Weapon X is kind of participating in Reload, although it's hard to put my finger on precisely how.  We have the same writer, and we're picking up the plot from where we left off two months ago.  But they're bringing out Wolverine and Fantomex as high profile guest stars, and we do have a new artist in the form of Tom Mandrake.

I've always been a little ambivolent about Mandrake's work - clearly a talented artist, but I've always found his work a little dark for my tastes.  However, this time there's a change of approach.  They've dispensed with the services of an inker, and Mandrake's art is being shot directly from pencils.  I think it's an enormous improvement.  It brings out subtleties in his shading that didn't come across before, and generally brings a bit more life to the work.

Granted, it veers into horror cliche from time to time - notably a graveyard full of off-kilter tombstones and twisted trees.  But on the whole, I find myself enjoying the art a lot more than I was expecting to.

As for the story, you'll remember that two issues ago we left off with Wolverine and Agent Zero arriving at Neverland and Weapon X HQ only to find them both deserted.  Last issue was a detour to fill us in on Malcolm Colcord, and this issue is... also a bit of a detour, since we only get back to the plot right at the end.

Instead, most of the issue is given over to flashback material laying out the history of the Weapon X Project and how it interacts with the Weapon Plus material from New X-Men.  It's the sort of thing that tends to divide audiences - often, these sort of extended recaps feel like gratuitous wallowing in continuity.  In this case, though, there's a stronger argument for doing it.  Much as I loved Morrison's work on New X-Men, it certainly threw Weapon X continuity into an awful lot of confusion.  The plus side is that it also gave Tieri some new material to play off, but first, somebody has to make sense of it for the benefit of new readers.

So Tieri sets out a history of the Weapon X Project, in both its incarnations, and how exactly it fitted in with the Weapon Plus programmes - something Morrison had left frustratingly vague.  Yes, it's predominantly an exercise in unscrambling continuity.  But there was a genuine need to unscramble this stuff, as well as to explain it for the benefit of Weapon X readers, so fair enough.  (The decision to pursue this material also explains why Sublime was used as a villain for the "Defection" arc, something which seemed like a very odd choice at the time.)

The point is to set up a feud between Sublime's Weapon Plus programmes and the breakaway Weapon X project, and it's reasonably effective at that.  Colcord is played too melodramatically, and there's a horribly contrived scene where he just so happens to be wandering through the park in time to stumble upon Brent Jackson in action.  I'm also less than sold on the characterisation of Sublime, a conceptually difficult character to start with, who comes across as a one-dimensional bad guy.  To be honest, I'm not at all convinced that Sublime is a good choice of villain for the book, when he seems entirely at odds with its tone.  But Tieri's pretty much saddled with him as a result of the Morrison run, I guess.

Overall, though, the issue does a fairly effective job of ironing out the kinks from what had previously been an excessively difficult area of continuity.

Rating: B

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