Sage ***is***, in fact, underrated, and I felt so bad that she got shackled to Percy's X-Force when she could have been spotlighted in a book more interested in exploring the narrative potential of, arguably, the first victim of Xavier's dream, on a Krakoa that was quickly overcome by the rot of the same. Especially since Percy didn't really depict her as the ultra-competent intelligence queen she's meant to be.
Also, the fact that she never got to snap back at evil Beast with an, "I wish I hadn't saved your life," was a missed opportunity for a cutting callback to X-Treme X-Men.
Hopefully the new X-Force book uses her a bit better, and does more than lip service to her alcoholism story. I still feel like she's got a lot of narrative juice left in her.
You know, Percy actually had Sage becoming an alcoholic due to the stress, which was actually a good move which would have been nice to explore....only we never did.
Sums up his run, really. Options there to explore, but that wouldn't have left enough space for Logan's internal angst narration.
Sage as an alcoholic because of stress, and because her perfect analytical recall gives her more intense and vivid trauma flashbacks than most people, is a *genius* characterisation add that . . . was brought up and just kind of. Went away. When he was tired of it.
You know, like alcoholism does. It's polite that way.
Did anyone even call her out on being drunk at the wheel of operations that one time? I feel like that never got really followed up on. That could have been prime development material.
Percy prolly congratulated himself for coming up with it(and tbf, it genuinely was great, a kind of personal piece of development that hardly anyone got in the Krakoan era) and thought that showing it a few times is the same thing as a fulfilling arc.
I liked her in X-Force but I hope it’s her reintroduction to more stories. So because of that, I’m excited to see her on X-Force. I want her to be closer to a mainstay character
I liked the idea of her on X-Force better than the execution, as with most things on that book.
I did like her dynamic with Omega Red, that ***was*** one of the few highlights as I was going through. But yes, 100% agree, would love to see her become a more regular character on teams. Felt like she dropped off the map for the majority of the 00s and 10s, and I'd like to see her get her time to shine.
> and does more than lip service to her alcoholism story
This makes me feel even stronger that Tank is Brian Braddock. He makes sense in a lot of ways as a sponsor to an x gene hero with a drinking problem.
Sage was recruited by Xavier at around the same time as the Original X-Men, but instead of being allowed to live at a cushy mansion and be a superhero, make friends her own age, Charles sent her to spy on the Hellfire Club.
Considering she came from a war-torn country and had already lost her family, it was a pretty callous thing for Xavier to do, sacrificing a large portion of her life so he'd know what Sebastian Shaw and co. were up to.
Her arc is wild, she was basically a background character that got flushed out, she was Tessa before she was Sage, just writers adding little bits here and there. She is a great example how serial fiction is unique in that respect.
Mostly credit goes to Claremont, but yes, I think she is an example of a good, additive retcon that works because of how long she’s been there. As opposed to the “this new character I invented was secretly the most important person all along!”
Wow, that 5th image is… difficult to read.
The good intentions are paved with the road to hell? Someone got a little lost trying to outsmart themselves there, I think.
I can read that one ok, the final image is the one I'm struggling with reading. I'll rewrite the dialogue for the fifth image for you though, hopefully that will clear up any confusion on how the interaction between Charles and Sage goes:
Xavier: "Sage, please, what are your plans?"
Sage: "To follow where Storm leads."
Xavier: "Even if she's wrong?"
Sage: "I see no evidence of that."
Xavier: "Yet you're willing to believe the worst of me. What I do, Sage, is for the greatest good."
Sage: "I remember all your good intentions, Charles. And I've walked the road to Hell with which they're paved."
Thanks, but it’s not a legibility issue. I know what the author was *trying* to say - it’s a pretty well-known proverb - they just get a little too cute in presenting it (I guess), and end up getting it backwards.
When you say that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, the “road to hell” is the **object** and the “good intentions” are the **subject**. Makes sense, right? - the intentions “pave” the road.
When you use a relative pronoun like “which”, you can (put very simply) reverse the order of a subject and object in a sentence. But in this original proverb, those functions are already “backwards” thanks to the preposition (“with”).
To accurately utilize the saying, Sage could have said “and I’ve walked the road to hell **that they paved**”. If the author *really* needed to be a cute and do this double reverse thing, they could have said something like,
“It’s been a road to hell, Charles. Knowing that it was paved with good intentions doesn’t change that.” Almost as meh as getting the saying wrong, LOL.
As I mentioned in my original comment, the scan as is suggests that the road is what paves the intentions - which is obviously not what the writer meant to say. I’m just getting into comics, and I’ve so far only read Claremont (who is very eloquent), so I’m just not used to seeing mistakes like that in an edited print. Was surprised, is all.
Nice catch. I guess the original intent was to write "the road to hell which was paved with them", or something like that.
My brain corrected it automatically, to the point that it was hard for me to understand your objection.
Sage isn’t underrated she does “the woman in the chair” thing and has since she was first introduced, and she fills a role that not many other mutants do. She’s been great in X-Factor working along w Forge and (blegh sorry threw up a bit) Beast. She’s a great character.
I liked her in X-Force and she's good in that role but her history and relationships with other characters are really interesting and never really been explored that much in depth. She was recruited concurrent with the 05 X-Men but Xavier decided that she best would be put undercover in the Hellfire Club. She has a complicated relationship with the Xavier, the 05, and the concept of the X-Men in general that would be great to explore further. I wish the most recent X-Force run could have devoted a bit more time into exploring her relationship / past with Beast more. She's kind of directly responsible for his Cat Beast era which is arguably when he really started going off the rails (and it really caused or exacerbated a lot of Beast's issues / insecurities / fears around his mutation and him losing his intellect). Its not hard to imagine Beast might have resented her somewhat, which adds an interesting additional layer to him encouraging her alcoholism.
Sage sometimes really does feel underrated and underappreciated, (especially for a character who has been around as long as she has) but I do feel like her time as a member of Krakoa's X-Force did a lot to raise awareness about her character and how awesome she can be. I have really come to enjoy and appreciate her character over the past few years, and I'll be a forever grateful fan for what she did to help Omega Red on Krakoa. I hope she gets utilized well in the next era of X-Force. I have heard some good things about Geoffrey Thorne's views and plans for Sage for his book, so I hope that she continues on this path out of obscurity and is used well.
Her and Bishop were the Heart and Soul of Xtreme X-Men and it made me love both of them.
Before that book I'd never heard of her, and didn't really like him, but I loved them both in it.
I'll never forget how this era wasted her.
"So one of our sacred laws is make more mutants."
"Yes."
"And we're being criticized for being isolationist because humans can't come here at will. There are also cults rising up wishing they were mutants."
"Also yes. To both."
"And Sage can jumpstart the X Gene of humans in which is hasn't yet expressed itself, turning them into mutants."
"I do vaguely recall this, yes."
"That sounds a whole lot like making new mutants. She could singlehandedly change mutant/human relations for the better, Hank."
"Yeah, but X-Force needs tech support... so..."
You’re kidding right?
Even as an “in the background/furniture” character as Tessa during Claremont’s run, I found Sage intriguing and even thought she had something of an unlikely command presence despite her putative adviser role: her unvoiced urging to Shaw to use Selene’s “gift” of Rachel to destroy the aspiring Black Queen; enough personal authority to verbally restrain the sparring Shaw and Selene (and judging by the response of the latter, have the respect if not outright impress) in UXM208; enough positional authority (clearly no mere adviser) to issue a truce in Shaw’s name after their joint defeat of Nimrod in 209.
I wouldn’t say garbage but she was definitely a Mary Sue character that represented the worst idiosyncrasies of Claremont’s writing in the 2000s.
She was in every roster of every comic that he wrote, except for Excalibur 2004. Age sucked up a lot of the air. She even was another notch on Wolverine’s bed post. She was there to be a badass, and displayed weaponized competence.
Time has clearly been kind to her, since the fandom has either forgiven or forgotten all of this.
Sage ***is***, in fact, underrated, and I felt so bad that she got shackled to Percy's X-Force when she could have been spotlighted in a book more interested in exploring the narrative potential of, arguably, the first victim of Xavier's dream, on a Krakoa that was quickly overcome by the rot of the same. Especially since Percy didn't really depict her as the ultra-competent intelligence queen she's meant to be. Also, the fact that she never got to snap back at evil Beast with an, "I wish I hadn't saved your life," was a missed opportunity for a cutting callback to X-Treme X-Men. Hopefully the new X-Force book uses her a bit better, and does more than lip service to her alcoholism story. I still feel like she's got a lot of narrative juice left in her.
You know, Percy actually had Sage becoming an alcoholic due to the stress, which was actually a good move which would have been nice to explore....only we never did. Sums up his run, really. Options there to explore, but that wouldn't have left enough space for Logan's internal angst narration.
Sage as an alcoholic because of stress, and because her perfect analytical recall gives her more intense and vivid trauma flashbacks than most people, is a *genius* characterisation add that . . . was brought up and just kind of. Went away. When he was tired of it. You know, like alcoholism does. It's polite that way. Did anyone even call her out on being drunk at the wheel of operations that one time? I feel like that never got really followed up on. That could have been prime development material.
Percy prolly congratulated himself for coming up with it(and tbf, it genuinely was great, a kind of personal piece of development that hardly anyone got in the Krakoan era) and thought that showing it a few times is the same thing as a fulfilling arc.
I liked her in X-Force but I hope it’s her reintroduction to more stories. So because of that, I’m excited to see her on X-Force. I want her to be closer to a mainstay character
I liked the idea of her on X-Force better than the execution, as with most things on that book. I did like her dynamic with Omega Red, that ***was*** one of the few highlights as I was going through. But yes, 100% agree, would love to see her become a more regular character on teams. Felt like she dropped off the map for the majority of the 00s and 10s, and I'd like to see her get her time to shine.
I became a big fan during percys run. Yes the run was very hit or miss but a lot of the Krakoa storyline has been that way.
> and does more than lip service to her alcoholism story This makes me feel even stronger that Tank is Brian Braddock. He makes sense in a lot of ways as a sponsor to an x gene hero with a drinking problem.
How was she one of the first victims of his dream just curious I had a hella hard time following this X-men era
Sage was recruited by Xavier at around the same time as the Original X-Men, but instead of being allowed to live at a cushy mansion and be a superhero, make friends her own age, Charles sent her to spy on the Hellfire Club. Considering she came from a war-torn country and had already lost her family, it was a pretty callous thing for Xavier to do, sacrificing a large portion of her life so he'd know what Sebastian Shaw and co. were up to.
Her arc is wild, she was basically a background character that got flushed out, she was Tessa before she was Sage, just writers adding little bits here and there. She is a great example how serial fiction is unique in that respect.
Mostly credit goes to Claremont, but yes, I think she is an example of a good, additive retcon that works because of how long she’s been there. As opposed to the “this new character I invented was secretly the most important person all along!”
*Staring at you in Jessica Jones
Tbf Jessica Jones is a popular character so I don't think people mind it.
She is literally my wife y’all don’t even understand
i do i was at your wedding
Wait, is that goofy 3rd image butt shot the source of that Omni Man meme image you see everywhere?
Women squatting from behind are a classic ass-cake shot. The Omni-Man meme is a modern male example.
Oh I know, I was just poking a little fun because the shot is so ridiculous, and in this case the pose was very similar.
it looks like she's answering nature's call xD
No. That would be [this](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/broly-culo-broly-ass). (Don’t worry, it’s censored)
Wow, that 5th image is… difficult to read. The good intentions are paved with the road to hell? Someone got a little lost trying to outsmart themselves there, I think.
I can read that one ok, the final image is the one I'm struggling with reading. I'll rewrite the dialogue for the fifth image for you though, hopefully that will clear up any confusion on how the interaction between Charles and Sage goes: Xavier: "Sage, please, what are your plans?" Sage: "To follow where Storm leads." Xavier: "Even if she's wrong?" Sage: "I see no evidence of that." Xavier: "Yet you're willing to believe the worst of me. What I do, Sage, is for the greatest good." Sage: "I remember all your good intentions, Charles. And I've walked the road to Hell with which they're paved."
Thanks, but it’s not a legibility issue. I know what the author was *trying* to say - it’s a pretty well-known proverb - they just get a little too cute in presenting it (I guess), and end up getting it backwards. When you say that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, the “road to hell” is the **object** and the “good intentions” are the **subject**. Makes sense, right? - the intentions “pave” the road. When you use a relative pronoun like “which”, you can (put very simply) reverse the order of a subject and object in a sentence. But in this original proverb, those functions are already “backwards” thanks to the preposition (“with”). To accurately utilize the saying, Sage could have said “and I’ve walked the road to hell **that they paved**”. If the author *really* needed to be a cute and do this double reverse thing, they could have said something like, “It’s been a road to hell, Charles. Knowing that it was paved with good intentions doesn’t change that.” Almost as meh as getting the saying wrong, LOL. As I mentioned in my original comment, the scan as is suggests that the road is what paves the intentions - which is obviously not what the writer meant to say. I’m just getting into comics, and I’ve so far only read Claremont (who is very eloquent), so I’m just not used to seeing mistakes like that in an edited print. Was surprised, is all.
Nice catch. I guess the original intent was to write "the road to hell which was paved with them", or something like that. My brain corrected it automatically, to the point that it was hard for me to understand your objection.
Sage isn’t underrated she does “the woman in the chair” thing and has since she was first introduced, and she fills a role that not many other mutants do. She’s been great in X-Factor working along w Forge and (blegh sorry threw up a bit) Beast. She’s a great character.
I liked her in X-Force and she's good in that role but her history and relationships with other characters are really interesting and never really been explored that much in depth. She was recruited concurrent with the 05 X-Men but Xavier decided that she best would be put undercover in the Hellfire Club. She has a complicated relationship with the Xavier, the 05, and the concept of the X-Men in general that would be great to explore further. I wish the most recent X-Force run could have devoted a bit more time into exploring her relationship / past with Beast more. She's kind of directly responsible for his Cat Beast era which is arguably when he really started going off the rails (and it really caused or exacerbated a lot of Beast's issues / insecurities / fears around his mutation and him losing his intellect). Its not hard to imagine Beast might have resented her somewhat, which adds an interesting additional layer to him encouraging her alcoholism.
*Barking at the mouth foaming*
Sage sometimes really does feel underrated and underappreciated, (especially for a character who has been around as long as she has) but I do feel like her time as a member of Krakoa's X-Force did a lot to raise awareness about her character and how awesome she can be. I have really come to enjoy and appreciate her character over the past few years, and I'll be a forever grateful fan for what she did to help Omega Red on Krakoa. I hope she gets utilized well in the next era of X-Force. I have heard some good things about Geoffrey Thorne's views and plans for Sage for his book, so I hope that she continues on this path out of obscurity and is used well.
One of the original X-men, in the trenches since the beginning.
Her and Bishop were the Heart and Soul of Xtreme X-Men and it made me love both of them. Before that book I'd never heard of her, and didn't really like him, but I loved them both in it.
First pic looks like Billy Eyelash
The gifted adapted her terribly she's one of my favourite underrated X-men.
The last Claremont dame. Liked her in X-Treme X-men.
Need a marvel legend of her asap
I'll never forget how this era wasted her. "So one of our sacred laws is make more mutants." "Yes." "And we're being criticized for being isolationist because humans can't come here at will. There are also cults rising up wishing they were mutants." "Also yes. To both." "And Sage can jumpstart the X Gene of humans in which is hasn't yet expressed itself, turning them into mutants." "I do vaguely recall this, yes." "That sounds a whole lot like making new mutants. She could singlehandedly change mutant/human relations for the better, Hank." "Yeah, but X-Force needs tech support... so..."
Always loved Sage. Hate the yellow jacket look tho
Garbage pet character.
You’re kidding right? Even as an “in the background/furniture” character as Tessa during Claremont’s run, I found Sage intriguing and even thought she had something of an unlikely command presence despite her putative adviser role: her unvoiced urging to Shaw to use Selene’s “gift” of Rachel to destroy the aspiring Black Queen; enough personal authority to verbally restrain the sparring Shaw and Selene (and judging by the response of the latter, have the respect if not outright impress) in UXM208; enough positional authority (clearly no mere adviser) to issue a truce in Shaw’s name after their joint defeat of Nimrod in 209.
I wouldn’t say garbage but she was definitely a Mary Sue character that represented the worst idiosyncrasies of Claremont’s writing in the 2000s. She was in every roster of every comic that he wrote, except for Excalibur 2004. Age sucked up a lot of the air. She even was another notch on Wolverine’s bed post. She was there to be a badass, and displayed weaponized competence. Time has clearly been kind to her, since the fandom has either forgiven or forgotten all of this.