INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #4
“Death War, part 1”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Philip Tan
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: The caption reads “Cable – felled by the Angel of Death, or his mysterious pursuer?” The “mysterious pursuer” is the person obscured behind Archangel’s left wing. Their costume doesn’t really resemble anything in the issue, but the monochrome clothing and the gun suggest it’s probably meant to be Domino. The fight is taking place in a scrapyard and doesn’t have much to do with anything that happens in the issue.

X-FORCE:

Cable. Last issue, X-Force fought the Beyond Corporation and Cable eliminated Boom-Boom as a suspect for murdering Kamala Khan in a future timeline. At the end of the issue, Boom-Boom found Cable slumped unconscious in his chair with some sort of mark on his chest, and Domino standing over him; the story ended with Boom-Boom attacking while Domino attempted to explain herself. (Akihiro helpfully explains that the art was supposed to show Cable “bleeding from a wound in his chest”, which it didn’t really convey.)

Domino’s flashback in this issue expands on this scene: it adds two panels before Boom-Boom comes into the room, in which Domino aims a gun at Cable, who tries to persuade her to stop. Domino says that she has to do it because “you won’t listen to actual reason, so maybe you’ll hear this”. We then get an abbreviated version of Boom-Boom’s arrival, after which Domino’s luck powers apparently save her from Boom-Boom by bringing the ceiling down, allowing her to escape.

However, while Domino seems to remember these events, nobody in X-Force is at all clear what happened. Cable remembers Boom-Boom coming to talk to him about the mission from issue #3 (which is indeed what she was there for), and thinks that she saw something that made her use her explosion powers (“an attacker maybe”) but doesn’t seem to remember Domino at all – in fact, he seems in perfect health, aside from minor injuries from the explosion. Boom-Boom doesn’t remember Domino either, and seems completely confused about what happened, though this may simply be because of her injuries. All of this seems rather similar to Cable’s lack of memory of what actually happened to the future Kamala in issue #1.

Instead of drawing that connection, though, Cable concludes that Boom-Boom must have been under some sort of outside influence and decides to investigate whether Archangel (his last remaining suspect) had something to do with it. He argues that Archangel is a machination of Apocalypse (which is true, in that Archangel was the result of the upgrades given to Warren’s powers by Apocalypse) and immediately accepts that he’s also been shaped by Apocalypse (as his origin story involves Apocalypse trying to use him as a host body). It’s possible that he’s just looking for an excuse to investigate his last remaining suspect, as nobody else seems to find the Apocalypse theory terribly convincing.

Cable claims to still believe in the presumption of innocence.

Archangel. Warren starts the story preoccupied with how well Boom-Boom seemed to deal with Beyond making clone weapons of her, presumably seeing some sort of parallel with his own transformation.

Last issue, he inexplicably turned Beyond’s weaponised clonse into flowers. He claims here that a “new ‘angel form’ took over” and that his mind went “somewhere else”, allowing this alternative version to emerge. He says that “If the last time I’d used the Death Seed had been an excursion into using some kind of life-giving energies, this was a full immersion.” I’m still not honestly sure what Tim Seeley has in mind here; the storyline in question seemed to involve both a Death Seed and a separate Life Seed.

Warren takes offence at the idea that he can’t be trusted because of his previous dealings with Apocalypse. But when pressed, he concedes that when he was first transformed into the Death persona by Apocalypse (circa X-Factor #19), his mind also went “somewhere else” and was replaced by a different personality.

The healing energies that Warren used on Boom-Boom are apparently at least semi-magical, because Akihiro is able to track their source. The train leads to what appears to be an abandoned beach house in Florida, but is apparently an abandoned SHIELD safehouse currently occupied by Mr Sinister, who claims some sort of influence over Warren. Sinister is somehow able to force Warren into a red and blue form.

Boom-Boom. She was nearly killed by her own explosion but Archangel’s new powers saved her life; she doesn’t remember the details of what happened. The near death experience seems to make her more serious than usual. She isn’t terribly impressed by Akihiro’s display of romantic interest, partly because of the timing, but also because she suspects that it’s prompted by him seeing Warren as a possible rival. Fighting the Nasty Boys seems to cheer her up a bit.

Hellverine. He’s fairly professional in helping to figure out what happened with Boom-Boom and Cable, and comes to Warren’s defence when he’s accused by Cable, despite not much liking the guy. He claims not to see the former evil Archangel persona in Warren any more, though it’s not clear whether this is an expression of opinion or something he literally claims to be able to sense with his demonic powers. He does claim that he can sense the energies that prevent Boom-Boom from dying, and says he can track it through a combination of his “infernal senses” and the “demonic help” of his inner demon Bagra-ghul; this seems to involve casting a spell of some sort, as he forms a ring of hellfire in order to do it.

His romantic approach to Boom-Boom seems sincere but, as noted above, goes down badly. She’s taken to calling him “wild boy”.

He recognises the robot sentries in the Florida beach house as SHIELD security androids which he saw “when I went to confront my dad”. This is footnoted to Wolverine: Origins #10, in which he does break into a SHIELD facility to confront Wolverine, back in his early days as a villain. The androids don’t appear in that story; it seems to be just an example of a story where he was in a SHIELD building.

Ms Marvel. She stayed the night at the X-Force base after issue #3. She doesn’t have a great deal to do in this issue, but insists on being allowed to go on missions even though the point of the team is supposedly to protect her. Cable approves of this: “leading means putting yourself on the line”. Despite that, he tries to insist that she stay close to him (which is fairly sensible, I guess).

Sonics can stop her from thinking clearly enough to use her powers.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Domino. Her powers allowed her to escape Boom-Boom last issue, but leave her unconscious in the river outside X-Force’s base until after they’ve left on their mission – which apparently means she can’t easily follow them. She gives this as an example of her powers helping her to win in the short term while making her lose in the grand scheme of things.

Beyond the cryptic comments noted above, we still don’t know why she attacked Cable.

Mr Chubby Cheeks. a

VILLAINS:

Mister Sinister. Last seen in Exceptional X-Men, Sinister – or at least this version of Sinister – has apparently co-opted a SHIELD black ops site and obtained some sort of control over Archangel, but we don’t know what any of that’s about yet.

The Nasty Boys. As henchmen, Sinister has cloned the Nasty Boys – Slab, Gorgeous George, Hairbag, Ramrod and Ruckus – who were his henchmen circa X-Factor #75 (1991). Cable describes them as “second raters”, which is fair enough. The clones disintegrate in battle, which seems to come as a surprise to them.

Strangely, both Boom-Boom and Mister Sinister tell us that the Nasty Boys are supposed to be dead. Boom-Boom specifically attributes this to “the Upstarts’ mutant murder game”.  This seems to refer to Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #20, where they were indeed murdered by the Upstarts – but that was pre-Krakoa, and at least four of them were explicitly resurrected on Krakoa. Even if Boom-Boom doesn’t directly know about their resurrection, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to her, and Krakoa even gets mentioned on the same page. It seems like a continuity error.

Maxine Danger. She appears in a one-panel flashback showing her having dinner with Warren after the events of issue #3; Warren still appears to treat her as a corporate CEO, at least to her face.