It's one of those weeks when there's lots of books out, but I haven't had time to read most of them.  Fortunately, only two of them are X-books, and they're both in mid-storyline anyway.  So let's start off with X-Force, another recently-launched title still in its first storyline.

X-Force, X-Force, X-Force.  What a frustrating comic.

Craig Kyle and Chris Yost have written some good stories in the past.  I thought their X-23 miniseries were pretty successful, and an interesting exploration of a character so thoroughly screwed up that there might not be any "real" personality left beneath it all.  On paper, X-Force goes into similar territory. 

They're a black ops team on the fringes of the X-Men, made up of characters who are willing to do that sort of job, but have differing attitudes towards it.  Warpath's wary of being sucked in; Wolfsbane's doing it for revenge; and Wolverine's trying to stop his young charges from turning into somebody like him.  None of this is spectacularly original, but it's not a bad premise for a spin-off book.  You can do something with it.

But the resulting book isn't really working, and isn't much fun.  The opening six-issue arc is all about X-Force hunting down the Purifiers, the religious maniacs who used to follow Reverend Stryker around.  With Stryker dead, his protege Matthew Risman has managed to replace him with Bastion, only to find out that Bastion is too mad even for his tastes.  So, you've got a civil war within the Purifiers, X-Force trying to take the organisation down, and a subplot about Risman's group cutting off Warren's wings and triggering a change back to his Archangel look.

It's the sort of storyline they might have done in the 1990s.  But in the nineties, it would have been full of people in bright costumes carrying stupidly enormous guns.  It would have been melodramatic, over the top, shiny, and a little bit aware of its own silliness. 

Instead, we have everyone in muted clothes, a story that takes itself desperately seriously, and a clumsy mismatch between the absurdity of the plot and the earnestness of the delivery.  The book carries itself like a solemn drama - and it's a story about mad Christian zealots breeding a gun-toting choir with metal wings, for heaven's sake.  Perhaps the writers were going for deadpan black comedy, but there's no hint of it in Clayton Crain's sternly murky art.  You couldn't even call it atmospheric - there are too many cut-and-paste crowd scenes for that.

The story seems to want us to accept Matthew Risman as a noble but misguided villain, who acts with the best of intentions and draws the line at Bastion's scorched earth tactics.  This doesn't work, because the Purifiers have never been anything more than one-note crazies, and we've never been given any reason to buy into Risman as anything more than that.  They have an agenda (kill every mutant in sight) coupled with a motivation (religious belief), but that's not enough to make them interesting characters.

But the main problem with this book is that it's so joyless.  Ironically, if the creators were willing to camp it up a bit more and embrace the silliness of their story, I might come along for the ride, and actually get into it enough to care about the character moments.  As it is, I just can't take it seriously.

Rating: C-

back | continue