{"id":4450,"date":"2018-12-30T21:19:27","date_gmt":"2018-12-30T21:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4450"},"modified":"2018-12-30T21:19:27","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T21:19:27","slug":"weapon-x-22-27-weapon-x-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4450","title":{"rendered":"Weapon X #22-27: “Weapon X-Force”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Weapon X<\/em>\u00a0was quietly cancelled through the age-old technique of just not soliciting any more issues; the final issue has no farewell message, at least not in the digital version, but simply the word “End” in the corner of the final panel. \u00a0And this final arc, which introduces a new team line-up under the “Weapon X-Force” name, then lurches through two largely unrelated chunks of plot, reads very much like an aborted new direction that was intended to run for longer. \u00a0Whether that’s the case, I can’t know for sure – but it reads like it, which is ultimately what matters.<\/p>\n

The new line-up, clad unflatteringly in Sabretooth’s black and orange colour scheme, are Sabretooth himself, Mystique, Omega Red, Lady Deathstrike, and Domino (the only one of these characters who would normally be considered to qualify for any variety of “good guy”, but in this company largely because she’s amoral). \u00a0As set up in previous arcs, the idea here is that the ailing Logan has steered Sabretooth in the direction of running this new team, which may or may not keep him out of trouble, depending on what sort of jobs his mercenary crew chooses to take on.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, after our opening showcase where they flatten some bozos from the Breakworld, Weapon X-Force’s first task is to rescue Monet St Croix from a dodgy religious cult, a job which he affects not to take seriously, but which everyone realises is plainly driven by his tentative relationship with her back in\u00a0Cullen Bunn’s\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> run. \u00a0So we get Mystique trying to do a sensible infiltration job, accompanied by a hopelessly unsubtle and crass “undercover” Sabretooth – which is good fun.<\/p>\n

In fact, M is already thoroughly brainwashed, and she’s lured Sabretooth there in an attempt to add him to the cult. \u00a0All this leads to our antiheroes taking on the cultists, their hired help Deadpool (because evidently the book was thought to need the help), and the bad guys actually behind it all: Mentallo and good old Reverend Stryker. \u00a0Given the grim nature of the core cast – even M’s not exactly a bundle of laughs after being deprogrammed – it’s probably for the best that we do have Deadpool here to join Domino in undercutting the proceedings.<\/p>\n

Stryker believes that he’s sold his soul to the devil. \u00a0The idea seems to be that he’s actually been dead for years, and did a deal with “Satan” to finish his work – though it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that since he was in Hell already, he wouldn’t have anything much to bargain with. \u00a0For no especially good reason we get a fight against a bunch of mind-controlled D-list bad guys. \u00a0(As in, there’s a ton of these guys, and the closest any of them come to being high profile is Sauron.) \u00a0 \u00a0That fills a chunk of part 3 and quickly gets dropped at the start of part 4 – the first obvious sign of the pedal being put to the floor in an attempt to get through the plot.<\/p>\n

So it is that, halfway through part 4, the team\u00a0start<\/em> looking for a way to get to Hell in order to get their hands on Stryker, and Mystique points them in the direction of the only demon type figure she knows well, namely Azazel. \u00a0Normally I’d question the sanity of anyone who wanted to dust off Azazel, given that he’s a largely generic demon figure mainly known for being in a really terrible storyline, but he\u00a0does<\/em> have the advantage of an pre-existing connection with a core cast member, so fair enough. \u00a0Certainly\u00a0Weapon X<\/em> seems to be ignoring the rest of his back story in favour of playing him as a generic Satan \/ tempter figure, exiled from Hell, who seems to be maintaining his power by selling favours to dodgy politicians. \u00a0(There’s an interesting idea, raised in passing, that he’s not taking their money, but destroying it so that it can be treated for mystical purposes as a “sacrifice” to him.)<\/p>\n

Azazel’s idea of sending the team (and Deadpool) to Hell is, apparently, to kill them in such a way that their powers ought to be able to restore them once the job is done. \u00a0At this point we lurch into a torment in Hell story, which has very little do with the first half of the arc. \u00a0Sabretooth, who still considers himself to be “inverted” despite his dubious behaviour in the course of this series, seems initially surprised to learn that the powers that be regard his inversion period as essentially trivial compared to the decades of serial killing and mass murder that preceded it – which may seem obvious, but also begs the question of whether there’s even any point in him trying to atone if it makes no difference to the end result. \u00a0His hospital sequence is genuinely creepy, while for a change of pace Deadpool’s personal hell turns out to be doing stand-up to a crowd that won’t laugh at his jokes (and Domino’s personal hell is having to be in the crowd listening to it all).<\/p>\n

But all that lasts about half an issue before the team regroup and head after Stryker. \u00a0The idea here is that Stryker’s endless cycle of hateful brooding in Hell, and periodic returns to Earth for another failed run at those damned mutants,\u00a0is<\/span><\/em> his personal eternal punishment – which is presumably why Satan signed up for the deal. \u00a0Oh, and somewhere in here, Sabretooth decides he wants to save the soul of Graydon Creed into the bargain (Mystique doesn’t seem remotely bothered). \u00a0The main angle, though, seems to be that Satan doesn’t seem especially bothered about standing in Weapon X-Force’s way, because so far as he’s concerned they’re all on the same treadmill as Stryker is. \u00a0Why would he want to stop them? \u00a0They’ll be back soon enough.<\/p>\n

Somewhere around here most of the team get sent back to earth to break up Mentallo’s attempt to revive Stryker by sacrificing the cultists, and Sabretooth makes a rather garbled heroic sacrifice to get Graydon out of Hell – a wildly abbreviated plot thread that really does have the hallmarks of a gesture in the direction of something that was meant to play out over a longer timeframe. \u00a0All this apparently traumatises Sabretooth and resets his personality so that the next writer can ignore the whole inversion thing. \u00a0The end.<\/p>\n

There’s an insane amount of plot material in here, and some of the ideas are reasonably interesting, as you’d expect from Greg Pak and Fred van Lente. \u00a0But the second half in particular feels extremely rushed, as if the thing was meant to play out over two separate 6-issue arcs. \u00a0The art also shows signs of backstage chaos. \u00a0Parts 1 and 2 are by Yildiray Cinar, whose work is perhaps a little soft-focus for the tone of this book, but does well with the more impish moments given to Sabretooth and Domino. \u00a0Then the remaining issues are drawn by Luca Pizzari, who’s more of a nineties artist – perhaps suitably for the cast. \u00a0Except he’s joined by one extra artist on part five, and three on part six, so the deadlines must have been pressing. \u00a0Ultimately, the art gets above the threshold of competent but doesn’t feel like it reaches its full potential.<\/p>\n

This is a weird and somewhat disappointing way for the series to go out; since it’s primarily a Sabretooth story, it doesn’t work as a finale for the team, and doesn’t really feel like a good choice to open the new direction. \u00a0Deathstrike and Omega Red have basically nothing to do in this arc, and even Domino’s role is largely confined to lightening the tone. \u00a0I’m not sad to see the end of the last remnants of\u00a0Axis<\/em>, but there could have been more mileage in Sabretooth coming to terms with the fact that his pre-inversion career is essentially un-atoneable.<\/p>\n

But mainly, this reads like a case of cancellation leading the story to switch to rushed resolution mode halfway through. \u00a0Perhaps if it had been done at more length, the rest of the regular cast would have had more to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Weapon X\u00a0was quietly cancelled through the age-old technique of just not soliciting any more issues; the final issue has no farewell message, at least not in the digital version, but simply the word “End” in the corner of the final panel. \u00a0And this final arc, which introduces a new team line-up under the “Weapon X-Force” […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4450","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\/4450","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=4450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4451,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450\/revisions\/4451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}