The X-Force team has had several, wildly varying versions in the past. This series reimagines them as the X-Men Kill Team. It’s a solid idea and it’s well executed but I’m gonna warn you from the get go: It resurrects Bastion. Bastion, at least for me, is one of the clearest examples of the chaotic, over-the-top, nonsensical story telling of ’90s X-Men.
Bastion died a long time ago, but it turns out that SHIELD kept his head. The Purifiers steal it and put it on the body of a Nimrod that they happen to have lying around.
There is a nice parallel here. After Messiah Complex, Caliban is dead, James “Warpath” Proudstar is missing, and Logan is trying to keep X-23 away from killing. The first issue has the three of them forming as the X-Force team, each dealing with what they lost during that X-Event–while the Purifiers are doing the same by creating a new weapon for their messianic movement.
X-Force is covertly sneaking into the Purifiers’ base but Bastion comes on line before they can stop it. There is a bloody battle. And by bloody, I mean BLOODY.
This is a level of graphic violence I don’t think we’ve seen in an official X-Book before. Warpath is not entirely comfortable with it at first.
He’s portrayed as a reluctant killer, in contrast to Logan who kills without passion, and X-23 who often revels in it. But he’s not shown to be the “conscience of the team,” which would be cliche. Rather, he wants to overcome his own reluctance to kill when he knows it is for a good cause.
The Purifiers take Rahne as a hostage, though, and Bastion shoots her in the knee and uses her as a human shield to cover his escape.
The scenes where Rahne is held by the Purifiers, a group of religious zealots, are quite good. Wolfsbane has struggled against the church for much of her history, and here she gets to confront it in a different way.
Bastion recovers the body of Magus (Warlock’s father) from the ocean floor. His master plan is to capture other former X-villains and use the transmode virus to control them. During these issues, he takes Donald Pierce, Bolivar Trask, Leper Queen, and Cameron Hodge, and exhumes Graydon Creed’s body. He later revives Reverend William Stryker himself–the founder of the Purifiers–to complete what he calls his “unholy technarchs.”
Matthew Risman of the Purifiers, who was a hitman for Rev. Stryker, disapproves of these methods and begins planting the seeds of revolution. Bastion orders him to kill Rahne, and Risman secretly allows Wolverine’s team to rescue her.
At the end of the arc, Bastion has assembled his team and so has Wolverine. Bastion and his group of mind-controlled villains are on the loose, and the Purifiers are no longer affiliated with him. Risman has his own team of enhanced Purifiers who have wings developed from a DNA sample from Angel’s metallic wings.
Risman calls his winged team his “Choir.”
This genetic work was done by Eli Bard, a scientist who immediately meets with Bastion’s distrust because there is no record of his existence.
During the big final battle, Warren Worthington attacks Eli–seeking revenge on him for taking his wings–and in the battle, Eli infects himself with the transmode virus and becomes some kind of monster himself. Risman dies in the final chapter.
This is a very complicated story. There’s an entire subplot with Rahne killing her own father, a priest who got affiliated with the Purifiers. Angel, the peacemaker of the group, kills all the members of the Choir.
(Or I think that’s all of them?). The process of Angel’s wings getting stolen has changed his DNA, permanently, so that (I think) he can shift at will between metallic/feathers, but in his Archangel form, his bloodlust takes over. Kinda like Hulk a bit. Bart is on the loose with the transmode virus inside him.
The religious themes are overt and complex. X-Men stories, particularly those involving Stryker, have attempted these themes before but never have they been this effective. And yes, there’s a ton of characters and the story relies heavily on decades’ worth of unnecessarily confusing past stories, but it also can stand on its own. Finally, there are deep and important changes for everyone involved. Wolverine is a leader and has to support X-23 being an assassin. Warren’s completely different. Rahne has killed her own father.
I liked this a lot more than I thought I would. Well done.
English (US) · 