There are few things as relieving in modern comics as a tight, self-contained bottle issue. After a summer of sprawling events and their endless tie-ins (gotta read ‘em all for that complete story), having something in your pull list that packs a quick story in its 28 pages is a wonder.
X-Force #2 delivers that relief. Following a similarly contained first issue, #2 suggests that this will be a book that sticks to the episodic rather than endless cliffhangers. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given writer Geoffrey Thorne’s background in television.
With Forge’s new doomsday detection device, there is no better X-team for one-and-done mysteries. Not quite monster-of-the-week so much as cataclysm-a-month. This month sees our team sneaking into Wakanda, which is slowly and magically reverting to a pre-technological point in its history.
Marvel Comics
There is some bit of mystery to the issue as whatever occurs transforms the team’s power players, leaving only Forge and Sage in their right, scientific minds. This puts Sage at the forefront, problem-solving the impossible and otherwise hating her life.
With single-use stories, this single-character focus provides the space to establish and develop the characters, and while the book doesn’t do a lot for Sage except set her up for fresh readers, it does so perfectly: this is Sage at her bitter best. Limited by her own excellence, Sage’s brilliant brain initially struggles with the unscientific nature of magic – mathematics, she insists, but a strange mathematics.
Marvel Comics
The single-character focus limits the book’s action, leaving power players like Captain Britain and Askani mostly off-panel and nearly neglecting the mysterious newcomer Tank, altogether. That’s the trouble with the neat episodic structure: the larger developments and character beats will take back-seat to the conflict. Thankfully, the wonderful Marcus To illustrates our characters with such precision that they make an impact, even in the background.
Marvel Comics
Another sticking point is that Wakanda’s god-drum – the magical reality-warping device – doesn’t feel all that cataclysmic, even though we are told that it is. With all the action and conflict hinging on Sage, the larger impact of the reality warp cannot be seen to have cost our heroes – or Wakanda at large – anything at all. It takes the implication of true loss (as with the devastated population of a city, seen last issue) to sell a cataclysm; the conflict, here, is a slow burn.
X-Force #2 is as efficient and tidy as one could want from a bottle episode. Though that format comes with necessary limitations, the book is nonetheless a cozy relief in a pull list cluttered with multi-part, multi-title crossovers.
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