To all intents and purposes, issue #8 is the final issue of Soldier X.  It actually rumbles on for another four issues with a completely different creative team before being formally axed, at which point the lead character is being shunted to the living hell of Weapon X.  But the remaining four fill-in issues are curios; this is the end of the Macan/Kordey run, and to all intents and purposes, this is it.

The traditional way of rounding off a truncated run is for the creators to produce a crammed issue of fastforwarded plot that attempts to resolve everything in twenty-two pages.  Macan and Kordey ignore that template entirely.  Issue #8 is an epilogue to a story we never saw and never will, showing what happened to the Askani teaching by 4006.  And no, aside from some cryptic flashbacks, none of the regular cast are in it.

But Macan and Kordey's run has been about nudging Nathan in the direction of a new Askani philosophy, to be the basis of his life now that Apocalypse was out of the way.  And in a roundabout way, this issue does resolve that theme, even if we don't really find out how things got to the point we see here.  By this time, the Askani are a group of pacifists who have mental powers but don't use them.  They wander around healing and defusing conflicts by inviting other people to beat them up instead.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm far from convinced that it's an approach to life that would ever lead to the Askani being regarded as anything more than lunatics.  That's acknowledged in the story title, of course, and plenty of people in the story do seem to regard the Askani as irritating nutcases.  But Macan does seem to be inviting us to accept that warring factions will have a epiphany and head home for a nice cup of tea when confronted with a sacrificial pacifist, and that strains credibility too far.  I don't buy that as human behaviour.  Yes, it's a symbolic illustration of the idiocy of warfare, but it's not as if there haven't been plenty of literal illustrations in the past, and they never seemed to persuade people for long.

It's a nice attempt at selling us on a fundamentally implausible idea, nonetheless.  The story does work as a short, effective coming of age story, and confirms my impression that Macan is better at writing single-issue stories.  And the issue looks great.  It seems Kordey's art is now being shot directly from pencils, and the resulting softer look suits him well.  A fabulous sun-drenched colouring job from Matt Madden is also attractive.  Unpersuasive as the central idea may be, it still manages to feel like a resolution of sorts.

Even though I'm not convinced by the direction Macan and Kordey were trying to go in, I applaud the effort to do something different with the character.  I have a feeling I'm not going to like what's in store for him now.

Rating: B+

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