Soldier X limps to a conclusion this week, as Karl Bollers ties up his fill-in arc and bolts on a segue to Weapon X.

In fact, the segue is a distinct problem here.  Bollers seems to have written a story intended to give the series a downbeat ending.  The idea is that Nathan and Magda, the mutant girl condemned to death, have a nice chat in which it turns out that Magda is innocent of murder.  But even after Nathan relieves her of her guilt hang-ups, she still wants to be executed, since escape would send the wrong message to humans.

All fair enough, as far as it goes, but Bollers overplays it a bit by having Nathan go off into six months (yes, the last two issues claim to span a period of some two years) of drunken depression as a result of all this.  For god's sake, look at the history of the man.  He's a veteran soldier.  I just don't buy him being that seriously affected by anything in this story.  I suppose the idea is that he was particularly affected because he was in telepathic contact with her at the moment of execution, but it doesn't really work.

Anyhow, Bollers seems to be aiming to set up a situation which justified Nathan withdrawing from his mission altogether, which would be understandable as a final story.  Unfortunately, he has to end the story by having Nathan dragged over to the cast of Weapon X, which makes it all seem a bit pointless.  There's some attempt to suggest that this is an experience which has changed Nathan and sent him back to the big-guns mode seen in Weapon X, but god alone knows why that's supposed to be happening. 

Bollers has been aiming high over the last few months of fill-in issues but hasn't quite hit the mark.  He's going to be writing the ongoing Emma Frost series shortly; hopefully things will click better on that book.

If the book hadn't been relaunched last year, this would have been Cable #119.  The book's been going since 1993, and  spluttering to a halt with four months of fill-in issues is not a very auspicious way for it to go out.  But then Cable is a series which will be remembered more for individual runs.  Robert Weinberg probably came closest to getting the book to work; the last couple of years deserve credit for trying something different, but really they've ended up showing that the character will only bend so far.  Not many people were interested in reading Igor Kordey's quirkily surreal take on the character; sending him back to his roots is probably not such a bad move.  But I don't hold out much hope for him to get a new lease of life over in Weapon X.

Rating: B-

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