{"id":7347,"date":"2021-11-27T20:50:30","date_gmt":"2021-11-27T20:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7347"},"modified":"2021-11-27T20:50:30","modified_gmt":"2021-11-27T20:50:30","slug":"x-force-killshot-anniversary-special-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7347","title":{"rendered":"X-Force: Killshot Anniversary Special #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-FORCE: KILLSHOT ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1<\/strong>
\nby Rob Liefeld, Chad Bowers, Bryan Valenza, Federico Blee & Mirza Wirawan<\/strong><\/p>\n

So this is a thing.<\/p>\n

Commemorating the 30th anniversary of\u00a0X-Force<\/em> #1, this is a 33-page one-shot written and drawn by Rob Liefeld – the other listed creators are the scripter and the colourist – which… does pretty much what you’d expect?<\/p>\n

Maybe not, actually. Liefeld sets up a perfectly decent premise for an anniversary one-shot. Cable is still fighting Stryfe through time and space, and for this mission he’s gathered an assortment of allies from across history, to take on Stryfe and his Mutant Liberation Front. There’s a passing mention that this version of the MLF is also from the past, or maybe an alternate timeline or… whatever, really. Not the same ones that are on Krakoa, which is the bit that actually matters.<\/p>\n

So we know how that sort of premise plays out in an anniversary oneshot, right? You use it to gather cast members from across 30 years of continuity, you team them up in a supersquad, you play the hits. And god bless him, for Liefeld loses sight of that point pretty quickly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The book opens with Cable explaining the plot while the art shows up close-ups of the team he’s assembled. And they\u00a0just keep coming<\/em>, for three straight pages, with variations on the same characters. It’s actually a cute gag. It’s a team of something like 30 people, but what it’s not is an X-Force team. The Thing is there. Major X is there (three times). Deadpool is there, four times, one of which is also Venom. In theory there’s a bit here about characters meeting at multiple points in their life, but nothing really happens with it.<\/p>\n

There’s a plot. Stryfe is about to activate a doomsday weapon. There’s a big fight, largely devoid of backgrounds. Stryfe gives a weird speech about how he’s trying to help Cable by wiping out the population of Earth, so that he’ll finally be freed of his burden of protecting them, then complains that Cable refuses to rule alongside him (er, rule who?), but Stryfe gets beaten up. His doomsday weapon can’t be cancelled, but Cable and Major X use techno-organics to shut it down. And then a weird negative-image version of Zero shows up to claim the bodies of Stryfe and Zero, which isn’t explained and never will be.<\/p>\n

So.<\/p>\n

It’s not good. But I’ve said before that Rob Liefeld is somewhat reviewproof, and a Rob Liefeld 30th anniversary issue is even more so. Who’s the audience for this? There’s completist masochists, of course, but we only have ourselves to blame. The real audience are presumably people who look back fondly on Rob Liefeld’s work at Marvel, circa 1990-1991.<\/p>\n

And that audience is not interested in the plot. It’s not all that interested in the characters. Neither of these things was front and centre the first time round. What Liefeld brought to the table thirty years ago was energy and exaggeration and a certain design sensibility and a somewhat\u00a0Axe Cop\u00a0<\/em>quality of making it up as he went along. And let’s be fair, there are plenty of elements from that work that turned out to be pretty enduring. Cable, Domino, Shatterstar, Deadpool… sure, they got massively fleshed out by later writers, but they’re still pretty much recognisable from their original creations. I still think the actual uniforms for early X-Force were a good piece of design. Several of the Mutant Liberation Front henchguys still show up pretty regularly, because they had a good look. A lot of Liefeld’s high concepts proved surprisingly workable over the years. People are still doing stories based on the original, “distorted entertainment culture” premise of Shatterstar. Who’d have predicted that in 1991?<\/p>\n

The point being, anyone who is actually in the market for an\u00a0X-Force<\/em> 30th anniversary special is probably more interested in whether it strikes the tone or not. And… kind of? It’s nonsense, and I don’t think you can get away with setting up a dangler in an issue like this (though to be fair, Liefeld does take the opportunity to revisit Major X, so maybe he\u00a0will<\/em> come back to this in a later story). There’s some energy. There’s some very Liefeld panels. It doesn’t deliver an X-Force reunion, but if you were expecting a Rob Liefeld anniversary special then sure, it pretty much provides that.<\/p>\n

It is what it is – which feels pretty niche in this day and age. But it delivers what it promises, for better or worse. Well, except for the bit where X-Force aren’t in it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-FORCE: KILLSHOT ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1 by Rob Liefeld, Chad Bowers, Bryan Valenza, Federico Blee & Mirza Wirawan So this is a thing. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of\u00a0X-Force #1, this is a 33-page one-shot written and drawn by Rob Liefeld – the other listed creators are the scripter and the colourist – which… does pretty much […]<\/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-7347","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\/7347","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=7347"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7356,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7347\/revisions\/7356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}