Oh god, let's not.  X-Force #2.

The first issue wasn't entirely as horrible as I'd feared.  Having softened us up, Liefeld now hits us with something altogether down to the usual standards.  You may remember that last month, Cable, Domino and Shatterstar knew that a mutant-hunting thingie called the Skornn was coming back, and they got hold of a magic sword which could kill it.  This was at least marginally comprehensible.

This issue, we pick up with Cannonball on his farm, where he's approached by the time-travelling Jon Spectre.  Spectre proceeds to regale Cannonball with a seemingly irrelevant anecdote about a time he saw Cable at a public meeting as a child.  Meanwhile, X-Force (who got back together off panel) watch all of this on monitors of some sort, and decide to go off and fight Spectre, for reasons that are not entirely clear.  And god only knows what any of this has to do with the Skornn.

So to the extent that the first issue at least had a comprehensible plot, the issue is already spinning off the rails.

Much of the issue is the product of Liefeld's waste-not-want-not approach to rejected material.  Spectre's seemingly irrelevant anecdote has the delightful consequence of allowing Liefeld to offload ten unpublished pages from his aborted Cable: First Contact miniseries (including, hilariously, the gatefold cover).  There is no sign of the public gallery which Spectre claims to have been in, and one tends to suspect that this is because the art was originally intended for a different scene altogether.  Would it have killed Liefeld to insert a couple of panels showing this alleged audience?  Apparently so.

To be fair, the art - apparently the product of Liefeld's dalliance with painting - is actually an improvement on his usual stuff.  It's just that it's blatantly be spliced into the story to re-use old material, pacing and logic be damned.

You've got to laugh, really.  Utterly horrible.

Rating: D

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