INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #7
“As Luck Would Have It”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Michael Sta. Maria
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editors: Mark Basso & Alanna Smith

COVER: Domino and Cable fighting side by side.

X-FORCE: 

Cable. He claims that he can’t interrogate the captured Mutant Liberation Front members telepathically because they’re being held on a level with power dampers that also affect him. Mind you, we know he’s under outside influence at the moment, so we don’t necessarily have to take that literally.

He claims that Professor X’s injunctions against invasive telepathic interrogation don’t apply “in times of war”, and apparently regards this as applying to the Mutant Liberation Front even though they’re amateur-hour bozos.

He greets Cyclops warmly and calls him dad, but we’re told later that beneath the surface he’s telepathically deflecting both Cyclops and Kid Omega with everything he’s got. He references Cyclops “rais[ing] me in the distant future to save me from a weaponized infection”, which is the Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix miniseries.

Hellverine. Kid Omega reads his mind, for reasons we’ll get to, and decides to wind up him and Archangel. Kid Omega greets Akihiro as “Daken”, prompting Archangel to point out that they don’t use that name any more because it’s derogatory. (It means “mongrel”, if you don’t know.) Kid Omega insists, probably disingenuously, that he likes Akihiro because “he’s honest about what he is” – the implication seeming to be that Kid Omega thinks the name Daken was pretty appropriate.

Kid Omega also claims that Akihiro privately thinks about how he used to be the sort of person who would have killed Archangel to remove him as a rival for Boom-Boom’s affections; and that he regards Archangel as a better and less morally compromised man. Akihiro stays calm throughout this speech until Boom-Boom gets mentioned. He seems to want to be on good terms with Archangel, even if the feeling isn’t reciprocated.

Kid Omega says that he and Hellverine know each other because they “got killed together once by Sabretooth”. That’s Wolverine #41 from the Krakoan era, but they spent a bit of time together in X-Force’s temporary Greenhouse base before that happened (in X-Force #47-50).

Archangel. He argues against invasive telepathic interrogation on grounds that hardly seem to have troubled most X-psychics in recent years, and defends Akihiro to Kid Omega in a rather virtue-signalling way, while making clear that he doesn’t like the guy. Seeley seems to be writing him as someone who wants to go through the forms of being polite and playing by the rules for respectability reasons.

Boom-Boom. As usual, she’s keen to support Cable and has great trust in his judgment. She’s willing to believe that even if the MLF prisoners are nobodies, Kali herself must be a bigger threat. As in previous issues, she also acknowledges that Kali makes her feel old, as she’s appealing to a generation younger than her.

Ms. Marvel. Her Inhuman powers are unaffected by mutant power suppressors. In a rather meta point, she says she used to hate her powers as a metaphor for teenage awkwardness, but now she sees the opportunity to fill the room. She makes some headway in talking to Resonant, but see below for more context on that.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Domino. She spends much of this issue on the run from the anti-mutant gang who attacked her at the end of the previous issue. Her first person narration has returned to being coherent, though she doesn’t remember anything before being mindwiped at the end of issue #5. (She says that the “earliest thing I remember is the enthusiastic embrace of gravity”, which is presumably Cable dumping her body somewhere between issues #5 and #6. It can’t be her falling into the river in issue #4, because that’s too early.)

She still has the photograph of X-Force that she was carrying around last issue, and which she regards as her only lead on her identity. She loses it just before running into someone she knows at the end of the issue.

Her luck powers continue to help her throughout the issue, leading to her taking out the inept gunmen without having to do much of anything – though when one of them gets close, she can still fight effectively on instinct. By the end of the issue, she’s figures out that her powers “let me fall but they always catch me”.

Cyclops. He shows up unannounced at X-Force HQ to ask why Cable stole the Zero unit that the X-Men had in storage (the one that Cable used to lure in the MLF last issue). But he also queries why there’s an X-Force team right now at all. Realistically, he’s there to find out what the deal is and he’s rightly suspicious of Cable.

Kid Omega. Brought along by Cyclops as back-up just in case anything weird happens. Cable makes sure to spell out for us that Kid Omega can’t read his mind because they’re similarly powerful telepaths.

Kid Omega winds up Archangel and Akihiro for what initially seems to be no particular reason beyond his own amusement. He explains later that he only read Akihiro’s mind by accident, because Cable was so strenuously deflecting his probes. Still, having done so, he evidently couldn’t resist making something of it.

Shatterstar. Domino finally loses her photo just in time to stumble into Shatterstar, who obviously recognises her. Tim Seeley wrote a Shatterstar miniseries in 2018, and seems to be picking up from that book’s status quo (which was pretty much ignored subsequently). In that book, Shatterstar was the landlord of Manor Crossing, a refuge for people from other realities who had been stranded on Earth. This is why he’s accompanied by…

Pug-Smasher. Yes, he’s a dog dressed as Flag-Smasher. He previously appeared in the Shatterstar mini, and he’s the Flag-Smasher counterpart from Spider-Ham’s world.

VILLAINS:

The gunmen are just generic anti-mutant bigots who get done in by Domino’s powers, as far as we can tell.

The Mutant Liberation Front. We only see the four MLF members who were defeated last issue – Unveil, Speedburn, DePop and Resonant. The power-suppressing location that they were teleported to at the end of that issue turns out to be X-Force’s HQ. Their powers can’t have been entirely suppressed, since Unveil still has wisps of mist around her.

According to Boom-Boom, the Kali Sez live streams are being monetised, and she thinks the whole thing is a scam by Kali. Somewhat remarkably, Boom-Boom claims in apparent seriousness that Kali’s insurrectionary live streams include adverts for car insurance. The four captive MLF members have no time for Boom-Boom, who they regard as a lackey (not entirely without justification – remember, in this book she is consistently willing to accept anything Cable says).

Resonant, at least, has much more time for Ms Marvel, because he recognises that she stands up to the rest of the team. However, Resonant also tells us that he got into the MLF because he was a Kali fan, and that he used his metal powers to try and trace her over the internet. Presumably this worked, because he did join the MLF, but he implies that he uncovered something disillusioning that he’s not supposed to know about. There’s nothing specific to foreshadow this in earlier issues, but he did seem to be the most competent of the MLF group in the previous issue.