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X-Force 2022 in Review! Where Krakoa Keeps Selling Out

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Credits: Ben Percy writes; Robert Gill draws; Guru-eFX colors; Joe Caramagna letters; Josh Cassara and Dean White kill the hell out of the covers, the only thing worthwhile here—all else is zombified compulsion

The last time I could give Mr. Percy’s Krakoan CIA title the benefit of the doubt was probably just before the Percy-helmed pseudo-event X Lives/X Deaths of Wolverine. Since then, both X-Force and Wolverine, but particularly the former and longer-running title, have taken embarrassing nose-dives.

I might check out the nearly finished, five-part “Beast Agenda” over in Wolverine once it’s all up on MU and report back here*. But after this mid-game report on X-Force, that’s it for me—until the true end, when we can all look back and marvel at Percy’s braided-narrative masterpiece, for the shaggiest of shaggy dogs that we already know it to be.

*Impressively, it’s Wolverine’s longest arc so far, consecutively, that is—guess that qualification is necessary! But the Danger and then Kraven debacles were each a waste of four whole issues, so my hopes aren’t up. Of course, “Beast Agenda” will segue into “Weapons of X,” about which Beast dropped a real heavy hint in an issue #31 data page that will titillate only the Percy diehards. These will likely prove to be a single “epic,” for what that’s worth.

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DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part V

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You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Picking up where we left off…

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Wolverine #24-25 in Review—Enemy of Himself!

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Credits: Ben Percy writes; Federico Vicentini draws; Frank D’Armata colors; Cory Petit letters; issue #25 backup story art by Greg Land, Juan Ferreyra and others; covers by Adam Kubert and Frank Martin Jr.

As ever, this little Ben Percy Wolverine arc shows us Logan’s continuing obsession with suffering. Not pain, as he would have us believe—because that, like pleasure and the sensation of hot and cold and so on, is transitory. And sure, that’s an easy thing to say when you don’t deal with it chronically, but we all know that is not and never has been the case with Wolverine*. The acute pains of violence fade very quickly for him. It’s the fixation on the wound, the role of the aggrieved sufferer, for which Logan has a passion that is literally undying.

(*The rare exceptions are very hard to recall out of his many thousands of tales in circulation.)

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Wolverine #20-23 in Review—Danger! Deadpool! Danger! Maverick! Danger!

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Credits: Ben Percy writes; Adam Kuberts draws covers & interiors; Frank Martin colors; Cory Petit letters

How Many Ways Can Percy Play the Faux Grimdark?

So, what did Wolvie get up to after, um, saving the time-stream or whatever in X Lives and X Deaths of Wolverine (Jan-Mar 2022)? His busy scribe Ben Percy took a backseat and called old Wade Wilson to phone in the lines for several issues. But in fact the notorious Merc with the Mouth mouthed nothing but pure Percy-isms throughout this four-month arc, never quite sounding like his mordantly buoyant self, cratered and a-boil as it is with those unsightly, indefatigable cankers. It’s Percy’s characteristic mordancy that wins through, the deep bass gravel having long since popped and shredded any sense of buoyancy; however cartoonishly irritating or genuinely leavening the generic loaf of two-dimensional slapstick violence, Deadpool’s trademark levity is inevitably missing from his run-on patter here.

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