X-Force #26

On the plus side, the artwork was really good.  It's been hit-or-miss with the art in X-Force.  I'm not much of a visual artist, so I often don't pay that much attention to the art in a book unless it's detracting from the story in some way.  Which the art in X-Force often tended to.  A lot of it was so dark I often couldn't tell what was happening, who was speaking, who was punching who.  It looked cool, but it was confusing as hell.  This issue had none of those problems.  It was very clear and even had some nice visual moments.  I assume it's a different artist, but I don't remember who the artist was before, so I'm not sure.

Also on the plus side, more New Mutants, including more speaking from Cypher.  I was thinking the other day that it's impossible for them to do the kind of character development with the X-Men that they were able to do back in the day because the cast is so much larger now.  Little hints of character development are all we can get per issue because the issues have to focus on so many characters.  Although they do have books like X-Force and New Mutants, which are supposed to specifically focus on a certain group of characters, but they both keep going through these big crossover stories, so every book is starring, like, all the X-Men every time anyway.  I hope after this one they get back to letting the books focus on smaller groups of characters for a while.

On the minus side...

SPOILERS...



So, they killed Nightcrawler.  Which makes me feel oddly prescient since I was just randomly throwing his name out there last week as a character they might kill if they were looking for a death that would elicit an emotional response.  I guess it makes sense.  Kinda makes me feel like I could write this stuff pretty easily myself.  It's like paint-by-numbers storytelling.  And I didn't really have that emotional response either, because I think subconsciously I did see it coming.  In retrospect, that line from the earlier part of the story where Nightcrawler found out about X-Force and was telling Cyclops that they were going to have it out when he got back to Utopia was a pretty clear sign that he wasn't going to make it.  Plus, like I said last week, I seriously doubt he'll stay dead all that long.

Blah.