Review: Uncanny X-Force Vol. 2: Deathlok Nation

Simone Bianchi's cover to Uncanny X-Force #5.1

When someone descends into a confusing, chaotic realm in which they are temporarily divorced from their everyday, normal lives and are instead faced with difficult, arcane or even just very particular minutiae, you'll often here them talk about having gone "down the rabbit hole." When it comes to Marvel's X-Men, I prefer the metaphor of the labyrinth: There are many different paths to take, they branch off and rejoin one another constantly, its easy to get lost and one could spend the rest of one's life wandering, without ever having covered all of the ground. Also, eventually you'll be killed and eaten by a half-human, half-animal monster. I'm guessing.

For example, over two years ago I read a Uncanny X-Force: The Apocalypse Solution, which collected the start of the Rick Remender reboot of the previously rebooted X-Force title, which was a reboot of a few other reboots of the series (and which has since been rebooted at least two or three more times, splitting into two different comics with similar names as part of the "Marvel NOW!" initiative, and then re-combining into a new, single comic as part of the "All-New Marvel NOW!" initiative).

I rather liked it, and had every intention of reading the next collection, but apparently forgot about it at some point, and never picked up the next collection.

Having recently started reading the Brian Michael Bendis-written X-Men comics (All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men) and discovering that they were actually pretty good (far better than his Avengers comics were) and taking the occasion of Jason Aaron's long-running Wolverine and The X-Men run wrapping up to start catching up on that book, I found myself reading a lot of X-Men trades all of a sudden, and encountering plot points I didn't understand, like original X-Men Angel not being the grim, blue-faced, metal-winged character he was the last time I saw him in Apocalypse Solution, but instead being a younger, happier, more naive and angelic-looking version of himself. And a kid named "Genesis" who looked an awful lot like the kid who got shot to death at the end of Apocalypse Solution being enrolled at the Jean Grey School (That's the X-Men school that Wolverine founded to replace the Xavier School, if you're an even less frequent visitor to the labyrinth of X-Men continuity than I am).

Wondering aloud (well, "a-blog," I suppose would be a more accurate term) about this, a few of you mentioned the Angel changes and the origins of this Genesis kid could be found in Remender's Uncanny X-Force, which I quit reading and forgot about.

So I thought maybe I'd get back to it where I left off, a few years ago.

And that's a half-dozen paragraphs basically just saying what the title of this post says, but I did want to take a moment to detail something curious about the X-books, and the curious way their plots feed in and out of one another, often changing hands from writer to writer and title to title and premise to premise in ways I don't think any other Big Two super-franchises do at the moment (For all their faults, for example, the Green Lantern, Batman and Justice League franchises at DC are a little more streamlined; I suppose Marvel's Avengers gets pretty messy, but because that line expansion is so recent, as opposed to the X-Men line, which has had a mess of books since at least the '90s, it's not as big a maze to navigate).

So when we (and by "we" I mean "I") last saw this version of the Uncanny X-Force, they had just completed their first mission. Assembled as the black-ops/wetworks squad of X-people doing mutantkind's dirty work while Cyclops and the less kill-crazy X-Men continued to present a handsome, happy face to mankind, the team consisted of financier and kinda sorta leader Warren Worthing III, aka Angel, aka Archangel, his girlfriend Psyclocke, other kinda sorta leader Wolverine, Grant Morrison-created Fantomas-homage Fantomex, Fantomex sentient mutant UFO EVA and mutant mercenary Deadpool. They all hung out in a secret cave headquarters with matching unifroms—basically just black and gray versions of their regular costumes—and killed people together.

But their first mission hit a snag when they found out that the next incarnation of Apocalypse was still just a kid, and while they were pretty sure he was gonna grow up to be a mutant super-Hitler, they weren't real keen on having to kill a kid, whether he was destined to be mutant super-Hitler or not.

All except Fantomex, anyway, who went ahead and shot the still innocent kid in the head and killed him.

This continues to way heavily on Fantomex's teammates as the second volume opens, with the supposedly amoral characters like Deadpool and Wolverine seeming especially upset and angry, and the supposedly more virtuous characters like Archangel and Psylocke worrying that they aren't more upset about angry, at that and about killing people in general.

That accounts for much of the inter-personal character conflict and a major sub-plot running through this volume, although I suppose I've already spoiled it by mentioning "Genesis" at all: Turns out that while Fantomex technically did kill the Apocalypse kid, he also took some DNA and then started growing a clone of him in The World, a sentient super-soldier factory that was in part responsible for cranking out various "Weapon Plus" mutants like Wolverine, Deadpool and Fantomex (I believe Morrison created it; it featured prominently in his New X-Men run, and was one of the many concepts that later writers continued to play with, even as much of Morrison's run and its innovations were discarded).

So is Fantomex more evil and heartless than all the assassins he hangs out with? Not really; he'll shoot a kid in the head, sure, but he'll also bring him back to life. He killed Hitler as a baby, but then cloned Hitler and tried to raise him right...? I guess that's the way Fantomex answers the whole time-travel, Hitler baby killing dilemma?

As for the A-plot, it mostly involves Deathloks, as the sub-title no doubt alerted you. The collection opens with Uncanny X-Force #5.1 (which, defying numerical norms, is placed before Uncanny X-Force #5. Why? Because Marvel, that's why).

This original round of ".1" issues were meant as good jumping-on points, but here it's basically just a done-in-one that introduces the characters (not that they really need it; Fantomex is the most obscure member of the cast, and Wolverine and Deadpool are among the best-known Marvel characters), and their mission: Secretly killing people.

The plot? Wolverine's enemy Lady Deathstrike has assembled a new group of Reavers (mutant-hating cyborgs) and they are planning to strike the X-Men's homeland, Utopia. X-Force preemptively strikes. Violence ensues.

Albuquerque

That story is drawn by Rafael Albuquerque who does a damn fine job. Unfortunately, he does not redesign Deathstrike at all, and she still looks like she did in the 1990s and in that dumb cartoon. Albuquerque draws her nicely and all, but I just don't understand what she's wearing. Or her head. What is on her head?!

Albuquerque

(By the way, how do her powers work? She must have the strongest fingers in the world).

With that out of the way, the rest of the collection is devoted to the three-issue "Deathlok Nation" story arc, which is simplicity itself. Deathloks from the future, made from superheroes with robot parts attached to 'em instead of just regular old soldier corpses with robot bits attached to 'em, attack Fantomex in order to get at The World and kill the clone of the kid that everyone thinks Fantomex already killed.

So it's kinda like Terminator, except instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's cyborg Marvel heroes, including Deathlok-ed versions of the Uncanny X-Forcers. Also, the "real" Deathlok, calling himself "Deathlok Prime," shows up to team-up with X-Force. They fight in Fantomex's house, they fight in the Alps and, ultimately, they fight in The World, where the various members of X-Force break up into teams to further their emotional conflicts while fighting Deathloks.

The artwork, penciled by Esad Ribic and inked by John Lucas, is superb throughout. They're given all kinds of crazy shit to draw, but they manage to make The World and it's craziness look realistic and threatening, but also airy and roomy. Additionally, they do really great work with good old-fashioned motion lines, denoting action.

Ribic and Lucas

Ribic and Lucas again

I forgot how much I like the X-Force costumes the characterss wear, too. Deadpool especially looks much better in the muted gray costume than the red one he usually wears. And I like how this version of Fantomex basically just ooks like G.I. Joe bad guy Firefly with a trench coat on.

Now hopefully I can continue to follow this storyline through the end of Remender's run on this title, without getting lost or side-tracked into a reboot...

Review: Batman: Black and White #2

This second issue of DC's 2013 revival of the 1996 miniseries of the same name features a cover by Jim Steranko, and while I don't really get the visual elements being incorporated (Batman's vague, somewhat saintly gesture and cowl of thorns look particularly strange to my eye, particularly given the ants, house and puzzle pieces, but perhaps it's just an allusion I didn't catch), hey, DC got Jim fucking Steranko to draw a Batman cover for them.

If that's not a "get," I don't know what is. I hope editor Mark Chiarello got plenty of high-fives for that.

"Manbat Out of Hell"
Written by Dan DiDio, drawn by J. G. Jones

More interesting than DiDio's writing of this story to me would be an accurate telling of how his work keeps cropping up in each of the various prestige projects it does, given that, more often than not, he's the odd man out in terms of either talent or reputation.

Naturally he's co-publisher of DC Comics, but is his inclusion conditional, like "Sure, I'll greenlight the project, if you promise to let me script one of the stories"...? Is it a particular artist asking DiDio to collaborate, because they're friends, because of some genuine admiration of DiDio's writing, or because they think it would be a good career move? Does it come from DiDio innocently mentioning in passing how he wishes he had more opportunities to write, particularly short stories,a nd an editor or artists mistaking it for some sort of passive-aggressive coercion on the boss' part...?

I don't know, but as with a few similar projects—Wednesday Comics, Batman Incorporated Special—DiDio stands out as one of the few who is neither a legendary creator nor one unlikely to ever get to play with the character in other contexts.

This short story is sort of troubling, to be honest.

The World's Greatest Detective sees Man-Bat (I didn't forget the hyphen in the story title; they did) in the process of attacking a man that works at a foster home. Batman acts to stop his old frenemy, and it isn't until they fight for a few pages that Batman notices that the foster kids in the room are actually Man-Bat's own children, that there's photographic equipment all around and that there are photos of child pornography scattered about the room (see above).

That's the heart of the story, the reversal in which Batman realizes the real villain and monster isn't the frightening-looking comics character. That, and perhaps also that the narrator isn't Batman himself, but Becky Langstrom.

In other words: Batman and Man-Bat vs. Kiddie Porn.

When Batman realizes his mistake, he cuts the bat-rope he had just tied Man-Bat down with, allowing  his long-time frenemy to go after the pornographer, telling the foster home employee gone bad, "I won't hurt you. I don't waste my time on scum like you."

Which is, uh, kind of true, given how infrequently child abuse and especially child pornography or sex crimes of any kind involving children crop up in Batman narratives (Andrew Vachss' prose novel Batman: The Ultimate Evil being a rather rare exception), but also kind of a weird thing for Batman to admit in a story that forces him into confronting it. His dismissive dialogue makes it sound as if he thinks such a heinous real-world crime is beneath him; he only deals with costumed criminals.

Siccing Man-Bat on the scum to seemingly murder him off-panel is pretty un-Batmanly behavior, but given the continuity-free nature of the stories in this project (In which the only real rules seem to be that each story must be 1.) Short, 2.) Have Batman and 3.) Be black-and-white), it's not really that weird or unusual.

J.G. Jones' photorealistic works looks great in black-and-white and, frankly, far better than it does in color, if you ask me. There's a luminous quality to all the whites within it (which probably doesn't come through all that great in these images, which you're looking at on a black and white website).

His design for Man-Bat is pretty excellent, giving the character actual head of an actual bat, and big, huge, proportionate wings (Contrast it with the werewolf-with-a-leather shawl version in the recent "Man-Bat" Villains Month issue).

I don't like the way he handles the fingers and hands of Man-Bat though; after spending a lot of time thinking about bat-wings over the last year or so, I don't think the character should have hands and wings...maybe just an opposable thumb at most (This Man-Bat has seven or eight fingers, counting the three extra ones in his wing membrane).

"Into The Circle"
By Rafael Grampa

By far the best, most interesting and most exciting story in this particular issue, Grampa's artwork is incredible, and each and every one of his character designs is bursting and crackling with an idiosyncratic life of its own. Not just the main players, but also the regular street criminals, who most any other artist would render as more-or-less generic. Grampa gives each of them a sharp and distinct design, looking a bit like they were assembled from parts borrowed and synthesized from E.C. Segar tough guys, Jamie Hewlett Gorillaz characters and old-school Dick Tracy heavies.

Each of them would normally be at least as interesting as The Joker, were Grampa's Joker not so unique. This Robot 6 headline is right—Grampa's Joker is the most disturbing one yet. (Suck it, New 52, flayed-off face Joker!)

Ironically, I sort of wish this Joker was in color, as I'm curious about his mouth. I'm assuming it's all red in varying degrees of intensity around his real mouth, and that the tooth like impressions around it are just lighter bits of red, either painted on or some element of the chemically-induced deformity, but that's left to the imagination. Actually, the exact nature of this Joker's look might be dependent on a twist in the story, but still: Awesome design.

Grampa's story isn't just a bunch of great drawings though (And hoo-boy, is that fight-scene with Batman awesome!); there's a very clever little twist to it, with great crazy-person Joker narration, and some pretty smart, proactive crime-fighting strategy on the part of Batman and Alfred.

"A Place In Between"
By Rafael Albuquerque

Batman finds himself on a skiff in the River Styx, with Deadman playing Charon. As a regular Batman reader for years, I had a pretty hard time buying some elements of Albuquerque's story—Batman not recognizing a scene from Greek myth, Batman not recognizing Deadman, Batman and/or readers being asked to believe that its not clear if superhero Batman would end up heaven or hell after death—which is probably two little road bumps too many for me in a story that's only eight-pages long.

Albuquerque sure draws the hell out of everything though, and this is another example of artwork that actually looks better in black and white than in color. He does a great job of selling a Batman-with-pupils, too, which a lot of artists have a hard time pulling off convincingly, and I enjoyed the surprise appearance of a favorite Bat-villain.

"Winter's End"
By Jeff Lemire and Alex Nino

Lemire the writer isn't really a big deal, and seems a bit out of place here, given how regularly one can find Lemire's writing in the rest of DC's line these days (Lemire the cartoonist, or Lemire the artist, however, would have seemed more deserving of inclusion here). But if someone had to write something for Alex Nino to draw, I suppose it might as well have been Lemire.

This is a pretty straight-forward, even generic story about Batman fighting ninjas in the snow while wearing the sort of arctic adventure battle-suit that a Batman toy-line might include. There's mention of Mister Freeze and The Riddler, both somewhat randomly and out-of-place, but Nino doesn't draw them and Lemire doesn't write them in story.

This is mainly just a showcase for Nino's weird, angular artwork, his thin, kinetic, occasionally tortured-looking character designs and his admirably bizarre technological and architectural elements.

"Silent Knight...Unholy Knight!"
Written by Michael Uslan
Illustrated by Dave Bullock

This is a great showcase for Bullock, an incredible artist whose work bears a striking resemblance to that of his peer Darwyn Cooke, only generally with a more detailed, illustrative quality.

This is premised as a silent movie, and the Batman who appears is the "first-appearance" Batman, with a Golden Age Bat-mobile and logo. After a page devoted to replicating the credit sequence of a movie, this is presented in a format similar to that of a silent movie, with dialogue and narration appearing on title cards between action panels.

The level of detail in the art, the irregular panel shapes, the degree of action and variety of angles all seem more modern than silent movie era though; viewed as a film, this would have to bee seen as a film aping silent movies. It's still gorgeous though.

The plot introduces a new villain, albeit one with the name of an old, somewhat obscure DC period hero) who, in a rather prevalent tradition of Batman villains, shares a great deal of origin and modus operandi with Batman, but went in the opposite direction.

Think about this for a moment, won't you?

The above image is a very good drawing of someone (here, a vampire) tearing someone's face off. It's drawn by Rafael Albuquerque, and it's from an issue of American Vampire (although I first encountered it in the American Vampire Vol. 1 collection which, you may recall, I rather liked).

Albuquerque is a great artist, so it's no surprise that the above panel is very well-drawn. The point-of-view chosen is the scariest, as the reader (or, in this case, the viewer) sees the vampire from the perspective of the victim—if that vampire were jumping at you and ripping off your face, that's the angle you'd see her from. Also, you might see that red thing flapping in her hand and, after a second or two, realize that the holes in it correspond to where one's eyes, nose and mouth would be and that Oh my God she just ripped off my face!

That's one of the great things about the panel, really. It depicts what has to be one of the least subtle subjects for one of the respresentational arts—someone getting their face ripped off—in a rather subtle fashion.

Oddly enough, the reason I lingered on the panel for so long when initially reading it, beyond the extra few split-seconds it took me to realize the shape of that bit of red flesh and what the shape signified, was that I had previously seen a pretty poorly-produced drawing of someone ripping someone else's face off in a comic book by this very same publisher: It's from one of the issues of DC Comics' 2007 miniseries World War III, and I'm reasonably certain it was penciled by Patrick Oliffe (the series had several pencillers and inkers).

As you can probably see, it's nowhere near as strong an image. The blob of red flesh in Black Adam's hand isn't recognizable as a face and is, in fact, probably too big to even be a face, given that it's bigger than the victim's whole head. The act itself isn't clear from the image alone either, and without the dialogue alluding to the fact that that the victim was "losing face," the drawing could just as easily be interpreted as Black Adam slapping his victim across the face with a rack of ribs smothered in a great deal of barbecue sauce.

But in order to really appreciate that first image of someone ripping someone else's face off as an exceptionally strong drawing of someone ripping someone else's face off, I needed to see a relatively poor image of someone ripping someone else's face off, establishing a point of reference for comparison's sake.

I think that says something about the necessity of—or at least the usefulness—of bad comics.

...

Um, I'm not sure what it says exactly, but I'm fairly certain it says something.