X-MEN #31: Soul Possessions Part One: The Butterfly and the Hawk

Everything you always wanted to know about Kwannon but were afraid to ask

Originally Published April 1994

We begin in the olden days, when Revanche was Kwannon and Betsy was white. It's a flashback from the point of view of the original sexy Japanese ninja assassin, as she exchanges some flirty dialogue with Matsu'o Tsurayaba, the schmook at the center of all this, revealing that they had, ga-a-a-sp... a romance!

Watching over these memories from an Orange-flavored shadow realm is Spiral, the body-changing witch from the Mojoverse who, unfortunately, plays a key role in the drama that is about to unfold between these two.

But we never find out to whom she is speaking. Mojo? Majordomo? Mojodojo? Unconfirmed.

Anyway, back on present-day Earth, the now-Caucasoid, now-Revanche is getting ready to use her sharpest knife to cut the biggest slice out of the X-Men's mentor, Charles Xavier.

Unfortunately for Spiral, who is psyched to see the head of the X-Men lose his on live TV, the broadcast cuts out. We rejoin sometime later -- Revanche is gone, having left a note for Charles and her döppelgänger, saying in effect "Thanks for the memories, Revanche out."

Andy Kubert worked very hard to get that thong on panel, so we have to acknowledge it

Psylocke doesn't mention the other parting gift Revanche has left behind...

Betsy Braddock's original eyes, aka the cameras to the Mojoverse!

Now, I know what you're thinking: these cameras have been proven not to work since the X-Men's "death" in Dallas, but we're now just straight up pretending like maybe they have. 

While all of this is going on back in America, Matsu'o (or "Matta" as Kwannon affectionately calls him,) thinks back to the salad days when he was merely courting a fellow dangerous assassin who happened to be on opposite sides of a deadly conflict. He suggests mutual suicide, but Kwannon isn't up for it.

Here in our world, Mat gets a visit from his onetime benefactor Spiral, who as we know played a part in the Asianifying of Betsy Braddock. Matsu'o, several months after the Warranty has run out, takes his grievance to Spiral saying "That's not what I ordered." Spiral notes that she abided by the terms of their arrangement: fix Kwannon's body, which she totally did, and she happens to have stuck a white girl's brain in there. Buyer beware.

Back in 'Murica, Betsy is sweating it out in the Danger Room against some replications of the Shi'ar military, taking her physical prowess to the limits. She's interrupted by the appearance of Angel -- in classic non-blue form -- but she's not having it so she cuts him down too, just to prove she can. He's a hologram, and she figures if he wants to talk he should come down for reals. 

Elsewhere in the mansion, Charles and Beast discuss expanding the latter's role within the X-Men -- sure, he's super busy with this Legacy Virus stuff, but the team needs a leader with Cyclops off on his honeymoon, and what's he going to do, ask Warren to do it?

Also Rogue and Gambit share some loaded dialogue that is either about cereal or sex, or both. 

But back to more important things and people. We return to Japan, and the fateful night when Matsu'o and Kwannon crossed swords, leading the the latter's death. Matta brought his broken beauty to the evil witch and said "Fix her" and the evil witch said "I will, but only in my evil witch way," to which Matta replied, "Works for me!"

Revanche arrives, seeking revanche.

She wants to know what in God's good green Earth inspired Matsu'o to wreck her life by making her a white girl. Eventually he tells the truth: he didn't know that Betsy was in her body, but he figured he could work with that.

Any soul is a goal

They talk a bit about how this didn't come up with Revanche and Psylocke visited recently, and Kwannon says that with all the psychic identity craziness going on she hadn't even remembered she was in love with Matsu'o, and more was focussed on what she had learned from Lord Nyorin's diary, that he and Kwannon were lovers -- which, by the way, turns out to be fictitious, so just forget about it, it never happened, I guess.

Anyway, Matsu'o shoots his shot and asks if they can just get back together already, and Revanche responds hell no we can't be together, I'm dying!

And by that, she means, like, right now, and she's come to Matsu'o to ask him to kill her in an honorable fashion rather than dying of a disease like an idiot. Reluctantly, Matta complies.

The whole thing causes a psychic backlash that affects Psylocke back in America, as she crashes her car coming back from Brunch with Warren (where they had been discussing several of the loose ends engendered by the whole Revanche affair.) She's a little dismayed that Revanche's death seems to mean that they'll never get answers as to WTF was going on with her in the first place, but luckily they are visited by someone who does know.

The phrase "Quit while you're ahead" comes to mind!

Further Thoughts:

Something that's very vexing to me about this whole affair -- as a guy who has made it his business to recap every issue of X-Men (more or less) -- is that this is perhaps the first time where the previous story has been re-written.

It's not the first retcon, per se, of course. There was an entire series of revelations about Jean Grey and Madelyne Pryor that were clearly not aligned with the original intentions of the stories as depicted. These revisions: that Jean Grey didn't die and that Maddie was a clone, did not outright contradict anything that we saw with our own two eyes, it was just inserting new information into the gaps of these stories that could re-contextualize them to suit the creative needs. Pretty sneaky.

But this? We saw, albeit in a very ambiguous fashion, what was going on with Betsy's transformation into Asian ninja. We don't exactly get all the hows and whatfors, but it was strongly implied if not outright stated, that Matsu'o has 1) gained possession of Betsy's (white) body, and 2) through somekind of heretofore unrevealed partnership with Spiral, connived to transform that body into an Asian one, so that the psychic they had gained possession of could move undetected in the Eastern underworld. Is it broadly offensive? Sure. But does it have a kind of nefarious in-universe logic to it? Yes. It's Face/Off--er, Race/Off.

Then Revanche arrived to answer the question nobody was asking about what had happened to Betsy's original body, and it was stated to more or less be a body-swap or rather a soul-combination: both believed they were Betsy. And now Revanche has come to terms, somehow, with the fact that she is Kwannon, in Betsy's body, and the result of Matsu'o trying to save his love and settling for Asian Betsy as a consolation prize. It kind of works if you squint.

Only now, you have to tell that part of the story, which is where Mr. Fabian Nicieza runs into trouble. A lot of heavy lifting has to be done go turn that story into this one,to tell us we didn't see what we saw, and that the intentions, actions and motivations of the characters were such that the events resulted in this. It's proving daunting. But there may be a bigger issue,even if the Revanche story was seamless.

A long, long time ago, a friend of mine told me a story about encountering a certain legendary member of a famous British comedy troupe at an HMV in Toronto. Being a big fan of this person's work, my friend went over to say hello. This well-known actor-writer-comedian took a moment to look at my friend and say brusquely, "Excuse me, are we working together? Because if not, there's no reason for me to talk to you," and send my friend on his way.

Now, was this heartless and needlessly rude? Absolutely. But on some level, I get it: this man can't go anywhere without people wanting him to re-enact famous bits from his iconic 1969-1973 sketch comedy show, perhaps those where he moves about in a funny or "silly" manner, or the numerous movies he starred in by hurling French-accented insults (just as hypothetical, possibly non-relevant examples.) You've got to protect yourself and conserve your energy and time.

Today, I feel the same way. Are we "working with" Revanche? Is this story vital to the ongoing saga of the X-Men? Is this entire affair with the Japanese underground going to take us to interesting and intriguing new places? No? Then why are we talking about it? Ultimately, the X-Men, even Psylocke, have absolutely no part in this, and only appear in snippets to check in with their ongoing personal dramas. This is the Kwannon and Matsu'o show, and I've made it abundantly clear that I do not care a whit about what happens in the Japanese underground: power plays, competing factions, secret romances, this is all at best background scenery that informs the action that our heroes -- you know, the ones whose collective names are on the cover of the book -- engage in. If they're going to be sidelined, then what is the bloody point? It could be the most fascinating character study ever committed to page -- and it's not -- and I would still be going "Okay, but where are the X-Men in this?"

Matsu'o isn't even really an X-Men villain. He runs the Hand and enables the Upstarts a bit, but he gets way more page time than he's due. Bro is not that interesting.

But now we're in the morass. Now we've introduced Revanche and Nyoirin and Matsu'o and the story won't feel complete until all of this has been untangled, even though it seems there's no way to do it and tell a good X-Men story. We're committed, though, to digging out way out: the only way out is through. The fact that we've already been through one explanation that didn't explain everything and was since discarded pretty much sums it up. Now with the big arrival of Spiral at the end, we're continuing to examine this rather than just cut our losses with the big dramatic death of Kwannon. 

This is what becomes a big problem for Marvel Comics in the 90s: stories that are built on revealing secret truths about earlier stories, which then merely become lectures in explaining how it comes together instead of a story itself. Although Nicieza imbues the life and death of Revanche with as much pathos and drama as he can -- and he sure goes for it -- it's fundamentally a level-setting on "what really happened in this story from four years ago."

This is a pretty stylish issue -- Nicieza is a very writerly writer who wants to embellish and craft, and I think that's cool. The abundant poetic narration and elliptical dialogue adds color to the piece, but also obfuscates the conveyance of information that we need (ie, it's hard to suss out just what the hell is actually going on.) I think that, freed from the trappings he has set up for himself with this particular stretch of story, he could do great things. But for whatever reason -- his own initiative, or editorial mandate, I don't know -- his X-Men run is largely marked by a trend of revealing that What You Thought You Knew Was Not The Case -- Follow Me For More Info! rather than proper narrative drive. It makes the X-Men's world very interesting, but it makes the individual comics less appetizing.