X-Force #40 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #40
“The Ghost Calendars, part 1”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artists: Robert Gill and Paul Davidson
Colourist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. X-Force leap into action in a futuristic city – with Beast in the background rather than Kid Omega, but that’s spoilers being avoided in the solicitations, I expect. If you want, you could claim he’s sort of symbolically looming over them? Deadpool doesn’t go on this mission either, but heck, it’s a cover.
PAGES 2-6. Quentin Quire briefs X-Force and takes them into the future.
This picks up from the end of the previous issue. X-Force have just dealt with a bunch of Beast’s genetic experiments who were dumped on Krakoa by Sevyr Blackmore, hence all the body parts lying around. Then the older Quentin Quire emerged through a portal, sliced off a giant tentacle thingy that was reaching after him, and announced that he needed X-Force’s help.
“You invite him [Deadpool] onto the team in my stead?” Quentin left X-Force when he vanished at the end of issue #29. Deadpool was invited to join in Wolverine #23 and appeared as a team member in X-Force #30.
Omega Red. Oddly, Omega Red is the team member who actively tries to defend Deadpool from Quentin, despite usually finding him intolerable and mutilating him on a routine basis. I suppose it’s one of those “only I get to do this” things.
Wolverine. Laura insists that she is not a member of X-Force. She was invited to join in issue #39 but hadn’t actually made a decision by the time Quentin showed up.
“He’s [Beast’s] gone, yes? Already off making trouble on his own?” Beast went rogue in Wolverine #31. Apparently Quentin knows about this part of history, but not about Deadpool being on the team – but in fairness, one is a lot more noteworthy than the other. Does this imply that he has advance knowledge of “Fall of X”, though?
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGES 8-9. X-Force arrive in the future.
Colossus is confused because he’s free of Chronicler’s influence in the far future. The data page shows Chronicler explaining this to his employer Mikhail Rasputin. Quentin attributes Colossus’ confusion to a side effect of time travel, but again, if he knows about Beast, might he know more than he’s letting on?
Shouldn’t this have happened before when he was transported to Limbo in New Mutants?
PAGES 10-12. X-Force fail to rescue Omega Red from a Beast Priest.
Self-explanatory (we’ll find out what a Beast Priest is later). Note that the moon seems to have been destroyed.
PAGE 13. Quentin introduces X-Force to his “rebellion”.
It’s not clear whether the Wolverine head in the tank is capable of saying (or doing) anything remotely useful, but since he’s described later as the group “leader”, presumably he does something more than we see here.
PAGES 14-15. Omega Red is taken to be sacrificed.
Kid Omega’s voice over basically tells us that Beast created a religion around himself as a vehicle of control, and these monstrosities are what remains of his decayed theocracy. Quite how the uncharismatic Beast managed to achieve that isn’t clear, but maybe we’ll get to it.
PAGE 16. Data page. This is basically a recap of issue #29 – quite reasonably, because it came out nearly a year ago. However, all the material about why Quentin disappeared at the end of the fight, and why Kid Omega’s mind was wiped from Cerebro’s records, is new. Essentially, the story is that when he defeated Cerebrax, Kid Omega had a vision of the future that he felt compelled to investigate, and he deleted himself from Cerebro to make sure that they wouldn’t just resurrect him in his absence.
PAGES 17-24. X-Force kill the “God of all Mutants” Beast.
Well, that was an anticlimax. But Quentin tells us that there are a load of other Beasts to deal with in the timestream before they can go home, so evidently we’re going on a time travel jaunt. The closing page seems to show a far future Beast/Nimrod giant in a hi-tech city.
PAGE 25. Trailers.
Yeah, nothing like this happened to Colossus when he was transported to Limbo. Although, he was able to tell Illyana he was having blackouts when he went to Limbo- maybe that was due to the Chronciler’s control being weakened/absent in Limbo.
Beast used to be so charismatic that he almost accidentally started a new religion by letting a bunch of coffee house beatniks paint his feet.
I really don’t understand Percy. After 70 issues of Beast being too dumb to dress himself, he’s a world ending threat. And then God Beast dies off-panel because he’s still too dumb to dress himself.
Maybe Percy had already started this as a story before he heard about Sins of Sinister and decided he had to do a rewrite? If not, I’m baffled.
At least Jar Logan has cute little claws.
Colossus being free from the Chronicler’s influence now when he wasn’t while in Limbo is easy enough to explain. From his perspective, Colossus doesn’t exist right now. From Colossus’, Chronicler is either dead or has stopped attempting to control him for decades.
There is no reason to assume that his mind control can travel through time. More than that, there is a reasonably high chance that this is an alternate future that may end up resetting itself out of existence an issue or two further ahead.
Whether the control will resume later when Colossus returns to the present on is unclear, but I think that the odds are high.
Of course, it very conceivable that Old Man Omega may decide to investigate Colossus’ mind and find some indication that he was controlled.
@Luis- But the New Mutants story relied on time being weird in Limbo. First, Illyana transported Peter from a time when she was Belasco’s slave to the “present” of Limbo. Then, Illyana says that even though they’ve been hiding from S’ym for weeks, it’s only been hours on Earth. You’d think that time moving faster in Limbo than on Earth alone would prevent the Chronicler from being able to control Peter.
I guess I am just not seeing it.
I’m going to No-Prize it. Colossus’s symptoms are, as Quentin said, from time travel rather than being cut off from Chronicler. Who Colossus doesn’t know is controlling/influencing him, so he didn’t bring it up in New Mutants. Perhaps.
I started this issue thinking that BP was upset about not being invited to take part in ‘Sins of Sinister’ so was going to write his own very dumb version of it and, at the end of part one, am not unconvinced that that might be the case. But, having said that, it has a certain level of bonkers fun that’s mostly been missing from the overarching story of ‘the misadventures of the dumbest supervillain around’. So I’m here for X-Force’s ‘Crosstime Caper’ which I’m surprised that Marvel doesn’t feel the need to also renew a title claim for.