Pretty Boy is the Reaver whose machinery gets under the skin in a different way. Bonebreaker looks like a weapon coming toward you. Pretty Boy can get inside your head.

Pretty Boy is the Reaver whose machinery gets under the skin in a different way. Bonebreaker looks like a weapon coming toward you. Pretty Boy can get inside your head. His cybernetic eye filaments allow him to interfere with a person's mind and personality. In the Reavers' first appearance, Jessan Hoan is the person on the receiving end. She has already been taken hostage after a bank robbery. Now he wants to make her useful to the gang by changing her. That makes the scene more disturbing than a simple demand for information. A captive can refuse to answer, lie or wait for a chance to escape. Pretty Boy is attacking the part of a person that makes those choices. Longshot interrupts the procedure, cutting the connections with a blade. It's a rescue with a very clear physical action, but what he is interrupting is much harder to measure than an injury from a gunshot. The danger was never only whether Jessan would survive being held there. Pretty Boy's mechanical body and extended components fit the gang's larger look, but his role is distinctive. The Reavers steal from the outside world. He can try to take useful pieces of someone and leave them carrying the consequences. He escapes the X-Men's attack alongside Bonebreaker and Skullbuster, which keeps that capability from disappearing with the original gang's defeat. The name almost sounds like a joke next to what he does. Then those filaments come out, and the joke is over. A bank robber can take what somebody owns. Pretty Boy's introduction is about trying to take ownership of the person as well.