I’ve been going back and forth on how I feel about ‘Uncanny X-Force’ and the last issue left me feeling the same way. There still isn’t a real team and while they have a couple things to follow up with, the series hasn’t had a solid direction to run.
I felt that this issue finally gave us a some direction and we saw what could be the start of a team emerging, but due to the catastrophe and the plans of the main villain, the team still aren’t all on the same page.
At any rate, we open with Psylocke returning after having dealt with Fantomex in the last few issues. It felt like a tiresome add on to the series that ended far too abruptly without details on the closure of an arc that they never gave us a reason to care about in the first place. Will Fantomex be back in the near future? Did Fantomex go from 2 bodies to 1? What happened to his evil side? I don’t know! Also, I’m not sure if I care, aside from the fact that they will most likely end up back in this story arc. Speaking of the arc, we’re back to the original story line with Bishop’s Revenant Queen getting ready to attack.
What happens when she does? Apparently every human (and mutant) has a demonic revenant side trying to get out into our reality. They hate us from being forced to watch from the outside looking in and this Queen has a way to bring them back into our reality. She sends a few of them to attack our STILL forming Uncanny X-Force and the team is quickly overwhelmed.
Finally we’re given an idea of what the revenants are and how they work after it’s been teased throughout the story so far with no solid details.
The Queen uses each of the member’s fears and weaknesses to bring out their revenants while Bishop escapes. He ends up being the only member here left loose (unless you count Spiral or Fantomex who aren’t in this issue) and it’s up to him to save his teammates and the day.
While I’m happy to finally see this comic return to the world of interesting, I felt it took most of the issue to get to that point. Also now that we finally have a real villain for this group to go after it’s no longer a group and just crazy old Bishop on his own to save them. He’s not only on his own from a team stand point, but from the entire world as well since most people still freshly associate him with the man who tried to kill Hope.
I still have a huge reservation that there is no team feeling to this team book. I’m also still convinced that somehow we should know who this Queen is, though I’ve started to doubt all of my theories to date. Still, it’s at least starting to pick up the interesting threads of a plot again so I’ll keep up with it for at least a little longer.
UNCANNY X-FORCE #10
Writer: Samuel Ryan Humphries
Artist: Dexter Soy
