterize” the wounds if he’s metal below the waist?.”

    Perhaps this is simply a misconception of Shinobi

  11. MasterMahan says:

    @Midnighter: That works. I can’t imagine Greycrow was in the mood to explain his genital situation.

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