As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-FORCE vol 6 #30
“The Hunt for X, part 1: Dawn of the Hunt”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colourist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1: The new X-Force line-up, complete with annoying Deadpool. This issue is bannered as a “Judgment Day” tie-in despite having no apparent connection to the crossover at all. In fairness, though, X-Force #30-33 are all listed as tie-ins, so perhaps this plotline will connect to it somehow over the next few issues.

PAGES 2-4. Wolverine yells at a tree.

Wolverine blames Krakoa itself for the disappearance of Kid Omega, who vanishes while fighting a Cerebrax-possessed Krakoa at the end of issue #29. Nothing in that issue gives Wolverine any particularly concrete reason to blame Krakoa, but Percy has repeatedly written Wolverine as the one guy on the island who really doesn’t trust the place.  Quentin’s disappearance is the catalyst for Wolverine’s wider doubts to come to the fore.

Wolverine is correct to say that Krakoa feeds off mutants – that was the plot of Giant-Size X-Men #1, and we established back in Hickman’s X-Men #3 that the island feeds less obtrusively off the large mutant population on the island.

PAGE 5. Recap and credits.

PAGE 6-10. Kraven the Hunter discovers Deadpool’s head inside a polar bear.

Kraven the Hunter. The classic Spider-Man villain has been dead for a few years now. This guy is the last survivor of a batch of clones that Kraven created in an attempt to give himself a son. He debuted in Amazing Spider-Man vol 5 #16 (2019) and took up the mantle a few issues later. For most practical purposes, he’s basically Kraven Classic without the continuity baggage.

The following scenes are an unlabelled flashback which take place before this scene and explain how Deadpool got eaten by the bear.

PAGE 11. Deadpool brags about being in X-Force.

Deadpool joined X-Force, as he dearly wanted to, in Wolverine #23. He certainly wasn’t begged to join, as he claims here (though it’s doubtful he really expects anyone to believe him).

Panel 1. The recognisable background characters are Nightcrawler, Penance, Magik, Gentle, a couple of randoms at the bar, the Blob, and Gorgeous George, who seems to be used exclusively as a background figure in the Green Laggon.

Panel 2. That looks like Colossus and Black Tom Cassidy in the hot tub.

PAGES 12-14. X-Force meet.

Wolverine is off doing something unspecified. Sage says he’s “opposed”, but it’s not entirely clear what he’s opposed to. Sage says he hasn’t spoken to “anyone” since “it” happened – assuming that “it” is Kid Omega’s disappearance, Wolverine clearly has spoken to Professor X and Krakoa, so presumably Sage means that Wolverine hasn’t spoken to anyone in X-Force.

Instead we have Deadpool and Omega Red, who shows even less tolerance for Deadpool’s antics than Wolverine did in Wolverine #21-23.

Sage remains the character taking responsibility for Omega Red’s co-operation; she’s staked a lot of her credibility on making this work, and sees Omega Red’s rehabilitation as a symbol of her own potential to sort out her drink problem.

Wilhelm scream. The clichéd Hollywood sound effects scream. More to the point, it’s a callback to Percy doing the same joke with Deadpool in Wolverine #23.

PAGES 15-16. Data pages: Beast and Sage give their separate rationales for the missions that we’re about to see. For Beast, it’s just a question of going on the offensive in response to the backlash against the mutants’ monopolisation of resurrection, after it was exposed on the day of the Hellfire Gala. For Sage, it’s a question of doing something heroic in order to take control of the narrative.

Sage’s reasoning doesn’t really convince me, certainly in the wider context of the X-books. Saving mutants from traffickers is something the Marauders do all the time anyway, so how does getting a couple of psychopaths to do it in the middle of nowhere change the narrative? And Krakoa already has straightforwardly heroic representatives to bolster the national image – that’s the premise of Gerry Duggan’s X-Men, surely. Maybe Sage is rationalising, and trying to come up with a more positive explanation of what X-Force is actually for.

The Peasant’s Revolt, which is the title of Beast’s piece, was a revolt in England in 1381, with various broadly economic causes. The relevance to what Beast is writing about isn’t immediately clear, but presumably he sees the human backlash as the revolt. Sage, on the other hand, chooses to reference the quirky 90s comedy-drama about Alaska, Northern Exposure.

PAGES 17-19. Domino and Black Tom rescue Angel.

The mob have apparently decided that torturing mutants without killing them is the way to go. The Elvis obsessive is presumably there because he wants the mutants to bring back Elvis. There’s a guy in a wizard costume with a “Bring Back Tolkien” placard, too.

As usual, the mutants have obnoxiously placed their gate smack in the middle of a major monument (the Delicate Arch), despite its massively inconvenient location for anyone.

PAGES 20-22. Omega Red disposes of Deadpool and gets on with the mission alone.

As Deadpool says, Omega Red’s back story has him as a serial killer even before he was experimented upon by the Russian government. There are some scattered flashbacks on this period, but basically, it’s the reason why he was in jail and available to be experimented upon.

PAGES 23-24. Kraven gets ideas.

Kraven wants to hunt the apex predator, and the mutants are in charge of everything now. Okay. We’ve had this before in some scattered stories with the original Kraven, but it’s new to this guy.

PAGE 25. Trailers.