Comic Book Review X Force Six Under THE GUN

COMIC BOOK REVIEW -X-FORCE #6 – UNDER THE GUN 1992

This represents everything that was bad about the state of super-hero comic book partworks adventures in the early 1990’s – a slender story, out and out cackling villains, and little more than an excuse for a big fight scene that never really turns up.

The X Force is a splinter group from the X0Men of a much better and more mature comic book series. They are involved in a war against the self-proclaimed  ‘Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants’, which just about says it all in corny melodrama.

After numerous defeats, the evil Brotherhood have struck up an uneasy alliance with the Morlocks, an underground breed of mutants who shamelessly take their name from H G Wells’s The Time Machine. Given the insulting, threatening rude tone adopted by the Brotherhood in securing this alliance, the Morlocks seem all the more stupid for signing up to it so readily.

Their primary target is a mutant called Feral, who they believe has left their ranks to join the good mutants of the X-Force.

The action shifts to say X Force, as two of its members share a bath together, but in their swimwear – to hint at sexuality and passion without daring to show it. This shows how diluted and weak this story really is. The couple, Cable, and Domino, lament taking on Feral, who when we meet him, seems to have his own agenda in mind in joining them anyway.

Two X Force members, Shatterstar and Warpath, try to hold a training fight as realistically as possible without hurting one another, with other mutants trying to stop them before things get out of hand. This is interrupted when the Brotherhood and Morlocks attack, but ends on a cliffhanger as the sides collide in a promise of a major battle in the next issue.

Of the characters, Blob & Toad are bad mutants who have escaped from Magneto’s forces in the regular X-Men series, while newcomer, Sauron is nothing to do with the Lord Of The Rings character, but a human pterodactyl.

The story is so superficial and slight – with people on both sides shouting and insulting one another a lot, silly phrases substituting for swear-words, and a closeted sexuality that suggests an attempt to do adult comic themes for children and then getting cold-feet. The whole thing is a mess and likely to put many off reading comics for life if this is all they see in comic after comic for a long reading period in a row.

Arthur Chappell