By: Rick Remender (writer), Jerome Opena (art), Dean White (colors), Cory Petit (letters) & Jody Leheup (editor)
The Story: Archangel’s plan to usher in a new Age of _______ starts coming to fruition.
What’s good: Jerome Opena’s art is great and Dean White is doing a wonderful job with the color art. These pages are simply incredible. The combination of Opena’s detailed linework and White’s almost painted looking colors is a look that you see a lot of art teams shooting for, but failing to achieve. Really….there are few things in comic art worse than bad painted-looking art that is all stiff an lifeless. The Opena/White combo has verve and energy out the wazoo. I’d love to see a little more variety in the layouts from Opena, but that’s a minor quibble.
And, the story is pretty good too. I have a few beefs that I’ll get into below, but it has an epic feel. The biggest highlight for me are the characterizations. Love this grittier version of Psylocke, especially compared to the prissy waif that she was when we first met the character back in the 80’s. Love the use of Deadpool. Remender is showing how Deadpool can be a real character and not just a self-parody: he’s effective, but also strange, annoying and kinda off-putting. You can just imagine how Fantomex would feel being teamed up with Deadpool in this issue: both safe and annoyed at the same time. And, I really enjoy his Fantomex as being over-the-top in terms of subtle violence to the point where he kinda freaks out Wolverine and Deadpool. Even the Deathlock is entertaining.
What’s not so good: I’m confused as hell by this story. Some of that is just normal aging and the fact that I don’t retain information as well as I used to. But part of it is that this story feelings like it is rooted in the X-Men of the 90’s and early 2000’s, which was a time I was out of comics. I’ve gone back and read Age of Apocalypse and Morrison’s New X-Men, but just don’t have much affinity for those stories and didn’t find them to be that memorable outside of broad plot points. The trouble is that without that anchor, this current X-Force story has felt all over the place. I kinda get what is going on: They’re fighting Arch-Angel who is the new Apocalypse and he’s trying to do something with these Life Seeds and the World, but I really don’t understand what is going on.
And, that illustrates a problem with these long-ass stories. When you miss the story hook, you get left behind for a long time. I loved the first 4 issues of Uncanny X-Force, but haven’t really felt like I was included in the story since then.
Conclusion: Great art. I mean it…..GREAT art! The story is fun and well written, but is a bit of a frenzied jumble at this point and it needs to wrap up because I’m getting more confused with every passing issue.
Grade: B
– Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion