- ISBN13: 9780785131731
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
It’s the exciting sequel to 2007’s Messiah CompleX! Cyclops has complete faith that his son, Cable, will do everything he can to protect the so-called mutant messiah – who he believes will save mutantkind. But he also knows what havoc former X-Man Lucas Bishop has wreaked in the nightmarish future. So now he’s sent his black ops team, the X-Force, on a risky, time-traveling mission to save Cable and the child, completely unaware that there’s something else waiting for them in the future. Something not even Bishop was counting on… Collects X-Men: The Times and Life of Lucas Bishop #1-3, Cable #11-15, X-Force #14-16, X-Force/Cable: Messiah War One-Shot and X-Men: Future History – The Messiah War Sourcebook…. More >>
X-Force/Cable: Messiah War
Skip this one. Terrible story with no forward momentum. Hard to see art in the X-force title. It takes dark to terrible new level. If you like looking at drab dark images, you might like this book. But not me. Just read X-men/Dark Avengers Utopia. That was a good read. Skip this one. Rating: 1 / 5
I had to write this after reading the other customer review which claims that Utopia is the book to read. Not for this longtime X-men fan. The X-force title is the only vital X-men book in the fold lately, and this book is certainly a worthy follow-up to the Messiah Complex, although not as good as that collection.
The Bishop mini-series included at the end of the book should be read FIRST. It was pretty good– and certainly a needed primer in X-men past and future history. I enjoyed the refresher course which helped sort out a lot of the mythology around Bishop, Cable, and the Summers’ storyline.
The second section of the book focuses on Cable and Hope as they move through time fleeing Bishop. I really liked this segment, as I haven’t had much interest in Cable and this was a good way to get back into the character– the authors really deepened his inner dialog and managed to make some sense of his convoluted history (again providing a needed sorting out of a lot of this messy continuity), while painting a very bleak portrait of the distant future– an intriguing science ficiton-esque warning of things to come. The character of the child Hope was also well done. The relationship between her and Cable was quite compellingly portrayed.
The latter half of the book depicts X-force hooking up with Cable and a big showdown between them, Stryfe, Apocalypse, Bishop, and Deadpool. This section had a few improbable plot twists involving Angel and Apocalypse, and some hard-to-follow action sequences, but overall it worked. The scripting was great— Deadpool was hilarious, and the whole X-factor team has a neat dynamic. I enjoyed catching up with Stryfe, who made a interesting villain. The story itself was a somewhat confusing, but still very interesting sci-fi conception of the far future involving some time-travel paradoxes and such. I give the authors credit for really pushing the envelope in portraying very ambitious concepts of time travel and extrapolating the X-men mythology to create a vision of the extreme future.
The book also features some great pages of notes on Cable and X-men mythology and characters– very helpful in refreshing one’s memory/boning up on this incredibly complicated saga.
I thought the artwork was excellent throughout the whole book, although the weirdly cartoony style of the Bishop series took some getting used to.
I hold back from a 5-star rating because of some of the head-scratching moments at the end of the story…there are just a couple plot holes and some annoyingly deliberate teasers about future revelations that left me feeling unsatisfied. But overall this is a very good X-men book, and certainly it is head and shoulders above the idiotic “Utopia” book, which features corny and ridiculous dialog, inexplicable character behavior, horrible and wildly inconsistent artwork, and an utterly stupid plot. Rating: 4 / 5