Written by Rick Remender
Penciled by Billy TanA nuclear facility has been infiltrated and taken over by the Shadow King! With nuclear missiles now aimed at both Utopia and New York, the lives of Earth’s heroes hang in the balance. X-Force heads into action, but to save the world, they must make a terrible choice. In order to prevent a nuclear holocaust, Wolverine and his team must kill every last person working in the facility. X-Force can save the day, but at what cost?
You know, I was excited about doing this one until I saw that it was a Psylocke spotlight issue. Really! Nothing against Psylocke, but as a character she’s become such a convoluted, self-referential mess that putting her backstory at the fore gives any comic book a more than fair chance of turning into a hideous car wreck. So do Rick Remender and Billy Tan pull it off? Let’s talk about it after the jump.
Well, the truth is, it’s only a little bit of a car wreck, and not a hideous one. I know I said above that this was a Psylocke spotlight, but I’m not entirely sure how true that was. I mean, it does give her the most character development, arguably — or, at least, that’s her sucking up the most panel time. Yet Archangel probably has the most nakedly dramatic, biggest moments. The action, meanwhile, is mostly a showcase for Fantomex. The spotlight is split three ways, and I’m not sure if this is by design or what; after a few re-reads, what it feels like is an issue that started as a codification of Psylocke’s status quo as an X-Forcer and ended up finding that so dull that the others had to come in and pep it up. I could be entirely wrong, and I strongly doubt that that sort of developmental path was intended, but holy hell, that’s what it reads like.
Uncanny X-Force took a roster riddled with negatives — overexposure, continuity casualties, lack of coherent motivations — and flexed them into positives by giving each character a distinct and defined role within the greater team structure. Wolverine’s the leader. Deadpool’s the wacky comic relief; Fantomex is the witty comic relief. Most interestingly used are the two characters who seemed most unworkable. Archangel is a man who’s crossed over the line and is struggling to find a way back, while Psylocke hovers at its edge, unsure whether or not she can cross, when it increasingly seems like she must. Archangel’s the lapsed Catholic seeking redemption, and Psylocke is the questioning one who’s not sure redemption will ever come. That dynamic is fascinating enough to drive a book on its own. Here, though, it has a big chance to come to the fore, and while the leap is graceful, the landing is a big fat flailing belly flop.
Speaking of fat bellies, in this issue we’re treated to the return of the Shadow King. Aside from being the most corpulent X-Men villain this side of the Blob, the Shadow King’s whole gig is mind control on a massive scale — he swoops into communities, takes control of everyone like an airborne virus, then… well, usually things fall apart around there. Here, he’s taken over a nuclear storage facility, apparently just to smoke out Psylocke and goad her into a confrontation. If this had been set up as a subplot over a longer period, then we could get a sense of credible danger, and a sense of the enormity of the antagonistic relationship between hero and villain — at one point, as this issue notes, Psylocke spent years using part of her mind as a psychic prison to contain the King. As a done-in-one story, though, it just kind of breezes into a showdown: “Oh no! The Shadow King’s taken a nuke hostage — sound the X-Alarm!” all before the first commercial break.
The thing is, rushing through Psylocke’s showdown (in theory) with an old enemy just kind of draws attention to how vacuous and unsatisfying most Psylocke spotlights are. It seems like there’s no way to sketch her out these days without resorting to some variation on this plotline: Betsy is rendered defenseless, helpless, or otherwise incapacitated due to the machinations of some enemy who has either conceptual or direct ties to her; she is forced to confront the duality that separates her “English lady of the Manor” and “Shogun Assassin” personas in some highly representative battle that occurs on the psychic plane; in the end, Betsy wins, and loudly exclaims to the universe, “I’m me, whoever that is!” Here, we get about two-thirds of the way through before the entire structure just caves inward and another character entirely steals the climax. On the one hand, we’re left without a satisfying conclusion to Betsy’s trajectory, and on the other, the other character getting the big moment seems rushed and abrupt. It just comes across as confused, which is a pretty dismal quality to have in a single-issue story, and even moreso in a book that’s capable of so much more.
I have kind of a love-apathy thing going on with Rick Remender. Sometimes, like on his buried-treasure thing with Kieron Dwyer, Black Heart Billy (or on the first arc of Uncanny X-Force), I’m behind him a hundred percent. Other times, like on Strange Girl, I just find myself staring listlessly and moving on with my life, committing nothing to memory. This issue represents that latter half of my reaction to Remender, and after an absolutely killer (ha!) first arc and a pretty good second one, the let-down this issue of X-Force represents feels that much sharper (ha!). The art could have given nuance — or at least atmosphere — to what comes off as a backfired script, but our fill-in this month is Billy Tan. While Tan has gotten much better with action in the past couple years, his characters’ acting is either jerkily overexpressive, or stiffly bored. He sells the fighting, but not the emotional core, except perhaps for Archangel, who really is nothing but sulky and psychotic, alternating.
So, eight point one issues in, we get Uncanny X-Force‘s first real misfire. It won’t kill the book, or derail its overarching plotline in any way that I can see, but it does complicate the picture by showing that maybe Remender’s “fixes” for his more broken characters are just the same old, same old. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t have more tricks up his sleeve, but what characters like Psylocke need are genuine magic, not Gob Bluth’s Aztec Tomb.
Final Verdict: 5.5 / Browse, but not too much
