Inglorious X-Force #10
"Past, Present... and Future!"
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Michael Sta. Maria
Colorist: Romulo Fajardo Jr.
Cover Artist: R.B. Silva and David Curiel
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Cable's possessor, a creature named Catharsix, has taken control of his body and traveled to the future so that it can assassinate President Kamala Khan. Fortunately, Kamala's younger self and the rest of X-Force have also come to the future, in order to stop the creature and save their leader...
Then and Now and Then
No longer needing to hide, Catharsix has fully taken over Cable's body and attempts to kill President Khan. X-Force arrives on the scene to stop it, but the creature uses Cable's powers and familiarity with the team to break them apart. He turns Archangel and Hellverine on each other, traps Boom-Boom in bad memories, and makes Ms. Marvel face whether she truly belongs on a team like X-Force.
Fortunately, a final message from a departed friend helps snap everyone back to their senses, and the team puts up a united front against their leader. Will it be enough to save Cable? And what happens when the full extent of Catharsix's manipulations is revealed?
Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal
And so ends Inglorious X-Force, soon to be replaced by Fugitive X-Force. This ten-issue run as a whole has been an excellent 90s-style X-book, even if this last issue in particular has a few flaws.
The series comes full circle this issue with the attempted assassination of President Kamala Khan. Only this time, we now know that the would-be assassin is Cable himself, and that he ultimately formed this X-Force team because they had already faced him in the future. Time travel, folks!
For a team that seemed so randomly put together in the beginning, this iteration of X-Force has turned into a real cohesive unit. I've been pleasantly surprised by how well the team worked, and how strong the character work has been. I thought the love triangle between Boom-Boom, Hellverine, and Archangel was stupid, but this issue seems to move us past that. Actually, Hellverine is probably the breakout character of this team for me—I was never really a fan of Akihiro in his previous incarnations, but his presence on this team has done some really great work in making him more likeable and sympathetic.
The character who gets it the worst here is Cable himself. Now, Cable is a man with a complicated history that spans the future, the past, and the present all at the same time. I'm a little unclear just how long he's been infected with Catharsix—this issue says that he got infected with it while trying to bring back his wife, which was in his past that's really the future but was a long time ago for us readers. So has he been infected throughout most of the time we've been reading about him, or did he somehow get infected later, more recently? Again, time travel, folks!
Either way, seeing the team come together and overcome their issues to try to save their leader is a great payoff to everything that’s happened in this series. No longer just a bunch of people thrown together, X-Force has become a true team.
Then the other shoe drops… Stop and put on your parachute pants; it’s Hammer—I mean, Spoiler time:
Throughout the series, on each of their missions, Cable has always done something extra—usually in secret. After the team returns to the present and tries to take a breather at one of Archangel’s safehouses, they learn that Catharsix used all the things it gathered from their past missions to commit mass murder—and to frame X-Force for it…
I know that the issue literally spells out how all the things from past missions were used to do this, but I really felt this ending was too abrupt and out of nowhere. It just didn’t feel earned—it felt more like the series was intended to end with this issue, then Marvel gave it a stay of execution, so the ending needed to be changed so things could keep going. After an issue that brought the series full circle so well, this ending was a bit of a letdown. It’s not going to stop me from continuing the story into Fugitive X-Force, but I still think it could have been done better.
Come Together
Tim Seeley pays off everything he’s set up over the course of this series, pitting Cable against the team he formed in order to stop himself. The character work here is strong, with the team coming together to save the future. The time travel stuff is a little confusing and doesn’t totally add up to me, but that’s pretty much par for the course with these kinds of things. As I said above, the ending is out of nowhere, so I do think Seeley dropped the ball a bit there.
Michael Sta. Maria has been the primary artist for much of this series, and I’ve generally enjoyed his work. That said, this issue seems a bit messier and unfinished than his normal efforts, so I wonder if deadlines got the better of him this time around. Interestingly, the early pages are less detailed than the later ones, so the artwork gets much stronger once the action really begins.
Romulo Fajardo Jr. seems like one of the busiest colorists in comics today—I swear I see his name on all kinds of books. His work is very consistent, and even when a title changes artists fairly regularly like this one has, his colors give the title a more uniform "look." He turns in another solid job here, although the closing scenes seem much darker than the rest of the issue for some reason. There are plenty of bullets and power effects flying all over the earlier scenes, and he keeps everything looking interesting and exciting.
Full Circle
Inglorious X-Force #10 closes out this volume with a final showdown in the future against the team's creator, Cable (you have to love time travel stuff). The team truly comes together as one and works together to save their leader. The ending to this issue unfortunately seems to come out of nowhere, so that does put a damper on the proceedings—but not enough to diminish excitement for the continuation of this team's adventures in the forthcoming Fugitive X-Force.