{"id":2742,"date":"2014-11-03T22:42:01","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T22:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2742"},"modified":"2014-11-03T22:42:01","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T22:42:01","slug":"x-force-vol-2-hidefear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2742","title":{"rendered":"X-Force vol 2 – “Hide\/Fear”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The current incarnation of\u00a0X-Force<\/em> is\u00a0evidently not a book written with the\u00a0collections\u00a0foremost in mind. \u00a0Presumably it’s a need for convenient break points that brings us a\u00a0volume comprising four issues, rounded out by a reprint of\u00a0X-Men Legacy<\/em>\u00a0#300 – which, yes,\u00a0is<\/em> by the same writer, and\u00a0does<\/em> introduce a character who appears here,\u00a0and hasn’t been reprinted before, but still…<\/p>\n

If the\u00a0opening six issues of the series were\u00a0about\u00a0introducing Si Spurrier’s take on the individual team members, these three stories (#8-9 is a two-parter)\u00a0move the focus onto the group.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0wildly dysfunctional team whose\u00a0actual purpose revolves entirely around curing Hope. \u00a0But\u00a0finding a cure for her is just the plot driver; the real theme here is that these guys are all, in varying degrees, crazy.<\/p>\n

This could easily\u00a0end up as multiple variations on “dark and brooding”, but fortunately Spurrier is more inventive than that. \u00a0So we have Cable replaced by a series of 24-hour clones with an increasingly desperate “ends justify the means” mentality;\u00a0a 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;\u00a0Dr 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. \u00a0That leaves Hope as the only character with a fully\u00a0functioning moral compass, but forcing her to interact with the rest of the cast in the garbled form of MeMe\u00a0prevents her from anchoring the team properly.<\/p>\n

Two\u00a0main themes emerge from this. \u00a0The 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,\u00a0got sucked into a life that has led them to lose touch with\u00a0a part of their humanity. \u00a0The second is that the team are on the verge of\u00a0becoming indistinguishable from the people they’re fighting, and their claims to hold the moral high ground are increasingly tenuous.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0the rest of the group don’t notice. \u00a0It’s a take that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the way the character is being written over in\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>, but as this book is doing the more interesting things,\u00a0it wins on that score. \u00a0The big idea here is based on\u00a0the idea that Fantomex is incapable of believing in anything\u00a0greater than himself, which I believe comes from a\u00a0Grant Morrison\u00a0issue. \u00a0Morrison 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. \u00a0Since Fantomex can’t change the way his mind works, the only way he can resolve this cognitive dissonance\u00a0is to\u00a0wilfully misinterpret\u00a0everything that seems to be\u00a0better than him, or to bring reality into line with his mind by\u00a0eliminating things that don’t fit.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0reality\u00a0into line with his worldview, rather than the other way around. \u00a0He’s fun like this.<\/p>\n

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). \u00a0Unlike the existing roster,\u00a0Domino 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\u00a0bring a bit of\u00a0much-needed perspective to the team.<\/p>\n

So the stories, then. \u00a0If I’m being honest, the overall direction of the series and the characters\u00a0is more engaging to me than the detail of what’s actually going on in some of these issues.<\/p>\n

Issue #7\u00a0introduces the\u00a0series’ 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. \u00a0There’s a fairly obvious NSA parallel here, but issue #7 is more concerned with\u00a0making a less-than-subtle point that Cable’s own approach\u00a0is logically equivalent to Zola’s own justifications for what he’s doing. \u00a0After all, as he points out, mutants genuinely do pose a danger, he’s not out to hurt them, and he’s simply\u00a0gathering information for democratically elected governments.<\/p>\n

I have some\u00a0doubts about this concept. \u00a0In a shared universe, it comes awfully close to being a story-breaker, since it\u00a0seems to posit that the government ought to know anything that any mutant character is doing (if they care enough to ask). \u00a0We’re explicitly shown Magneto as one of the surveillance subjects, for example. \u00a0Now, 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\u00a0an objection to be filed next to “why doesn’t Rogue just borrow one of those power-suppressors\u00a0that villains have no trouble getting hold of, and turn her powers off when she wants a hug”. \u00a0The answer is “because it would break the story” and\u00a0it’s just about an acceptable answer as long as\u00a0these things are kept in their box.<\/p>\n

But it does seem a bit much\u00a0– perhaps it’s the “every mutant in the world” thing, which feels a bit too sweeping and hand-wavy for this book. \u00a0Even so, it works for a parallel with Cable, and\u00a0the issue works pretty well when it comes to\u00a0challenging the team’s perspective\u00a0– one that\u00a0would normally go unchallenged in this sort of book.<\/p>\n

Issues #8-9 are a trip to Afghanistan, where it turns out that Volga has sold his temporary power-up technology to both sides. \u00a0Well, of course he has. \u00a0He’s an evil arms dealer, that’s kind of what they do. \u00a0It’s not like the story treats this as some sort of major twist, to be fair. \u00a0Instead,\u00a0issue #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. \u00a0The real heart of this story is apparently\u00a0intended\u00a0to be\u00a0Hope’s interaction with the straggler of the group, who is\u00a0about as conventionally heroic as this book gets; clearly these are the relatively nice guys in a\u00a0rather unpleasant world that’s ultimately getting the upper hand on them.<\/p>\n

But it’s not a hugely satisfying story. \u00a0Part 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. \u00a0It’s all fairly self-cancelling, and most of the characters are relative cyphers. \u00a0To some extent that seems to be a deliberate choice –\u00a0Spurrier 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\u00a0where everyone has their one dominant character trait. \u00a0The result is a team who are explicitly more or less interchangeable, and that’s kind of hard\u00a0\u00a0to hang a story on. \u00a0There’s a problem with balance, here, I think – the soldiers probably should be fairly generic tough guys to stop them overshadowing the rookie,\u00a0but\u00a0the size of their role\u00a0in the story means they end up overshadowing him anyway, despite not actually being all that interesting in themselves.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0guy from\u00a0Legacy<\/em> #300, whose power was to be forgotten as soon as you stopped looking at him. \u00a0The\u00a0joke here, of course, is that\u00a0the team keep forgetting\u00a0about their own plan, while poor beleaguered Forget-me-Not desperately tries to\u00a0hide from the gun-toting lunatics. \u00a0All this naturally helps bring home just how screwed up the team are, by bringing in an ordinary, down-to-earth character from outside their\u00a0sub-genre, who looks at them with entirely understandable bafflement and horror. \u00a0This 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\u00a0it leads to a strong pay-off.<\/p>\n

Like\u00a0Legacy<\/em> before it, Spurrier’s\u00a0X-Force<\/em>\u00a0stories aren’t consistently winners. \u00a0When they are, it’s one of the best X-books; but even when they’re not, they\u00a0still\u00a0have consistently strong ideas and interesting angles\u00a0that make the series as a whole well worth my time. \u00a0After a slow start in the first few issues of the series, where this looked to be a disappointingly routine guns-n-ammo book,\u00a0X-Force<\/em> is growing into something much more interesting than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The current incarnation of\u00a0X-Force is\u00a0evidently not a book written with the\u00a0collections\u00a0foremost in mind. \u00a0Presumably it’s a need for convenient break points that brings us a\u00a0volume comprising four issues, rounded out by a reprint of\u00a0X-Men Legacy\u00a0#300 – which, yes,\u00a0is by the same writer, and\u00a0does introduce a character who appears here,\u00a0and hasn’t been reprinted before, but still… […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2799,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2742\/revisions\/2799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}