Better and Better
It seems like with each passing issue or with the conclusion of each arc of Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force, the title moves higher and higher on my list of favorite reads. After this week's issue #9, Marvel's "kill-squad" is now my favorite part of the entire X-Universe. Instantly on my Top 5 list of comics for sure.
What the X-Force title has been doing under Rick Remender isn't just about superheroes who kill super-bad folks. We see the characters grapple with the moral ambiguity of having a team of super-powered hitmen (and a hitwoman) in the first place. After returning from their latest test against the Shadow King, they return to find that Magneto has discovered their secret team. Rather than the expected condemnation, Magneto makes a request, handing the team a picture of a Nazi officer and quietly leaving. Just as quietly, Logan takes the mission solo, finding and killing the long-since retired Nazi.
This book is most powerful by remaining vague in the contours. Billy Tan gives us an expression of desperation in Magneto's eyes little seen on one of the X-Men's oldest, greatest foes, leaving readers to understand that, for as much horror as the X-titles have seen in the last fifty years, they still pale in comparison to the time Max Eisenhardt spent in a concentration camp. Much of the issue is without dialogue, which the final issue of Fantastic Four proves actually doesn't always resonate. But as Wolverine approaches the target's house, we have prominently displayed balloons indicating music is coming from somewhere - a phonograph in an old man's house. It strikes me that everyone will put their own music in here as they construct the scene. I gave it a pretty pleasant melody in my own mind, which made the coming assassination that much more eerie. Wolverine then, in keeping with the tone of the issue, doles out the punishment to the old war criminal without a word. We never actually know the Nazi as a villain. We see him in only two photographs - one in his uniform and one enjoying a sunny day with his life's only love - and we see him as an old, immobile man. We are only left to assume his evil through Magneto's haunting plea for help (I mean, this guy is no stranger to smiting enemies himself) and through the old man describing himself as a monster because of his past. Leaving his time in the Holocaust as only assumed makes it hard to develop a deep enough hatred for the character to feel any righteous vindication in his death. A death that happens off-panel, by the way, which brings another layer of subtlety to a title that has already seen one guy feeding another guy part of his forearm.
Coincidentally timed with the week where US forces killed Osama bin Laden, Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force continues to ask its readers to think about what constitutes a just death. Or more appropriately, a just killing. In the first arc of the series, Fantomex kills a child for what it is assumed he will eventually become. In #9, Wolverine dispatches a man for something he did in a distant past, a past he kept hidden even from his wife. He mentions at the beginning of the story that the X-Force does what they do so others don't have to, then shoulders the burden of this one simple kill alone, as if to suggest that it's too morally ambiguous to even include the rest of a team whose sole mission is killing things that need killed. This title asks us once again to consider the area that exists between Batman's "I never kill anyone" and the Punisher's "I will kill pretty much everyone eventually." When should heroes kill and, more importantly, should they? I look forward to seeing the X-Force guide us through this conversation in many more future issues.
