With Wolverine disbanding his little black ops squad of X-Force, there was room for a new one to be formed. While Cable might have formed his own to work with, there was a group of X-Men who were in charge of taking care of problems for the mutants on the whole. Storm was leading them and after the AvX storyline it was broken after all of the internal struggle in the team. Now a new X-Force appears to be forming. With Psylocke not being comfortable being on a normal team, Storm needing a break from the X-Men, and Puck back from the dead, we have a group investigating a problem for Wolverine. This isn’t a black ops mission its him asking for help for his old Canadian pal Puck.

It appears Puck is investigating a new drug epidemic. This epidemic is apparently the work of Psylocke’s ‘best friend’ Spiral. As Spiral is the only person who she would probably kill on site the team is immediately thrown into a fight to the death. Everything isn’t always as it seems though as Spiral is harboring a young girl who is also a mutant. A mutant whose mind controlling all of the young adults in the area to stop Psylocke by all means necessarily.

As the battle rages on one has to ask where the plot is going. Yes we’ve got a solid cast of characters on screen but there isn’t exactly a team in place. Let’s pause from the action so far to zero in on a few of our other potential members.

Fantomex and Cluster are out having a date and while things are going great for them Cluster mentions she misses Psylocke. If she misses Psylocke, even if Fantomex claims he doesn’t, there’s a good chance his other personality does as well. She quickly convinces him they have to go keep her safe and we zoom out of their lives for another issue.

Isn’t Bishop supposed to be in this comic as well? As we go back to the action Bishop roars on the scene. Literally he roars as Psylocke asks the question “Bishop?! Is that really you? Did you just growl at us?

Very quickly we learn Bishop isn’t quite who he used to be (not including the semi-crazy he had going on the last time we saw him.) It looks like he has some new powers and he even claims to no longer be Bishop. Maybe he does have some crazy going on still.

While I will always associate X-Force with Cable from the days he started it I have to say both the Wolverine incarnation has been my favorite with it’s Age of Apocalypse story line. That being said I love the potential character dynamic they can put into play with this one and the return of Bishop (one of my favorite characters) has me intrigued on where the story will go.

It didn’t hurt that the pages were beautifully illustrated and each character was rendered perfectly onto the page. I’m looking forward to some quality fight scenes in this one and hope the trend keeps up because visually this has had some great action so far and looks as if it will continue in that direction.

Writer: Samuel Ryan Humphries
Penciler: Ron Garney
Cover Artist: Olivier Coipel