While his stellar run on X-Men Legacy is almost over, Simon Spurrier is onto the next big thing, which is taking over X-Force. Formerly two titles – Uncanny X-Force and Cable & X-Force – which recently combined for a crossover finale, we’ve now got a very pared down team as opposed to two full ones. Psylocke and Fantomex from the former and Cable and Dr. Nemesis from the latter, with the addition of a much more punky version of Marrow. I have no idea what’s happened to Marrow in the last decade or so, but here, she can transform into a crazy boney spider thing and she talks like The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight.
X-Force #1 is a re-establishment of what the team traditionally was – a black-ops dirty tricks squad in service of mutant kind, or “the mutant nation” as it’s called here, which is not to imply that they have a physical country of their own. The Mutant Nation is a conceptual one, and X-Force’s job is to outmaneuver jerkwads who would pin their crimes on mutants, an all too common practice. Someone’s been figuring out a new way to turn a country’s high-tech defenses against their own people, and that’s something the team has to stop – although first, they have to fight an enormous Chinese ragemonster to protect their informant, who happens to be Fantomex, much to Psylocke’s chagrin. They were a simmering thing back in Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, then it got really weird in Sam Humphries run on that book, when Fantomex split into three people, one of which was a woman, and another of which fell in love with that woman, and another of which was evil or something. There’s no remnant of that business to be seen here yet, but Spurrier’s version of Fantomex is a lot heavier on the French and still quite amusing, as is Psylocke’s hatred of him.
Also to be celebrated is the fact that Spurrier gets to write Dr. Nemesis again, because the brilliance showcased in that X-Club mini he wrote is what first made me take note of the man. Doc only has two panels here, but hopefully there’s more to come.
The entire issue is mostly Marrow’s internal monologue about how violence is her music, speaking to some unseen person/place/thing she calls “baby.” She was depowered during M-Day, but has apparently gotten those powers back and then some, with the aforementioned bone-spider thing that happens toward the end when she’s allowed to go all crazy, baby. She’s resolved to forgo any angst from her old interpretations and go full-on smashtastic, baby, yeah, baby, yeah! There’s a lot of that, and I’m not sure I like it all that much, but again, if I just take her as a character from The Tick, I can deal with it.
The artwork from Rock-He Kim (a fantastic name almost begging to have “-adeus” added to the end) is a mixed bag. It’s a very watercolory sort of style that works excellently most of the time, especially on things like the Chinese Ragemonster, but a little less so when drawing Psylocke like she’s naked except for coloring her body like clothing, although that’s a ‘comics in general’ gripe. I’ve yet to see a pair of pants fit a woman so tightly that each buttock is so perfectly adhered to that her buttcrack is accentuated through them, and I generally don’t see shirts that mold themselves to each individual breast, either. Also, there’s a little bit of confusion with the action, particularly when Fantomex and Psylocke are arguing about her no-kill clause. I’m not entirely sure what happened at the end of that sequence – whether Fantomex employed some misdirection or if she just lost her cool in the middle of reaffirming that she wouldn’t lose her cool, which seems weird. I’m assuming that’ll be clarified in the next issue.
Overall, X-Force #1 is promising because of Spurrier, who manages to make us care about characters we ordinarily wouldn’t – like David Haller in X-Men Legacy. It’s a start not without its bumps (a phrase I chose instead of saying ‘it’s a bit of a Rock-He start,’ so be thankful at my restraint), but I’m still on board.
