X-Force #41 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #41
“The Ghost Calendars, part 2”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Paul Davidson
Colour artist: Guru-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: The makeshift X-Force on a mound of skulls – Colossus, Wolverine, Domino, Omega Red, elderly Kid Omega and alt-future Deadpool. (The real one was left behind last issue.)
PAGES 2-5. Beast buries clones of himself at world heritage sites.
It’s not entirely clear whether this is something Beast is actually up to now, or simply part of the back story of the future timeline, but it doesn’t really matter. Beast’s basic idea here is audaciously silly: the best way to make sure his clones survive into the future is to hide them within world heritage sites, because nobody’s going to mess about with them. Which kind of begs the question of how he got in in the first place, and how he expects that shallow grave in Stonehenge to go unnoticed, but let’s assume he’s bribing or mind controlling people or whatever.
Over in Wolverine, Beast was paranoid about his clones undermining his control, but presumably he’s not so bothered about these guys, because he doesn’t expect to be around. Or perhaps these are more spare clone bodies in which he can be resurrected with his own mind, as happened (somehow) in the epilogue of Wolverine #30. But probably not, because Quentin’s explanation last issue was that Beast “has planted various versions of himself to influence the future.” He described them as “experimental hatchlings and mutations”.
The Beast clone buried in Stonehenge is holding the Cerebro Sword, evidently being positioned here as some sort of Excalibur analogue.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits.
PAGES 7-11. X-Force arrive on a Krakoan world.
The previous issue ended with Quentin explaining that X-Force had to work their way back through time to eliminate all Beast’s sleeper clones. Since Quentin tells us at the end that the next jump will be their last, apparently we’ve skipped over a bunch of iterations of this.
The Krakoan world in the sky has the face of the Beast – which is rather clearer on page 18, but you can see the teeth.
The rest of this is self-explanatory, and the one reference to earlier stories is footnoted anyway.
PAGES 12-14. X-Force meet the local Deadpool.
This is an alternate Deadpool who made it to the far future by simply not dying.
Staten Island. Deadpool was ruling Staten Island as a kingdom of monsters in his 2020-2021 series, though the whole thing seems to have been quietly dropped somewhere around the end of King in Black. At any rate, that’s why he’s sat out the intervening millennia ruling Staten Island.
Blind Al was a supporting character from Deadpool’s first ongoing, who also showed up in Wolverine #20-23.
PAGE 15. Data page. This is a sequel to the data page in the previous issue, also headed “Cerebrax <Former Cerebro Cradle>” and using the same art. That one was a basically straight recap of issue #29. This one basically consists of the voice of Cerebrax dementedly repeating its insistence that it and Quentin are the same person – apparently an ongoing distraction that Quentin has to deal with, coming to a peak right now.
PAGES 16-19. A Beast bioweapon attacks.
Omega Red dies, but doubtless he’ll be back.
Quentin apparently destroys the entire Krakoan hivemind for this world, on the view that it’s corrupted by Beast.
PAGE 20. Data page. Beast compares his clones to the lodgepole pine, which does indeed germinate in the aftermath of forest fires. (Some of them, anyway. Apparently the populations vary.)
PAGE 21. Colossus and Domino discuss the Beast.
Colossus raises outright the question of whether the Beast is under some sort of outside influence. Of course, Colossus himself is under the influence of Chronicler, and has been throughout this series. In the previous issue, Chronicler lost control of Colossus when he went into the future, and Colossus claimed to be confused and to feel like he was waking up. The fact that he’s so keen to raise this point might suggest that he’s more aware of what was happening, which would fit better with other books – though if so, you’d think he’d take the chance to warn someone.
Domino’s explanation for Beast’s actions is basically the same one that Beast himself gave in last week’s Wolverine.
PAGES 22-24. Kid Omega falls to Earth and X-Force make their final jump.
This is the city we saw at the beginning of the issue, with Stonehenge in a dome. Moreover, it’s also the city we saw at the end of the previous issue, which had a massive Beast-like figure standing over it, with somewhat Nimrod-like properties.
PAGE 25. Trailers.
I like Wolverine a lot more than X-Force, despite the writer and villain being the same. Maybe it’s because I really dig the Ryp/D’Armata art team on the former, maybe it’s because I don’t care about most of the characters in this book, maybe it’s because the plotting is better, but I found this issue lacking in fun. Also, the Cerebrax (ugh) data page was an even bigger waste of space than the usual data pages.
First off, I have not read this issue yet, so I apologize if I derail the comments (hopefully not!). I had planned on doing this later on, but decided to go for it because I wasn’t sure if the correct time would ever arrive. Anyway….
Back at the start of May, I read House of X / Powers of X, and enjoyed it. Decided to continue on with the X books (I haven’t read any comics books since that mid-1990s) with a cool chronological-order reading list for the X-titles that I have found online.
As of tonight, I’m just about to start the Hellfire Gala of 2022, with Judgment Day to follow. I’ve read everything X-related in between. (and i mean everything, save like 2 or 3 issues of Savage Avengers that had the X-Men during the King in Black I couldn’t find anywhere, so I’ve seen the highs and the lows, haha)
And I have also read every annotation (and the comments below!) for every thing as well.
So what am I getting at? I just wanted to send a BIG thank you to Paul for all the work you put in. You have been an INVALUABLE resource and treasure for me on this journey. I have learned so much from your notes, and you’ve helped me understand some things I never would have without you.
So….thanks. I really appreciate it, and I enjoy this place to learn and listen. Hopefully, one day, I’ll be at a point where I have caught up and I’m able to comment along with the current issues. Until then, I’ll be just a little bit behind y’all. Hope that’s okay!
The exploded moon from this issue is also visible in a scene in the previous issue, which is a nice touch. I suspect this whole arc will reward re-reading.
I was very worried what Percy would do with Laura after he seemed to completely not get her in her introductory scene.
Luckily for me, it seems he’s not going to do anything, she’s just here to fill background space. Great.
Other than that – not much to say. Percy can do goofy stuff. The possessed whale was probably the high point of Lives/Death s of Wolverine.
Any theories on what’s going on with Quentin? He seems to vomit some kind of metal tentacle near the end but it doesn’t look techno-organic. Maybe some kind of sentinel tech? I don’t have my hopes up for it being anything too interesting.
The small amount Laura does get to do is pretty stupid too. Deadpool says “I’ll tell you later, well not later but earlier” and she responds “I don’t speak idiot”. Like come on, she’s literally in a time travel story and has done so many, many times before – it’s not too hard to figure out what he means.
Yeah, but judging by the first issue she was in, it could have been so much worse.
At this point I don’t think Percy even wanted her in this book, I’d guess editorial just wanted to keep her in circulation after X-Terminators wrapped up.
@RaoulSeagull- the data page seems to imply Quentin’s been merged with Cerebrax.
And yeah, when Laura said “I don’t speak idiot”, my first thought was ” Laura, YOU are the idiot.” This wasn’t an example of Wade babbling, it was Wade saying as simply as possible “My younger self will tell your older self what happened”.
Why does Old Man Kid Omega need the rest of the X-Forcers in this arc again? He seems fully capable of ridding all of these moments of their Bad Beasts without breaking a sweat. In this issue he could have launched his massive pink missile (so to speak) at the Beastmoon on pg 8 panel 1 and not bothered with any of the intervening nonsense.
@RaoulSeagull I think that tentacle on pg 41 panel 3 is just reminding us that he’s merged with Cerebrax.
The current events in Russia- no matter how they turn out- show how bad an idea the “Colossus is controlled by his brother’s minion” plot was. None of us can be sure if Putin will last another couple of weeks. If Putin falls tomorrow, then the Colossus plot will look silly.
[…] #41. (Annotations here.) The previous issue seemed to set up one of those “jump after jump through time” […]
But Vatnik RuZZia is not all Vladimir Putin, even if he were to drop dead right now , their ruling regime would still be more or less mostly still the same tsk tsk tsk