One Perfect Moment - Self/Friends speaking the same language

[icon_uk]

My final contribution to One Perfect Moment week, from New Mutants #8


Since his enforced resurrection by Selene and Eli Bard, Doug Ramsey, alone of all the technorganic bespelled zombies, has retained some sense of self awareness (probably due to his familiarity with technorganic computer code), but since he is under the control of another, he has no chance to provide his own context on the world and has had to watch himself attempt to kill his old team-mates. He keeps asking "What language am I?" but no one can give him a proper answer.

Warlock has faith in his selfsoufriendcypherdoug though, and is determined to bring him back to the land of the living, and has just rescued him whilst taking out the equally resurrected Hellions. Now he knows what he must do...



The soulswords primary power is that it will do no harm to ordinary matter, but will slice through magic like.. well a sword, shredding spells like tissue paper.

The next page has some semi-Freudian imagery which Wertham would probably have hated... So it's all good!





And thus, thanks to the power of a friendship that Doug was actually the one to teach Warlock about years before, Warlock brings his best friend back to himself.

(Oh, and if anyone is interested, clicking on the images will take you to pages on my CAF site, where the original inked pages are up, I HAD to get them when I saw they were available :) )
 

Comments

[kiev4am]

Awww, I love Warlock. He's like the Tin Man of the Marvelverse. That's a great scene.

[bwhahahabeck]

Warlock and Doug are ♥. All the scenes between them during Necrosha had me tearing up like a baby.

[proteus_lives]

Great moment.

Warlock and Doug are true blue friends.

[nervousystem.livejournal.com]

Why didn't the New Mutants save more of the Necros?

I'm really mad at them actually.

[icon_uk]

Because they couldn't, and it wasn't their fault either.

Doug was salvageable because he had an affinity with computer codes and the TO virus, and Warlock had always retained a complete copy of Doug's memories stored within himself from their old Douglock merges and which he downloaded into Doug earlier in the story, not enough to break the spell, but a help in restoring Doug.

As Karma pointed out during the story when she tried possessing them, underneath the shell of control that Selene had imposed, all the other Necros were completely and irrevocably insane, simply freeing them from the control spell wouldn't have helped.

[nervousystem.livejournal.com]

Dang.

"Necrosha" was such a damn tease. What X-Fan doesn't have one (or more) of their personal favorites in the comic grave?

Thanks for the info, I have been saving up for the big ole Hardcover.

[icon_uk]

What X-Fan doesn't have one (or more) of their personal favorites in the comic grave?

Yup! See icon! :D

[long_silence]

That's not entirely true. Thunderbird and Risque both seemed to slightly resist Selene's control, for brief moments their own personalities broke through and in Thunderbird's case it allowed him to rebel and show Warpath how to kill Selene.

And I don't think Destiny was ever under Selene's control.

[icon_uk]

Ah, was not aware of Thunderbird and Risque. I think the personalities of the originals were there, but only as a shell to make them easier for Selene to direct them.

They needed to have some level of rationality to them to make them useful, and the default setting was in there. So whilst the Hellions appearred to be coherent as individuals (bitching and snarking as was tsome of their wont), that was a thin layer over an ocean of screaming madness. Which makes Thunderbird and Risque's efforts all the more impressive, but it's not likely to have been able to last long term. Doug's mind could be could be restored because there was a work copy to restore to him.

Destiny didn't exactly live in the here and now, so I can see her being an odd case at the best of times.

[long_silence]

Did you read the X-Force and Legacy parts of Necrosha or are you only basing this theory off of the New Mutants tie-in? I don't mean to sound accusatory, it's just that most of the Necrosha storyline and the lead up to it was in X-Force.

This was the same T/O virus that the Purifiers used to resurrect William Stryker, Bolivar Trask, Steven Lang, Cameron Hodge and Graydon Creed. And I don't recall "screaming madness" ever being used to describe them. Though to be fair none of them were great examples of sanity to begin with. They all had their own personalities, but they were all under Bastion's control.

iirc Magik only used her soul sword on Beef and Bevatron, who said that they liked working for Selene. If Illyana had used her magic killing sword on anyone already resisting Selene, it may have freed them from her influence. That way they wouldn't have been devoured by Selene. They'd probably be under Bastion's control instead but they'd have survived a little longer. And then Doug could have talked their T/O viruses into submission like he did his own.

[icon_uk]

I read the introductory Legacy issue where Selene sets her plan in motion and folk (including Doug) get ressurrected, and the New Mutants issues. Might have leafed through a related X-Force, but can't recall.

I was basing the insanity bit on Xian's comment when trying to control Rouletter and that "Their minds sound like a screaming modem. Whatever these things are, their minds are insane." So I conflated the terms, but the underlying theme is there, when a telepath reads somebodies mind as insane, I tend to take them at their word.

At least couple of the ones you mention had been members of the Phalanx IIRC, maybe that helped them?

Yeah, Beef and Bevatron seemed like a couple of bullies so not the best choices there. Ilyanna also used it on Tarot who simply sort of sat there, but her live/dead status appears to be erratic at best, since last I saw, she was already back to being alive under her own steam and via her own methods.

Yeah, maybe a few more restorations would have been worth a shot.

[selke]

This totally made me smile.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Aww - greater brotherly love hath no techno-organic creature.
I can't say I like the way Warlock is drawn here, though - I'm used to him as a constantly morphing creature, with his features shifting into a new form virtually every panel. There's a little bit of that in the 'what language are you?' panel, with his eyebrows, but back in his heyday, 'Lock was basically a mechanical Toon, changing on the slightest whim. Here, he's pretty much just an anorexic robot-thing with glowy eyes. Bit of a letdown.

[icon_uk]

Agreed he's a little static, but the story makes it clear he's operating on massively reduced power, since he won't take lifeglow from living things. The next issue mentions he's on about 10% of his usual power levels and it will take a long while to get back to normal. (He was back in full warrior-toon mode in the Second Coming story having absorbed masses of lifeglow from the Right members, but later purges himself of the power he gained because he killed to gain it)

[psychopathicus_rex]

Oh - well, that's good to know. It's a bit of a shame that he's prohibited himself from draining lifeglow that way - I haven't read all that much about the character, but one of the things I found interesting about him is that he's such a nice guy, yet he's really a sort of a vampire - he can't exist without energy taken from others. Also, he originally didn't really have a problem with this, as I recall - after all, it was second nature to him, like eating would be for us - he just kept it to a minimum because his friends asked him to, and he didn't want to upset them.

[icon_uk]

Yeah, I agree it needs a little work there IMHO. Not taking lifeglow from sentients I can understand, Warlock has always viewed that as a "very bad thing", and his guilt over killing the Right members, and not wanting to use their lifeglow makes sense, but animals and plants have never been an issue before, though perhaps he might be doing it as much because he doesn't want to do anything which might lead to a Phalanx infestation.

[pyrotwilight]

Aww, the Bromance be strong with these two. Left a message on your CAF for page 22.