X-Force #40
Kid Omega’s return brings the team a new mission in X-Force #40, by writer Benjamin Percy, artists Robert Gill and Paul Davidson, colorist GURU-eFX, and letterer Joe Caramagna. This issue takes X-Force into their most superhero adventure yet.
Kid Omega talks to the team and grabs the field unit - Wolverine, Colossus, Sage, Omega Red, Deadpool, and Domino - and pulls them into the portal he came through. They appear in a blasted future and are soon attacked by Beast-headed octopi. They defeat them and hide out, where Kid Omega introduces them to the resistance in this future, including Wolverine’s head inside a robot body. They go out to find Omega Red, and Omega fills them in on why things are like this - Beast destroyed everything and became the God of Mutants. The team rescue Omega Red and kill Beast, but they learn that they have to keep going through the timeline, killing earlier and earlier versions of Beast to truly save the day.
Percy has done great with the black ops tales and the way it affects the morality of the team. So, having mastered that, he takes things in a more superhero-ish, X-Men direction. A time travel story to a dystopian future where the X-Men’s enemies have won is the kind of story that X-Force has been missing since it started.
Percy does a great job of laying everything out in this issue. From the fun of the issue’s opening scene, where everyone sasses everyone, to the change in tone once the story hits the future, everything about this issue works. The way Percy turns the formula of this kind of story on its ear is fun too. Readers are used to going back in time to stop an enemy, not traveling from the future and going backwards. It’s an intriguing way to subvert this trope and makes this story more than just a classic superhero/X-Men story. It’ll be interesting to see how he finishes out this plot and why things have to be this way.
Gill does the first four pages, and they’re wonderful. Davidson takes over the book and also does an excellent job. His style isn’t drastically different from Gill’s, so it’s not a tonal shift. The Beast octopi look cool, but could look cooler. The action scenes are crisp and detailed, and the Wolverine robot looks awesome. It’s not meant to be intimidating and works with the joke that Wolverine is in this future. GURU-eFX’s colors are amazing, but that’s to be expected at this point.
X-Force #40 kicks off a new story for this book in the best way possible. Percy takes a standard dystopian future story and throws a curveball into the mix, which is pretty great. All in all, this is a fantastic read that’ll hook readers immediately.
