The current incarnation of X-Force is evidently not a book written with the collections foremost in mind.  Presumably it’s a need for convenient break points that brings us a volume comprising four issues, rounded out by a reprint of X-Men Legacy #300 – which, yes, is by the same writer, and does introduce a character who appears here, and hasn’t been reprinted before, but still…

If the opening six issues of the series were about introducing Si Spurrier’s take on the individual team members, these three stories (#8-9 is a two-parter) move the focus onto the group.

While the recap pages continue to gamely assure us that this is a series about a black ops team making sure mutants have a stake in the world, it’s increasingly clear that the series itself treats that as little more than Cable’s pretext for gathering a wildly dysfunctional team whose actual purpose revolves entirely around curing Hope.  But finding a cure for her is just the plot driver; the real theme here is that these guys are all, in varying degrees, crazy.

This could easily end up as multiple variations on “dark and brooding”, but fortunately Spurrier is more inventive than that.  So we have Cable replaced by a series of 24-hour clones with an increasingly desperate “ends justify the means” mentality; a Psylocke who claims to be fighting her addiction to killing but plainly sticks around so that she has a non-X-Men outlet for it; Marrow, whose ravings are a defence against having to deal with the world at all; Dr Nemesis, who could politely be described as socially non-viable; and Fantomex, who has a bizarrely abstract existential crisis based on a throwaway line from a Grant Morrison comic.  That leaves Hope as the only character with a fully functioning moral compass, but forcing her to interact with the rest of the cast in the garbled form of MeMe prevents her from anchoring the team properly.

Two main themes emerge from this.  The first is that, as Hope insists several times to those other characters who’ll listen to her, these are still basically good people who have, somewhere along the line, got sucked into a life that has led them to lose touch with a part of their humanity.  The second is that the team are on the verge of becoming indistinguishable from the people they’re fighting, and their claims to hold the moral high ground are increasingly tenuous.

Throwing a spanner into the works in Spurrier’s take on Fantomex, who doesn’t actually fit into this model, but is close enough that the rest of the group don’t notice.  It’s a take that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the way the character is being written over in Wolverine and the X-Men, but as this book is doing the more interesting things, it wins on that score.  The big idea here is based on the idea that Fantomex is incapable of believing in anything greater than himself, which I believe comes from a Grant Morrison issue.  Morrison seemed to intend this more as an explanation of why Fantomex was an atheist, but Spurrier pushes it to the extreme where Fantomex literally cannot come to terms with the existence of anything better than him.  Since Fantomex can’t change the way his mind works, the only way he can resolve this cognitive dissonance is to wilfully misinterpret everything that seems to be better than him, or to bring reality into line with his mind by eliminating things that don’t fit.

It’s a very abstract problem for a character, but it works for the character – partly because it gives him something new to do, but also because there’s still something fundamentally human in there, in the frequently alarming consequences of his dogged determination to bring reality into line with his worldview, rather than the other way around.  He’s fun like this.

Given that Spurrier’s X-Force is such a parade of damaged goods, it’s interesting that these issues reintroduce Domino into the cast (though she doesn’t meet up with the rest of the group until issue #11).  Unlike the existing roster, Domino is at least a character who’s basically functional and at peace with who she is; so when she gets properly drawn into the story, she should bring a bit of much-needed perspective to the team.

So the stories, then.  If I’m being honest, the overall direction of the series and the characters is more engaging to me than the detail of what’s actually going on in some of these issues.

Issue #7 introduces the series’ next major villains, the Yellow Eye – an operation run by Arnim Zola which is using little insects to carry out surveillance on all the world’s mutants (well, all the ones they can find), and sell it to the government.  There’s a fairly obvious NSA parallel here, but issue #7 is more concerned with making a less-than-subtle point that Cable’s own approach is logically equivalent to Zola’s own justifications for what he’s doing.  After all, as he points out, mutants genuinely do pose a danger, he’s not out to hurt them, and he’s simply gathering information for democratically elected governments.

I have some doubts about this concept.  In a shared universe, it comes awfully close to being a story-breaker, since it seems to posit that the government ought to know anything that any mutant character is doing (if they care enough to ask).  We’re explicitly shown Magneto as one of the surveillance subjects, for example.  Now, granted, the Marvel Universe is riddled with technology that breaks the story if you think about the implications too closely, and on one view this is an objection to be filed next to “why doesn’t Rogue just borrow one of those power-suppressors that villains have no trouble getting hold of, and turn her powers off when she wants a hug”.  The answer is “because it would break the story” and it’s just about an acceptable answer as long as these things are kept in their box.

But it does seem a bit much – perhaps it’s the “every mutant in the world” thing, which feels a bit too sweeping and hand-wavy for this book.  Even so, it works for a parallel with Cable, and the issue works pretty well when it comes to challenging the team’s perspective – one that would normally go unchallenged in this sort of book.

Issues #8-9 are a trip to Afghanistan, where it turns out that Volga has sold his temporary power-up technology to both sides.  Well, of course he has.  He’s an evil arms dealer, that’s kind of what they do.  It’s not like the story treats this as some sort of major twist, to be fair.  Instead, issue #8 inverts the format by doing a story from the perspective of the British army unit that X-Force are harassing, with the team themselves hanging around the edges.  The real heart of this story is apparently intended to be Hope’s interaction with the straggler of the group, who is about as conventionally heroic as this book gets; clearly these are the relatively nice guys in a rather unpleasant world that’s ultimately getting the upper hand on them.

But it’s not a hugely satisfying story.  Part of it is that nothing is really achieved at the end, other than for a guest-starring Pete Wisdom to take the opportunity to point the team in the direction of Yellow Eye.  It’s all fairly self-cancelling, and most of the characters are relative cyphers.  To some extent that seems to be a deliberate choice – Spurrier clearly doesn’t want his powered-up British soldiers to look like a superhero team, nor does he want them to be the Howling Commandos where everyone has their one dominant character trait.  The result is a team who are explicitly more or less interchangeable, and that’s kind of hard  to hang a story on.  There’s a problem with balance, here, I think – the soldiers probably should be fairly generic tough guys to stop them overshadowing the rookie, but the size of their role in the story means they end up overshadowing him anyway, despite not actually being all that interesting in themselves.

Issue #10 takes a swerve into black comedy as the team set about tracking down Yellow Eye using the one character they can be sure isn’t currently being watched – Forget-me-Not, the guy from Legacy #300, whose power was to be forgotten as soon as you stopped looking at him.  The joke here, of course, is that the team keep forgetting about their own plan, while poor beleaguered Forget-me-Not desperately tries to hide from the gun-toting lunatics.  All this naturally helps bring home just how screwed up the team are, by bringing in an ordinary, down-to-earth character from outside their sub-genre, who looks at them with entirely understandable bafflement and horror.  This is the best of the four issues in the collection; Forget-me-Not is a one joke concept, but it’s a good joke that doesn’t outstay its welcome, it’s married to a proper character, and it leads to a strong pay-off.

Like Legacy before it, Spurrier’s X-Force stories aren’t consistently winners.  When they are, it’s one of the best X-books; but even when they’re not, they still have consistently strong ideas and interesting angles that make the series as a whole well worth my time.  After a slow start in the first few issues of the series, where this looked to be a disappointingly routine guns-n-ammo book, X-Force is growing into something much more interesting than that.