Comic To Read This Week: X-Force #26

If you haven’t picked up an issue of Craig Kyle and Chris Yost’s X-Force then you’ve been missing the best X-Men title since Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run.  Cyclops has assembled a secret team of the X-Men’s best hunters and killers to take out their enemies before they strike first.  None of the other X-Men knows about this team, and since they started X-Force has slaughtered anti-mutant groups, gone to the future to try and help Cable and Hope, and also brought back the Archangel in Warren Worthington III. 

Now Cable has returned to the present with Hope, the only mutant born since M-Day.  She left a baby and has returned a teenager with great survival skills.  No one knows what Hope’s return means to mutant kind, but Cyclops think she’s their last chance to survive.  Bastion, a super-sentinel from the future knows where to find Cable and has sent his forces out to seal the fate of mutants forever.  While trying to retrieve Cable and Hope, X-23 sticks a claw right through a man’s head, and makes the other X-Men start ask questions as to what her and Wolverine have been up too lately.

Issue #26 is chapter 5 in the “Second Coming” story line.  Nightcrawler and Rogue have teleported Hope out of harms way and trying to return to their mutant sanctuary just off of San Francisco.  The other X-Men are trying to lead Bastion off their trail, but he finds Hope and swoops in for the kill like a terminator on steroids.  Bastion makes short work of Rogue and all her powers; then moves in to finish off Hope.  But Nightcrawler gets between them and makes one great jump back to Utopia that cost him his life.  The X-Men return home to find Hope kneeling over Kurt Wagner’s body. 

Although I’m sure Nightcrawler will return some day this is a heroic death for one of the best X-Men ever.  Kurt has always been the spiritual one of the X-Men, and tried to keep things lighthearted.  His last words to Hope were, “I..I believe in you.”  Now the X-Men will have to wonder if Kurt’s death was in vain. 

Hope doesn’t even know what she is supposed to do, but everyone is looking to her to solve their problem.  In the middle of the battle Bastion says to Hope, “We have seen what you become, what the world becomes because of you.”  Is he referring to the end of the world or a new beginning for mutants?  “Second Coming” so far has been anti-climatic, but now I’m drooling to see what comes next.

Kyle and Yost have made X-Force a must read for any X-Men fan.  Its dark edge is taking the X-Men over a line they thought they would never cross.  Mike Choi’s artwork in this issue adds to the story with some great page filled panels that include Wolverine leaping (and on fire), Bastion smashing into his meeting with Hope, and Hope crying over Nightcrawler’s body on Utopia’s shore.  

I’ve always enjoyed that the X-Men storylines usually have nothing to do with the rest of the Marvel Universe; so I don’t have to collect twelve comics to figure out what’s going on.  I can’t wait to see what happens to X-Force after “Second Coming.”  Serve me up another fastball special!