The other concluding miniseries for the week is Weapon X: Days of Future Now, after five very odd issues.

For those who may have forgotten, Frank Tieri's Weapon X miniseries was cancelled in mid storyline, a decision which was difficult to justify.  This miniseries was, in principle, supposed to give the series a resolution.  And in a way it does, but not in the way you would probably expect.

Instead of simply resolving the outstanding plots, Tieri largely swept them aside and concentrated on the big picture.  Aside from the first issue, the whole series is set in an alternate future, as Wolverine and the Weapon X Director continue to feud for years to come.  All of this leads to yet another iteration of Days of Future Past while, in the proud tradition of alternate reality stories, various characters drop dead along the way.

In this final issue, Wolverine leads the surviving X-Men and some dissident Weapon X characters in an attempt to alter history - the big idea being to use Rachel Summers to travel back in time and stop Wolverine from maiming the Director in the first place, thus removing his motivation and cancelling out everything related to Weapon X.  This actually makes a degree of sense, except for the fact that it obviously can't work because it would entail a massive rewriting of continuity.

So we have a big twist finish.  Just as the future Wolverine has averted disaster, Sublime pops up, possesses Wolverine, and makes sure that he maims the Director after all.  History proceeds along its natural course, with everyone dead and defeated. 

It is, to say the least, a rather downbeat ending.  These things are difficult to pull off because they beg the question of whether anything of consequence was achieved during the story.  In a sense, obviously, that's the point - that Wolverine and the Director have been locked in a wholly futile battle for decades, and the only winners are the vultures like Sublime.  But it doesn't really work, since the failure doesn't stem from the protagonists' errors - they just get blindsided by Sublime when they seem to have everything worked out.  (It also creates a time loop for Sublime which makes absolutely no sense, but that's another matter.)

Anyone who was looking for this series to resolve the storylines of individual characters will have been disappointed, since it's entirely directed to the wider battle.  And even on that level, the payoff doesn't really satisfy - and although that's partly intentional, nor does it effectively dramatise the ironic message that Tieri seems to be going for.

And yet... for all that the book doesn't really work, on some level I've got to admire Tieri's nerve in writing such a dementedly odd storyline to resolve his series.  If nothing else, it was at least ambitious, and made a determined effort to avoid taking the easy or obvious routes.  An extremely strange comic, which at least deserves credit for trying something different.

Rating: C+

back | continue