Why I Just Dropped X-Force From My Pull List
Why I Just Dropped X-Force From My Pull List
Aug 28Over the past year, I’ve been nothing but unilaterally positive about the comics coming out of Marvel’s X-Office. “If you had told me that I’d be reading both X-Force and Cable and enjoying them a few years ago, I’d have laughed at you,” is a sentence I’ve uttered more than once. And while I’m still digging Uncanny and Cable quite a bit, I’m not the fan of Warren Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men that I should be and, while I love Mike Carey’s work, I hate Gambit, which makes me doubtful about whether or not I’ll stick with X-Men Legacy.
But what I really want to talk about right now is X-Force; my relationship with it is problematic. It’s a team made up of characters I like doing reprehensible things and, in doing so, painfully reminding me that character development is the largest, weightiest Sisyphan boulder in comics. It’s being written by a creative team that won me over after inheriting New X-Men from a team (Nunzio DeFilipis and Cristina Weir) that I was incredibly smitten with. The art by Mike Choi and Sonia Oback is phenomenal.
X-Force is, unarguably, the best written and best looking comic that features a sixteen year old girl being tortured with a chainsaw that is on stands today. That’s right, folks. X-23, the teenage girl clone of Wolverine, is being held captive and dismembered with a chainsaw.
Are you fucking kidding me?
For a book that is purportedly about a black ops X-Men team, the title has consistently been more invested in traumatizing X-23, a character that Yost and Kyle created. That’s downright fetishistic on a level that makes Chris Claremont’s obsession with Kitty Pryde/Storm/Psylocke seem tame and healthy.
Wow, that’s. . .yeah. Unfortunate.
For what it’s worth, it looks like they’re trying to morph ‘X-Men Legacy’ into something like New Mutants/Young X-Men used to be, with Rogue mentoring a young team. Gambit notwithstanding it might fill the nice.
Also, chainsaw-torturing teenagers puts my ‘technical problems with the point-of-view-choices in Fraction’s X-men’ complaint in perspective. I don’t always trust Matt Fraction’s comics to make sense, but I’m reasonably sure he’s not going to have Pixie’s arms cut off with a chainsaw.
Oh, God, yes.
I’ll say upfront that I’m still reading X-Force — my completionist instinct won’t let me not read it, and I love some of the characters (Scott, Logan, Warren) too much not to know about major parts of their continuity. But I’ve never paid for it; I’ve been borrowing from a similarly completionist friend since the series began, because I knew that some of Kyle and Yost’s favorite tropes drive me up a wall.
Here’s the thing: Kyle and Yost’s preoccupation with torturing children is all-encompassing and, frankly, disturbing on a number of levels. They’ve been doing it since they took over New X-Men, and X-23 is their worst victim, but certainly not the only, victim. If they can show a child getting tortured with a chainsaw, or having their skin or wings ripped off, or losing a portion of their soul, or dying in a bus explosion, they’ll do it, without hesitation.
But what bothers me MOST is when they wrench every other character out of anything resembling believable characterization in order to play their child-torturing games. I refuse to believe that Cyclops, a teacher who has seen first hand what happens when children in his care are brainwashed and tortured, would tell X-23 to go kill people when she’d been used as a weapon for her entire childhood. I refuse to believe that he would consistently put children in so much danger, without a thought — not as X-Men (he was a teenage X-Man himself, he understands that) but as a black ops kill squad.
It’s the same problem I had with the most recent X-23 mini, when Captain America was going to turn X-23 over to the government because the U.S. told him to. Cap is not the government’s lapdog — and even if he was, this was post-Winter Soldier. I’m pretty sure Captain America understands that when TEENAGERS are BRAINWASHED TO BE ASSASSINS against their will, they’re not ACTUALLY evil or even responsible for their actions. If you have him even start to believe that X-23 deserves to be punished no matter what, you’re not writing him with any regard to his character or history.
In conclusion: Kyle and Yost’s teenage torture porn fetish not only disturbs me, it’s also a sign of poor writing.
Jen, I’d be saying “You need to stop reading this!” except that I’m counting on you to tell me what happens.
See, I don’t know what the difference is here, but I liked Childhood’s End. I liked that it felt dangerous, that it had consequences that still resonate with me as a fan of the characters.
I think maybe I’ve answered my question; the difference is that what they’re doing to Laura is completely gratuitous and insubstantial.