Psylocke #3: What’s Wrong With The Butterflies?

This series continues to impress as the creative team once again find the perfect balance action, mystery and interaction. Alyssa Wong writes a fantastic Kwannon. There’s a hardness about her, she’s extremely capable and confident in her abilities due to years of training but that hardness is off set by her affection for the children she’s trying to protect as well as for her lover and the entire creative team gets to show off these two distinct sides to her personality in her interactions with everyone else through the issue. Meanwhile Carratu also gets to show of marvelous fighting scenes in a wonderful deadly and dynamic ballet. you’ve got robot animal monsters, a new villain introduction, Shinobi running his mouth and trying to make Greycrow jealous. it’s just enthralling stuff from page one.

If I think about all the best X-Men solo series I’ve read going back over the years. The ones I love the most are the ones that dig into the characters head, relationships, have a healthy dose of action and melodrama but also show the character doing something cool that we haven’t seen before with their abilities and this issue has all of that. From her very mature self aware relationship with Greycrow to her putting Shinobi in his place while still soliciting the information she needs from him, and through all her interactions Wong paints a compelling picture of an extremely capable woman with emotional depths that seeking answers internally as well as externally. Using the idea of the butterfly motif in both a symbolic and actual physical way is the kind of clever soft touch I live for in series like this, while the twisted take on a certain upstate manner and character in a wheelchair reveal all speaks to an understanding of not just the characters involved but the iconography and melodrama of X-Men as a franchise that makes us love these stories as much as we do.

The art team of Vincenzo Carratu, colorist Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, Letterer VC’s Ariana Maher set not one foot wrong with Wong’s perfectly sharpened script. Dropping you straight in the action with an incredible double splash action scene, showing of how great Carratu is with depicting Kwannon in motion to an absolute mic drop moment with psychically guided kunai blades (thanks Devon, you genius)T the action scenes are flawless affairs from the whole team. Colorist Sifuentes brings the line work wonderfully to life with purples, pinks and blues while Maher’s lettering is perfectly placed. Again I have to come to the clever use of the butterfly motif that even gets used to break up panels on a page. It’s just a very smartly written and beautifully drawn affair from Mahmud Asrar’s strikingly beautiful cover to the menacing last page reveal. An absolutely perfect mutant butterfly of an issue.