Catching Up with the X-Men, Part 2

It's interesting that X-Force, once the most laughably unnecessary re-launches in X-Men history, has become surprisingly fertile ground for the franchise in the past five or six years. Beginning with the Craig Kyle and Chris Yost revamp of the team as a covert operations unit for the X-Men, X-Force has been a consistently good and interesting read. (I will exempt the X-Force: Sex and Violence series, which painfully included not-so-subtle scenes of Domino offering — and giving – oral sex to Wolverine.) 

Marvel Now! turns X-Force into a franchise with the franchise, splitting the idea into two books: Cable and X-Force and the second series of Uncanny X-Force.

Starting with Uncanny X-Force, the covert ops concept mostly continues here, though with a mostly new cast including Storm, Spiral, Cluster and Puck along with returning mainstay Psylocke. This is a pretty messed up bunch of characters, with Psylocke having serious issues with Spiral over that whole blinding and bionic eyes episode way way back somewhen in the character's Marvel UK days. And then Cluster is a clone of Fantomex — and is in some way romantically involved with him.

Writer Sam Humphries does a nice job keeping things fun and action packed, but what I liked the most was the dominant role for Storm. I've said before that the character has seemed frequently lost since Chris Claremont left the X-Men in 1991, but reading Humphries version, it's almost like she never left. I do have reservations about Puck, a character I always liked best when Byrne wrote him in the original Alpha Flight run. I really despised the ridiculous origin Bill Mantlo came up with for the character, where he sacrificed his full size body to keep a demon genie trapped inside himself. Mantlo's run on Alpha Flight remains atop my list of Most Destructive and Regrettable Runs.

But, I digress. I like that Humphries makes Puck fun again, but I'm seeing near enough "eh's" in his dialog. Also, I don't recall him ever being quite so cosmopolitan, or even being from Saskatchewan. I always thought he was from Toronto, but whatever.

Oh, and Bishop is in the book, too.

The art is very solid and nice looking, with the vastly underrated Ron Garney on the first batch and the last couple of issues by Adrian Alphona of Runaways fame. I also like the redesigns on the costumes, with Psylocke in particular getting a nice full-body redesign that finally gets her out of the purple bathing suit Jim Lee designed in 1990. Overall, this is an entertaining and solid book, although I wouldn't say it's setting the world on fire.

Cable and X-Force on the other hand reads more like a straight Cable book. That's not to say there's not good stuff going on with the other characters, especially Colossus, long one of my favorites. But the supporting cast, which includes Domino, Forge, Doctor Nemesis, Hope Summers and Boom Boom is pretty nondescript. Domino and Boom Boom never really stood out as especially interesting characters, while Forge has lacked direction since 1987's Fall of the Mutants and Doctor Nemesis has always seemed like a bad caricature of Warren Ellis, if Warren were a member of the X-Men. This book comes in second to Uncanny X-Force for me, saved in large part by the excellent artwork of Salvador Larocca, who has long been one of the better pencilers at Marvel.

Moving on to Wolverine, there's two new series here, including a new main Wolverine title by Paul Cornell and Alan Davis, and Savage Wolverine, which looks to be more of an anthology series in the mode of Legends of the Dark Knight. On Wolverine, Cornell and Davis do a solid job of telling a good Wolverine story in more of the superhero mode. Davis' art is always worth looking at. Cornell's story works mainly as an action piece, giving Wolverine some cool stuff to do like bring down an airplane before it hits Yankee Stadium. If we're going to have this many Wolverine comics, at least these are a bit of fun if not much else.

Frank Cho writes and draws the first five issues of Savage Wolverine, which feature Logan in the Savage Land with Shanna the She-Devil. That gives Cho a chance to draw what he is best known for — attractive, well-endowed women. The story is not bad, but it's definitely on the lighter side of Wolverine. A bit of humor is always welcome in comics as grim as the mutant books often are, I just wish the attempts weren't so clumsy and were a bit more, you know, funny. This is a lot of eye candy, and it's really nice looking eye candy, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Savage Wolverine #6 features a new creative team, this time writer Zeb Wells and artist Joe Madureira. As you might expect with Joe Mad back on an X-book, this feels like a nostalgia trip back to 1997 or so. I overall like Madureira's art, which is expressive and shows the influences of animation and video games. But there's a cartoonish quality to it that has always seemed at odds with the general grimness of its tone. Anyways, this so far features Wolverine teaming with Elektra and Spider-Man and the Kingpin's in there, too, along with some new characters. It's a fast-paced comic with lots of fun quips and cool posing and it's a reminder that not everything about 1990s superhero comics were bad.

The light — with that being a very relative term when it comes to X-comics — tone of the Wolverine books is interesting given the thing that made the character popular in the first place was his edgy elements and the promise of real violence. I don't think a Wolverine book needs to be graphic, necessarily, but nothing about the character really stands out or works the way it could without more serious elements. Wolverine was always all about pain — managing his own and inflicting it on others. He should always be a bit uncomfortable and out of place, and these tales are awfully safe. This is certainly nothing new in the way Marvel has managed the character, but with so much of the company's output reading very solid and entertaining these days, it's a shame they couldn't take a little bit more of a chance with these books.