March 5, 2025

(Warning: this post will contain SPOILERS for Psylocke #1-4!)

Marvel’s Psylocke spinoff series was off to a great start in 2024 with the first two solid issues! The series follows Kwannon, the true identity of Psylocke, as she investigates a conspiracy that involves mutants, children, and as of the end of issue #2, the missing John Greycrow. Let’s see how well issues 3 and 4 stack up to the solid foundation that the first two issues made!

Psylocke #3

The third issue picks up immediately from the second, as Kwannon finds John Greycrow’s severed arm surrounded by a bunch of blue butterflies. She doesn’t have much time to process this, though, as she is immediately ambushed by swarm of strange animal-machine hybrids. Jumping straight into the action gives this opening scene a great pace, and the full panel art of Psylocke fighting while trying to give Devon a psychic call is very fun. The way the art and speech bubbles are laid out, while not entirely unique, is really well done and gives an intuitive sense of motion as Psylocke cuts through the strange robots.

We see a bit of her backstory as she uses her training by the Hand and her powers to track down John. She finds and rescues him, but they are quickly attacked again by even more of the hybrid robots. After a fun action sequence, Kwannon takes John to Beast to get him fixed up.

The story deepens as Kwannon and John sneak up on Shinobi, and he gives them a bit of insight into a strange figure that gave him butterflies as a child – the same butterflies that surrounded John’s arm. Kwannon takes this chance to track down this figure, as he spies on her and grins

This issue is probably the least exciting of the series so far, but that isn’t to say it’s bad. It provides the necessary followup on the mystery of John’s arm and gives Kwannon the information she needs to pursue the big bad of this story. There’s quite a lot that I enjoy! I think the use of butterflies as a sort of calling card is really interesting; it parallels Psylocke’s connection to butterflies and provides a nice visual to contrast the weird robot hybrids. I also like the new villain – the Taxonomist. As far as I’m aware, he’s completely original to this story, which definitely helps the intrigue of the story work better, since Psylocke isn’t just pursuing a typical Marvel foe we’ve seen 100 times.

I enjoy John Greycrow’s importance to the story, but I’ll admit, Shinobi’s inclusion doesn’t do much for me. The little snippets of his backstory don’t really interest me too much, and his little quips don’t entertain me nearly as much as it feels like the writer intended them to. I don’t think he’s a bad character, I like his design and he’s fine in other stuff, but he’s easily the least interesting character in this series to me.

Issue 3 was probably my least favorite issue of the series so far, but once again, it isn’t bad. It feels more so like necessary payoff and build up for the issues around it, which is just needed in the comic series format. This issue set up some crazy stuff to go down in the next issue, so let’s see how this saga continues in…

Psylocke #4

Once again, the action picks up right where it left off: Psylocke is jumping in to where the mysterious villain should be hiding. She uses her powers in some interesting ways (funnily enough, she does the Marvel Rivals dash move which was pretty funny) and, with the help of some kana made by Devon, takes out some surveillance drones. She sneaks her way into the building, which turns out to be a museum that is conveniently easy to break into… maybe a little too conveniently easy to break into…

Once inside, her powers start to act strangely. There’s a cool artistic choice where the speech bubbles representing her psychic call with Devon has some erase marks through it. On her own, she makes her way through the museum, which displays strange taxidermies and skeletons of mutated creatures. On her way through, she begins to hear voices and flashes of past Psylockes, and has to take out a few more of the hybrid robots.

She finally makes her way into a chamber where a strange baby in a tube calls her mama and she hears the voice of the Taxonomist beckoning her to follow a trail of butterflies. As she does, she’s confronted with Psylocke – Betsy Braddock classic suit design Psylocke! The two Psylockes fight, with Kwannon completely rejecting this past Psylocke. A great exchange between the Psylockes happens towards the end where Betsy says “You may have taken by name, but you’ll never be me,” to which Kwannon replies “I don’t want to be.”

This fight was in vain, though, as it turns out to be an illusion caused by the butterflies. This illusion gives the Taxonomist the opportunity to incapacitate Kwannon, and he has his machines pin her up like a giant taxidermy butterfly on the wall.

This is some great escalation! The standout moment for me is definitely the fight between the Psylockes. It works great on a thematic level, as we’ve seen Kwannon exhibit some insecurities regarding her past and identity, so seeing her get to literally fight a personification of these insecurities is the kind of stuff I live for in comics.

This fight (and all the action in this issue) is also helped by the fact that Psylocke does some awesome stuff with her powers in this issue. While her powers have been cool throughout the series so far, seeing her throw some powered up kunai, dash around, and use her charged up sword has really been the highlight of the action so far.

The Taxonomist is once again mysterious, but I like how he seems to be a freaky weirdo, I’m a big fan of the freaky weirdo category of villains in comics. He has mad scientist energy mixed with some classic X-Men villain characterization and I’m here for it.

The art is mostly pretty good here, although with this issue I kinda realized that we don’t get a lot of closeups or big panels of a singular action shot, which is fine, but it honestly did kind of bug me a bit in this issue in particular. Once again though, the art isn’t bad, it just could be better. The cover art makes up for it though, as it is absolutely my favorite cover so far! It’s very dynamic and I love how it continues to play into the butterfly dichotomy at play.

Conclusion

While issue 3 is probably my least favorite issue in the series so far, issue 4 is probably my favorite! This remains a really solid story, and the way it’s fleshing out Kwannon is super interesting. I think it’ll be really neat to see this Psylocke team up with the X-Men in the future, although I worry a bit that future writers may not have the character spark that Alyssa Wong does.

Regardless though, we still have the rest of this series to look forward to! Issue 5 releases in just two weeks, and that should be the conclusion of this story arc. The series will continue, though, as Marvel’s already revealed the cover and story teaser for issues 6 and 7! If this story sounds interesting to you, I’d recommend getting caught up so you can enjoy the conclusion of this arc at release!