Review: Uncanny X-Force: Final Execution Book 2

And so here we are, the final volume collecting Rick Remender's 35-issue run on Uncanny X-Force. While the almost three-year run on the series offered plenty of simple, surface pleasures, some no more complex than seeing familiar characters in newer, cooler costumes, or seeing Deadpool written with a degree of seriousness (more Spider-Man, less Ambush Bug), or lots of mutant super-people running around and fighting one another, what impressed me most about the series, what kept me reading it through eight collected volumes was the relentless way in which Remender stayed focused on a theme.

Remender inherited the concept of a black-ops mutant kill squad lead by Wolverine to do in secret the nasty things that the regular X-Men couldn't do in public, re-stocking his cast with killers and mercenaries like Wolverine, Deadpool and Fantomex, and good people-teetering-on-going-bad characters like Psylocke and Angel/Archangel (with killer cyborg from the future Deathlok and vengeance-driven "Age of Apocalypse" Nightcrawler coming and going). In the very first story arc, they were confronted with the decision to either kill a little boy who was destined to grow up to be a new version of the worst of all X-Men villains, or let him live and hope that he chooses not to embrace the badness he was born with, a sort of X-Men riff on the old conundrum of whether or not one could, should or would kill Hitler as a baby.

Only one of them, Fantomex, was able to pull the trigger, and even he was conflicted enough that he decided to secretly clone the boy and raise him in a virtual reality tank to test the idea of nature versus nurture vis a vis born killers, a question close to his heart, and the hearts of his teammates. Throughout the next seven volumes, the characters would be haunted by that first moral quandary, and constantly doubting themselves, whether a black-ops mutant kill squad was a good idea or the worst idea ever, and worrying about what kind of people they must be to be a part of it, whether they were "heroes" or "villains" in the comic book way of looking at things.

"Final Execution" is the final storyline of Remender's run of the book, and the second story arc so big it necessitated being stretched over two collections (following "The Dark Angel Saga," in which Archangel's own struggle with whether he's predisposed for evil reaches it climax, and our heroes have to again decide whether to kill one to save many). Remender has assembled a "greatest hits" collection of villains from throughout his run on the title, throwing in some of Wolverine's deadliest archenemies for good measure, to form a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Sabretooth and Daken lead Mystique, Shadow King, The Blog from the "Age of Apocalypse" timeline, The Skinless Man and The Omega Clan in killing Fantomex and capturing Evan, the cloned Apocalypse child who has been attending Wolverine's Jean Grey School (in the pages of Jason Aaron's Wolverine and The X-Men) and using the name Genesis.

He's bait for Wolverine, meant to bring Wolvie to their underwater base off the coast of Genosha, but he's also an opportunity for the villains to try and "break" him, to get him to embrace his inner bad guy and become Apocalypse, answering everyone's questions about the nature of good and evil, of nature and nurture, once and for all.

This volume is essentially a book-length fight scene between the various combatants, with a surprise betrayal and a series of deaths and almost-deaths, including some extremely creative finishes to individual battles (In finally getting his revenge against AoA Blob, for example, AoA Nightcralwer teleports a live shark inside The Blob's stomach). All of our (anti-)heroes ultimately survive "Final Execution," but the same can't be said of the villains, the killing of whom in at least one case seems to be about as bad a defeat as possible for Wolverine. He has to kill Daken, which he does so by drowning him in a shallow puddle; that, Sabretooth gloats, was the ultimate point of all this: To put Wolverine in a kill or be killed position with his own son.

As far as long-term plotting and adherence to themes go, Remender's Uncanny X-Force is a pretty remarkable book, especially considering the fact that it's part of the X-Men line, and prominently features characters like Deadpool and, more especially still, Wolverine, who have multiple books of their own and appear all over the Marvel Universe more-or-less constantly. Daken's appearance in these last few volumes, along with that of Sabretooth, might seem a little sudden, considering how late in the game they appear, but Remender uses them to play into his themes perfectly well, particularly Daken who is himself, like Evan, a living example of the nature versus nurture questions. Using these double of Wolverine also helps to throw into sharper relief the question of whether Wolverine and his kill crew are really heroes or villains, and just what exactly separates a guy like Wolverine who kills constantly from guys like Sabretooth and Daken who likewise kill constantly—is it really just a matter of a choice of targets?

After the "Final Execution" story arc ends, there's a nice one-issue epilogue story entitled "Rainbows, Puppy Dogs and Sunshine," which essentially breaks up the band, sends the characters back into their own respective corners and storylines and, rather generously, sets up a complication for the next writer of the series, which, this being Marvel, is actually a whole new volume of the series, starting over with a new #1.

Wolverine buries Daken in Japan, Psylocke has a heart-to-heart with her brother in Otherworld, Deadpool—back in his red costume which I don't like nearly as much as his gray one—sneaks into Evan's room for a final heart-to-heart, there's a one-panel revelation that more-or-less absolves Wolverine of his killing Daken in the climax of "Final Execution" (which sure seemed rather overtly brutal and merciless to me at the time) and, finally, they pop Fantomex into some sort of resurrection machine to bring him back to life, which works. Sorta. Instead of one Fantomex with three brains, they get three Fantomexes, each with a different brain, but that's up to Remender's successor Sam Humphries to sort out in Uncanny X-Force vol. 2, which features Psylocke and an otherwise brand-new team: Storm, Bishop, Spiral and Puck.

I'll probably get to that series eventually, but I don't know. It's got Bishop in it...

Review: Uncanny X-Force: Final Execution Book 1

The sixth and penultimate volume collecting writer Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force rockets towards its conclusion here, the awkward title indicating that this is indeed the first half of the climactic act of the series.

The team begins to break up, with Betsy having satisfied her sexual curiosity about Fantomex and deciding to quit, and Fantomex following immediately in her foot steps because, it seems, he was mostly hanging around for Besty, anyway.

That leaves just Wolverine, the Nightcrawler who emigrated from the "Age of Apocalypse" setting and Deadpool, who is, in the book's first issue (drawn by Mike McKone) infiltrating a high-end super-weapons dealer. Before long, the three find themselves locked in combat with "The Omega Clan," an Omega Red, an Omega...Black (?) and an Omega...Blue (?), each programmed with memories of X-Force killing their families, for extra motivation.

They are just a couple of the villains in what turns out to be a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, lead by Wolverine's son Daken, Sabertooth and Mystique, and consisting of villains from throughout the book's run up until this point: The Shadow King, The Blob from Earth-AoA, The Skinless Man and now The Omega Clan. They kidnap Evan/Genesis, the clone of the Apocalypse child Fantomex killed at the end of the first story arc of the series (and who Jason Aaron used as a fairly important member of the ensemble cast of Wolverine and The X-Men), and then they proceed to cut out Fantomex's heart, totally killing him—which makes his sentient UFO friend EVA mutate into humanoid form, so the team is down a member but still has the same number of members. Then the BOEM blow up the UXF's secret HQ, Cavern-X.

Is this the end of our heroes...?

No.

They escape in a rather unusual manner, Psyclocke hijacking Gateway's body to send them all 30 years into a Julian Totino Tedesco-drawn future just before the explosion.

And what a future it is. Apparently, at some point in the near-ish future, Evan/Genesis did end up "ascending" and becoming Apocalypse, Wolverine gathered an army of an X-Force to defeat him, and the terrified world turned to X-Force for safety and order in the aftermath of the world. This futuristic world, complete with flying motorcycles, is now ruled with an iron fist by The Uncanny X-Force—Wolverine, Deadpool, "Magistrate Braddock,"  Frank Castle, Cable and Hope. Oh, and Ant-Man. Some of them even unironically wear Nazi uniforms, only with black armbands with an "X" on them rather than red armbands with swastikas, in case the fact that they've become fascists isn't apparent enough from the script.

Seeing only one way to prevent this terrible nightmare future, where X-Force's philosophy of preemptive striking has been taken to its extreme if logical conclusion (and, incidentally, Fantomex's experiment of nature vs. nurture with Evan has proven to be a failure, and it turns out that bad people really are just born bad), the young Psyclocke tries to take her own life, thus killing old Psylocke. This leads to a rather weird, reversed action sequence, in which the protagonist desperately tries to kill herself, while her enemies race to rescue her.

After two issues of this future, Old X-Force sends Young X-Force back to the present in a time machine operated by Nazi drag Hank Pym, but not before Old Frank Castle offers advice on people they should kill, and Old Wolverine whispers something of great import to Young Wolverine (something we're not privy to...yet).

In addition to McKone and Tedesco, Phil Noto contributes two issues' worth of art to this collection. The three have fairly different styles, but each section is pretty distinct from the other; McKone draws a section mostly set in a bright super-weapons shop, Noto draws the middle section in which The Brotherhood moves against X-Force and Evan/Genesis and Tedesco draws the section set in the future.

In this second-to-last book of Remender's run, he assembles a sort of villain team of greatest hits villains, sets them upon our heroes from all sides and has them racking up some pretty big wins (killing Fantomex and Gateway, taking Genesis from the Jean Grey School, destroying Ultimation and Cavern-X). He then sends our protagonists to a dystopian future for a last-minute gut-check, before they return in the seventh and final volume for the climax of the series.

Who will win? The good guys or the bad guys? (Or, in this series, I guess it's the Pragmatic-but-Haunted Guys Willing to do Bad for the Greater Good, or the bad guys?)

I can't wait to find out.

Review: Uncanny X-Force: Otherworld

Following "The Dark Angel Saga," which spanned the previous two collections of the Rick Remender-written Uncanny X-Force, this is the second consecutive story arc in which the black-ops team of mutant assassins travel to an alternate dimension, and the second consecutive story arc which heavily rewards familiarity with the ins and outs of X-Men continuity.

The previous volume, The Dark Angel Saga Book 2, marked a major turning point in the series, as 1.) Angel/Archangel/Warren Worthington died and was reborn sans his memory (and thus left the team), 2.) the Nightcrawler from the world of Age of Apocalypse joined the team in order to hunt down and kill a few of his enemies from his world that escaped into the main Marvel Universe and, 3.) the fact that Fantomex has secretly been growing and training a clone of the Apocalypse-to-be little kid he killed in the first story arc was finally out in the open.

It also ended with Captain Britain and some other Captain Britains emerging from a portal and kidnapping Fantomex.

That's where this fifth collected volume of the series opens, with a four-issue story drawn by Greg Tocchini.

Apparently Psylocke's brother is Captain Britain, who currently leads the Captain Britain Corps, a vast army of Captain Britains from many different dimensions based in Otherworld, a fantasy realm filled with various cliched fantasy elements like castles, dragons, wizards and suchlike. Her other brother, a reformed sometimes-villain, is also there, and helping out the cause of...Captain Britain-ing, a family business the Braddock boys would really like their sister Betsy "Psylocke" Braddock to get in on.

So they kidnap her and Fantomex, who they want to put on trial for his killing of the kid who would grow up to be Apocalypse. Verdict? Guilty. Punishment? Death.

Otherworld's got other problems too though, as there is a big war involving a goat-headed wizard trying to lead his army of Lord of the Rings monsters into Captain Britain HQ in order to gain access to the multiverse. Weapon Plus program alum Weapon III, The Skinless Man, is there and seeking revenge on Fantomex for flaying him alive (he reciprocates by cutting off Fantomex's face). Wolverine, Deadpool and Nightcrawler arrive to fight the forces of The Goat. And there is a rather bitterly ironic nature to the threat to Otherworld, which puts the Braddock siblings in the same place Fantomex was in when he decided to pop the Apocalypse kid, and they choose the same path that Captain Britain and his Corps were ready to kill Fantomex for taking.

While I'm pretty unfamiliar with the Braddock family soap opera, this is another tightly-plotted story arc by Remender, who has been remarkably consistent at sticking to the central theme of this book (which is at this point almost two years into its existence), whether or not doing something bad to prevent something worse is okay or not, and, even if it is okay, how that might wear on those who do those things. This whole super-team may consist of people with fairly huge body counts, but as cool as Wolverine might make stabbing people seem, Remender has effectively made the taking of lives for good seem like a depressing, soul-crushing burden.

Also, he provides Tocchini with a bunch of weird, cool shit to draw.

Tocchini's illustrator-like, almost painterly style is a sharp departure from much of the art that's preceded it on this book, but then, there hasn't really been a consistent look to Uncanny X-Force since its first issues. The dark gray and black garbed heroes of X-Force stand in sharp contrast to the bright red, white, blue and gold of the Captain Britain Corps and the earthy colored creatures of Otherworld.

There are two more comic books contained in this volume. There's the done-in-one "Frozen Moment," drawn by Phil Noto. This issue is split between Wolverine and Deadpool's attempt to help AoA Nightcrawler kill AoA Iceman, and the aftermath of the events of "Otherworld," as Psyclocke and Fantomex attend a funeral and finally enter into a physical relationship Fantomex has been pushing for since the book started. It's hard to believe that Betsy could look at Fantomex after seeing his face cut off, let alone sleep with him, but I suppose that's why she's a superhero and I'm not.

Finally, there's Uncanny X-Force #19.1, by Remender and artist Billy Tan. I was actually quite surprised to find it in the back of this book just now, as I didn't read it a few weeks ago when I first read this collection, nor do I remember it even being there. I suspect I was reading this late at night, got all the way up to the end of the relevant story, and then stopped reading. And then moved on to the next story without returning to this volume to read #19.1.

I didn't read it just now, either. It's entitled "Ghost Reunion," and doesn't feature any member of Uncanny X-Force in any capacity, so I'm not entirely sure what it's doing in this collection. It's a story set in the "Age of Apocalypse" setting, where Dark Angel Saga Book 1 was set, and ends with the tag "TO BE CONTINUED IN AGE OF APOCALYPSE" so I assume it is a prequel to the short-lived Age of Apocalypse monthly series, trying to lure the Uncanny X-Force audience into checking out that series.

Recent Marvel Trades I Waited For (Pt. 4): Uncanny X-Force Vol. 1: The Apocalypse Solution

This is another Marvel series that I fully intended to buy the trade collection of once it became available/I got around to it, but then I saw the trade sitting there on the shelf at the library and decided “Hey, why wait and pay, when I can read it tonight for free?”

The latest Marvel use of the name “X-Force” was applied to Cyclops’ Wolverine-lead wetwork/assassination/black-ops squad, which, from a safe distance, doesn’t really seem like the sort of thing Cyclops would create, but as I’ve been catching up on Astonishing X-Men, it’s become clear Marvel’s been gradually pushing Cyke into the dark, troubled, ends-justify-the-means role of a leader whose entire race is on the brink of extinction.

I thought the initial line-up was pretty amusing: It was basically all the stabbiest X-Men who had knives. But my interest wasn’t really piqued until Marvel announced they would be ending that short run of X-Force comics with issue #28, only to relaunch it with a new number one in a series that would add the popular mutant adjective “Uncanny” to the title.

This line-up included characters I knew and/or liked, like Wolverine, Deadpool and Fantomex (the French mutant super-thief from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men) and Angel/Archangel. Plus Psylocke. (The psychic ninja lady who sometimes looks Asian and sometimes doesn’t, and sometimes has purple hair and sometimes doesn’t. But who never, ever, ever seems to wear any pants at all).

I liked the fact that they would all be wearing matching gray and black versions of their own costumes even better. There’s something about small alterations to familiar costumes that I find exciting, something I can’t really explain (although I assume it has something to do with the admixture of the comfortable familiar with the exciting newness). That’s one of the things I really enjoyed about Geoff Johns’ black and white Lanterns in Blackest Night and Brightest Day.

Having read the first story arc and some of the filler material that comprises Uncanny X-Force Vol. 1: The Apocalypse Solution by Rick Remender, Jerome Opena and company, I see that the line-up works extremely well for the purposes of the book.

Old-school X-characters Angel (one of the oldest half dozen or so) and Psylocke provide the book a melodramatic center, where emotional conflicts can blossom and excuses can be provided so that the stories can potentially be “about something,” while Wolverine, Fantomex and Deadpool serve as foils. The three are similarly straightforward in their characterization, their mysteriousness, their bad-assedness and not-really-X-Men-material natures, but they all have pretty distinct personality traits and foibles and super-character markers, and are thus all different enough from one another that they’re fun to watch bounce off one another and off the straightmutants.

The premise of this X-Force series remains the same as the previous one, and both seem like they could very easily succumb to a sense of having too many Wolverines in the kitchen. But because Remender has chosen such flamboyantly distinct characters as the other Wolverines here, that is most assuredly not the case. (At least in Uncanny X-Force; I don't know how adjectiveless X-Force worked out, but just looking at the covers I can see that they did have a literal clone of Wolverine in the lineup).

The book gets off to a very, very rocky start, so rocky in fact that I had to flip ahead to make sure the whole thing didn’t look like the opening. That’s a seven-page sequence from some Wolverine: Road To Hell comic book that Marvel apparently published to hype their emergent Wolverine line about the time writer Jason Aaron launched a new Wolverine series with his “Wolverine Goes To Hell” storyline.

This story-like tidbit is written by Remender, but, in the context of what follows, it like reads like two scenes he might have cut out of story arc “The Apocalypse Solution” between the first and second drafts. In it, Fantomex gives Wolverine a ride in this UFO (That’s another thing I like about Fantomex; he has his own UFO) while they talk and drink PBR. Then they meet up with the rest of the cast, explaining the purpose of the team in the process.

And that’s it. The story starts over on the next page with the first issue of Uncanny X-Force. While there’s nothing really to the segment, it’s the art that is most offensive. It’s by Leonardo Manco and, to put it nicely, it’s not done in a style I enjoy.To put it less nicely…well, let’s just stick with nicely. Suffice it to say it is heavily photo-referenced to the point that all of the lines, which are actually dots, seem applied on top of photos, with little to nothing actually looking like it was drawn.

Opena’s art throughout the rest of the book is a definite improvement, with everything looking drawn, and looking excitingly, dramatically drawn. In addition to handling the figures in motion and faces expressing emotion well, Opena’s layouts and the angles he chooses help give the scenes—even the quiter, more mundane ones—a sense of motion and urgency.The story is fairly simple. The new X-Force team has a lead on Apocalypse, one of the X-Men’s greatest enemies, and the sort of threat that endangers the whole world. Angel has history with him, as Apocalypse once possessed him or mind-controlled him or whatever and turned him into one of his Horsemen, which meant he got blue skin and wings made out of knives for a while. That must be a pretty important X-Men storyline, because they adapted it into that awesome/terrible X-Men cartoon from the '90s.

Angel/Archangel (he can switch back and forth at will now, apparently) has a plan to deal with Apocalypse: X-Force are going to hunt him down and kill him immediately, before Cyclops and the rest of the X-Men get involved.

The hunt occurs fairly quickly, and the majority of the action is devoted to introducing four new horsemen of the apocalypse, colorful characters with bizarre mutant abilities plucked from throughout history, and having X-Force fight and then dispatch them. As for Apocalpyse, he’s not yet the big gorilla with pile-driver arms and a huge A belt buckle yet. He’s been somehow recincarnated as a little boy in a private elementary school uniform, whose main interests include toys and comics, although his followers/worshipers are intent on educating him so that he grows up to be the supervillian they want him to be one day.

So the seemingly amoral heroes of X-Force are faced with a moral dilemma, the X-Men equivalent of whether or not you’d kill Hitler as a baby if given the opportunity.

The book climaxes with the varying ways the heroes decide that question for themselves, (presumably) leaving the fallout to the next volume. Remender’s plotting and characterization was quite engaging throughout, and I do like the fact that his storyline pivoted on confronting his team of hardcore heroes with the choice to perform the very hardcore act that they tell themselves and each other they are committed to doing, in this case the act being such an extreme one that committing it actually seems beyond most of them.

The collection also includes a back-of-the-book gallery all of the many, many covers for the first four issues, including work from such disparate artists as Marko Djurdjevic, J. Scott Campbell, Rob Liefeld and Clayton Crain, a few pages of process stuff showing the evolution of a single page from script to final colors, and an exhaustingly complicated six-page prose summary of the 28-issue, 2008-2010 run of X-Force that preceded the launch of X-Force. I was actually glad they included this, as I liked this volume well enough to read another like it and, knowing it would be a few months before Uncanny X-Force Vol. 2 came out, I was sort of tempted to look for trades of the X-Force series that preceded this one. Skimming this history of X-Force, however, was more than enough to convince me not to even make the attempt: It apparently tied in very closely to all the X-Men meta-story business involving Cable and timetravel and mutant Messiah Hope and Mister Sinister and the space cat-lady that used to date Cyclops' dad in outer space or something and Greg Land art. (It looks like Wolverine had a snappy red and blue costume on for at least one panel of the run though...?).

But as for The Apocalypse Solution? I liked it an awful lot, and given my resistance to all things X-Men, I have to assume that means it's really, really good. I'll read the next collection of Remender and Opena's run on this series, when it comes out. Maybe I'll even buy it, if I don't run across it in a library before I run across it in a comic shop...

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By the way, what are the comics that the child who will grow up to be Apcalypse reads when he's not playing with his toys?I recognize Debbie Huey's Bumperboy Loses His Marbles and Lark Pien's Long Tail Kitty.