Weapon X wraps up "War of the Programs" with issue #25.  Mind you, saying that perhaps gives an undue impression of closure.

Although Weapon X tends to work in fairly short arcs, with three or four issues becoming the norm, and it does steer clear of undue decompression, it would be a little misleading to infer that anything really gets resolved at the end of any of these arcs.  This turns out to be another "conclusion" which doesn't really conclude anything, so much as lead into the next act.

There's nothing wrong with that - it worked perfectly well on New X-Men, for example - but labelling the stories in that way does give the impression that you're actually heading for a resolution of some sort, and makes it a little annoying when you end up with a plot advancement instead.

What actually happens this issue, basically, is that the Weapon Plus programme lure Wolverine, Fantomex and Agent Zero to the site of an old Weapon X test, and deliver some exposition.  Apparently the Weapon X team have "gone underground", though that still doesn't really explain what happened to all of their staff and the inmates of Neverland - something I'd rather assumed this arc was getting round to in due course.  Weapon Plus thinks that one of the three is in the pocket of Weapon X and so, having fulfilled arch-villain obligations by delivering some exposition, the baddies send in the soldiers to kill everyone.  Big fight, the heroes escape.

Okay for what it is, but it doesn't really take us much further forward.  The main achievement of this arc has been to straighten out the needlessly complicated interrelationship between Weapon X and Weapon Plus, and to tie up a dangling plot thread from New X-Men (what did Wolverine see in the Weapon Plus files?).  But we don't seem to be that much closer to resolving the cliffhanger from four months ago, and most of the supposed major characters haven't been seen in ages.

Even though Weapon X isn't a series that goes in for decompression, Frank Tieri often seems to have struggled to juggle the various subplots for all his characters.  People have a tendency to go AWOL for months at a time in this book, giving individual arcs a stop-start feel.  With the title presently overrun by guest stars to the (literal) exclusion of most of the regular cast, there's a definite danger of momentum being lost elsewhere.

Rating: B-

back | continue