Uncanny X-Force vol. 5: Otherworld

“The Dark Angel Saga” was a high point for this series that garnered near-unanimous acclaim and cemented writer Rick Remender as Marvel’s latest MVP.  It’s also something that I might be talking about on my “Best of 2012” list — either that or “Astonishing Spider-Man and Wolverine,” I’m still deciding.  So after that epic blew all of our minds, the fact that Remender and company would want to dial things back a bit isn’t surprising at all.  The problem is that while there’s a good story here, it happens to be buried under some very rough and unwieldly art.

Back in the first volume, Fantomex shot the child Apocalypse in the head before he could grow up to be the ruler his followers so desired.  The problem now is that as he himself is a multi-dimensional anomaly, his actions attracted the attention of the guardians of the multiverse:  the Captain Britain Corps.  Their representative in our universe, Psylocke’s brother Brian Braddock, took the both of them to the Corps stronghold in Otherworld to convince his sister to rejoin their cause and to put Fantomex on trial for his actions.  This comes at a time when Otherworld itself is under siege from a powerful magical foe known as The Goat and his army, and it’s into this conflict that Wolverine, Deadpool and the “Age of Apocalypse” Nightcrawler find themselves a part of when they cross dimensions in order to rescue their teammates.

The majority of this storyline is a solidly constructed superhero action/fantasy story that unfolds in a fairly conventional manner, but ultimately plays to the title’s strengths.  Remender does a good job of balancing the separate threads of Psylocke and Fatomex struggling to escape the Corps while the rest of the team tries to fend off The Goat’s advances.  There’s also plenty of good character moments throughout as Fantomex has to rely on Psylocke’s goodwill in order to survive, while she has to step up and make the hard decisions in this conflict, and both have to deal with their feelings for each other (and manage to do it in a way that doesn’t make me want to claw my eyes out).  We also get to see more of the new Nightcrawler in action and it’s interesting to see the ways in which he differs from his deceased counterpart in our dimension.  That said, seeing Fantomex have his face sliced off was a senseless bit of gratuitous violence, especially after it was simply re-attached with bandages almost immediately afterwards.

It does wraps up very strongly with a final confrontation between The Goat’s forces and all the forces opposed to him in the Otherworld tower.  I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to say that the beast’s struggle to secure dominance over the entire multiverse is stopped, but the methods by which it is are particularly brutal thematically and visually.  X-Force was formed with the idea of stopping the most extreme threats by any means necessary so that other mutants could sleep easy at night without the knowledge how these threats were stopped.  That plays out again here, and in a way that leaves much potential for the development of the characters involved.

If only the art lived up to the story it was meant to tell.  Greg Tocchini illustrates the “Otherworld” arc and while I can imagine his loose, exaggerated style working elsewhere, it doesn’t do things justice here.  Compared to the likes of Jerome Opena, Esad Ribic, Mark Brooks and co. that have previously worked on the book, Tocchini’s style lacks the detail and energy of most conventional superhero art.  While you only need to look at the work of Daniel Acuna to see that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Tocchini’s work also lacks the visceral intensity of Rafael Albuquerque who has a comparative style and contributed a memorably violent issue of this series as well.  This is also saying nothing of how the artist’s work looks progressively more rushed as the arc goes on.

Fortunately we get a reprive in the last two issues collected here as Phil Noto competently illustrates a story of Nightcrawler seeking revenge on the Iceman from his dimension.  Any lingering doubts that this version of the character is anything like our own — can you imagine the pious Nightcrawler embarking on such a mission — but his final words to his former friend were immensely satisfying to me on a personal level.  I like seeing stories where the bad guy is made to know that he has lost, or is in the wrong before they get what’s coming to them.

The final story in the collection is illustrated by Billy Tan in a way that I’ve rarely seen from him.  Remembering his smooth, conventionally appealing work on “The Rise and Fall of the Shi’Ar Empire” and seeing the gritty style he employs here is eye opening.  I hope he keeps refining what we see here for future stories.  As for the story itself, it’s a new tale of the “Age of Apocalypse” as we find out what happened to everyone who returned there after “The Dark Angel Saga” and it’s not good.  Weapon Omega, the corrupted version of Wolverine in this universe, is making his attack on the last human stronghold while Magneto, Jean Grey, Sabretooth and the few remaining mutants on their side rally to its defense.  Their last hope:  to utilize the powers of the brain-dead Scarlet Witch to turn off the mutant gene of all the mutants in the world.  It’s a good action story, and the revelation of the leader of the X-Terminated, a group of particularly skilled humans fighting the mutants, is particularly inspired.  

However, the tale’s main function is to serve as a lead-in to the ongoing “Age of Apocalypse” series by David Lapham.  This does make me curious to read the series from a “how much worse can things get” perspective, but a better way to do this would be to have had Lapham write the issue himself.  That way, I’d be able to tell exactly what I’d be getting with that series rather than hope the writer is able to approximate what Remender does here.

That the main story doesn’t swing for the fences isn’t an issue here.  While it has good character development, good ideas and great twists, it’s consistently let down by the art.  I’m not disappointed enough to not recommend this volume to people who have been reading this title, but they can consider themselves warned.  The good news is that Noto appears to be the title’s new regular artist, which is good enough news as anyone with a decent handle on Marvel’s “house style” will be a marked improvement over what we got here.