Wednesday, May 26, 2010

X-Force #27 Review

X-Force #27
Writers: Chris Yost and Craig Kyle
Artist: Mike Choi
The first 12 pages of this issue are all about the fight scene between the X-Men and the Nimrods. There's no word bubbles, it's all up on Mike Choi and his ability to convey the intensity of a battle; which he does exceedingly well.

The important moments of the battle scene are this: Psylocke rips a Nimrod in half with her telekinesis (You go, girl!), Hellion gets his hands and part of a forearm shot off (seen in the preview pages [Here]), and Hisako gets her ass beat. One thing that bothered me is Rogue gets one of her absorbed wings ripped out again, and I get the effect of her losing something is good for contributing to the seriousness of the fight, but why the hell doesn't she just fly with Betsy's telekinesis rather than make herself vulnerable by making more of herself that could get hurt?
What bothered me loads more was apparently Iceman got third degree burns. Except it's been established so many times that Bobby's able to come back from just about anything nowadays, so I have trouble he can even be scratched these days.

Anyway, in the end we get a bleak page of the X-Men picking up their wounded, and then we turn to Bastion's force which now is Bastion, Graydon Creed, Trask, and whatever Nimrods they can pull from the future. So that's the villain head count right now.

Back at X-Central, the injured are being reviewed, and everyone's in a frightened mood. Which I can say that thanks to the resurrect-a-thons of the past 5 years that it doesn't mean shit to me. Because I know Nightcrawler will probably be back in two years. And there's a chance Karma's leg will be fixed sometime in the future. When dead doesn't mean dead, it's hard to tell a convincingly serious war story.

Anyway, the facts about the white sphere are in and apparently it links to the future. And the supply of Nimrods available to come through is over 170,000. Everyone's confidence starts to shake worse, and then Emma turns to Cyclops--->

Except Cyclops is Jim Jones here. He brought a bunch of vulnerable people to one place which is surrounded by ocean. Or more like Fraction attempted to convince us that an experienced leader like Cyclops would actually pull a suicidal stunt like this. Utopia's real name is Masada. Except at least Masada wasn't in the middle of the ocean.

Cyclops does come up with a plan though. He wants to send X-Force into the future with Cable's one last jump. And he wants Cypher to "speak the language" of the Nimrods to re-wire them. Remember when I said Cypher was going to become an Ink? Yeah, right about now. BTW, his tag is now "Cypher is Deus Ex Machina".

Oh by the way, Storm finally finds out about X-Force:

Um, no no no. Let's review what formerly marked the difference between Cyclops and Storm's leaderships.

Storm was all right with killing first, k?
I don't care that this was 20 years ago and she was under the influence of Inferno. This is just one of the examples I can pull out that shows Storm as the harder leader. Which was true up until we decided Scott needed to be "badass" like Wolverine because otherwise he's a lame character (which started post-Apocalypse possession).

Moving on, Cyclops hands out assignments like telling Rogue to get all the noncombatants into the Atlantean column underwater. And Betsy gets the most badass job of all:

Speed-telepathy while riding motorcycle? Ohhhh Betsy, it's no wonder why we love you.

Anyway, just as more Nimrods are coming out, the modified X-Force leaves to the future. Cyclops turns to Emma and whines about how he's killed X-Force because they have no way to get back. Really? Why say it like that, Yost and Kyle? Does anyone for a second think that Wolverine, X-23, and other well-liked or recently brought back to the X-Circle characters are really going to die? No. So just say they're screwed, and leave it at a place where we can be convinced. Conclusion: For all my complaints this issue, in the end it was a pretty decent issue considering my complains are more over consistent problems in the X-Universe rather than just this issue. This issue is actually probably one of the better issues of Second Coming.

3 comments:

GPROA said...

Maybe Storm and Cyclops' long talk is going to be Storm saying "I told you so! Congrats on growing a spine!" for ages.

FSaker said...

Are you sure that the person with Bastion and Trask is Graydon Creed and not Stephen Lang? From some spoilers from SC Revelations:Blind Science that I read, it seems that Kavita Rao killed Creed's people and that he was directly manipulating the X-Club's perceptions before that, so I'd assume that he was killed as well. Plus, Lang was never shown or mentioned as dead/destroyed.

As for the mission in the future, yeah, it's pretty obvious that most of the team will come back (unless Marvel decides that Wolverine's solo book will now take place in the future... but even then, he would be absent from the X-Men books, causing them to fall greatly in sells). But even if it wasn't, Cyclops didn't kill any of them; I'm pretty sure that Cable, Wolverine, X-23 and Archangel can survive in the DOFP timeline for years (although the same probably can't be said for Domino or Cypher, but both are expendable anyway).

Storm was never supportive of proactive killing, she just used to defend an opponent's killing in case of self-defense; as much as one can argue that X-Force is acting on self-defense of mutants, most of their actions fit better in the description of terrorism.

As for Rogue losing her wings (again), it seems she's not exactly a bright girl... (except when Carey writes her)

Mr. Hellfire said...

@Hasoon Here's hoping considering her kill streak starts all the way back with Calisto.

@FSaker My bad, haha, yeah you're right it is Lang. Sorry, all these guys just feel like the same villain reheated to me so I end up tripping up on who's who a lot.

And yeah, but the thing is that Storm has wrestled between having to kill more often it seems than Cyclops. I mean she's been willing to kill both Calisto and Marrow and the Marrow time she even licked the blood off the knife. Basically, while she wasn't for killing, she seemed the one closer to sanctioning a kill team than by-the-book Cyclops who's more steered towards Xavier's ideals.