The X-Men and identity politics #4: Reconsidering Wolverine

A decade ago, I wrote a paper about the X-Men. It's been, amazingly, by at least a few thousand people, which is why I'm now turning it into a book. And which is why I'm not re-evaluating a lot of the things that I said 10 years ago. For instance:

Wolverine’s super-power also serves to essentialize his biological male-ness: he is in peak physical condition, a natural hunter with heightened physical senses and instincts (improved senses being another super-power), must constantly train to be patient and keep his temper in check, and – thanks especially to the recent X-Men movies – projects an animal magnetism that renders him irresistible to the opposite sex. In other words, his very powers reinscribe the singular, biological, and essential notion of traditional white maleness – a muscled, animalistic body that, in addition to his moral code, serves to appeal directly to the desires of adolescent male readers.

First, my apologies for the over-writing of an aspiring grad student.

Second, I over-generalized. Sure, Wolverine is John Wayne given superhero form. He's morally righteous, quick to anger, and a brute. He also sleeps with nearly absolutely every woman who's ever been associated with the X-Men. (Except for the girls who are 16ish and younger. For whom he is a father-figure. For nearly absolutely every girl who's ever been associated with the X-Men.) But that hasn't always been true.

In Geoff Klock's excellent book about Matt Fraction's Casanova, he argues that Casanova Quinn skewers, deconstructs, and refutes the need for the sort of superhero masculinity that Wolverine embodies. Klock writes, for instance, that "death surrounds Casanova, and invades him, and the resulting nihilism is what needs to be conquered when the temptation is to embrace it as part of badass masculine posturing." And if it can't be conquered? Then "why shouldn't we all escape from it?"

These are good questions: questions that need to be asked and answered, over and over, because norms of masculinity are stubborn and enduring things that aren't easily undermined or overturned. But y'know what? Wolverine had already asked them. (Or to paraphrase Jason Powell, whose own book on the X-Men is coming out later this year: Claremont did it first.)

But don't take my word for it. Here are a few examples from the Australia Era, which I've previously described as the most progressive and creative era of the comic.


Uncanny X-Men 233-234

Wolverine is implanted with a Brood egg and is transformed into a hideous alien monster. It isn't the first time - he was also implanted with a Brood egg in UXM 162 - but this time is different. It's also the first indication that something is wrong with the nigh-invincible Wolverine, who had recently and ridiculously been restored to life from a single drop of blood in UXN Annual 10. (Because healing factor.)

Unlike the previous infection, Wolverine appears to lose this one - he transforms into a Brood, even losing control of his mind. (The Brood announces "Behold, human, the shape of your world to come!" It's pretty explicit.) Of course, this is Wolverine we're talking about and as quickly as he loses the battle with the Brood, he miraculously recovers. Wolverine thinks it's his healing factor, but Claremont implies that it's actually the work of a preacher, who may or may not be a mutant himself. "I bring peace and comfort to all those out there," the preacher explains as he holds his wife's arthritic hands, as if to suggest that "comfort" is not just a euphemism. "They say I help them." It's probably not a coincidence, then, that Brood Wolverine reverts to regular Wolverine at the moment the preacher touches him.

So, Wolverine is, basically, killed by the Brood egg - an attack that he had previously survived. More importantly, though, this storyline kicks off a much longernarrative about Wolverine's mortality, which will run for at least the next two years: a series of near-death experiences that push his healing factor to its breaking point. And then break it.


Uncanny X-Men 235-237

Wolverine (and Rogue) are kidnapped and taken to Genosha, where his powers are suppressed and his healing factor ceases to work. Unlike previous power-loss narratives, though, which seemed indifferent to problems like 'doesn't it hurt to use your claws?' or 'is all that metal on your skeleton a good thing?', this one devotes a lot of time to Wolverine stumbling and coughing while Rogue - whose mind is under the control of Carol Danvers' personality - carries him and comments on his impending death.

A particularly vivid scene involves Wolverine popping a claw to pick a lock, which causes his hand to bleed profusely. And then just continue to bleed. Cue Wolverine's cool as ever gift for understatement: "No power, no healin' factor." Later, as Storm holds him and he believes his death is imminent, Wolverine still projects a Klingon-like acceptance of his impending death: "Them's the breaks, darlin'. I had a good run. If this is where it ends... ain't such a bad way to go."

So, two quick things to point out:

• Wolverine is saved, again at the last minute, through someone else's action. Carol/Rogue puts a gun to the head of Wipeout, who can remove and restore powers, and asks Psylocke to compel Wipeout to save Wolverine. So, again, Wolverine's healing factor fails him. And, again, Wolverine is granted a last-minute reprieve through the intercession of a third party.
• I may be overstating, but the pathology of Wolverine's non-mutant state - coughing, sweaty, hunched, generally sickly looking, prone to bleeding, and unable to heal - looks an awful lot like an AIDS stereotype. Applied to the most masculine, virile X-Man, no less. This is not to imply that masculine, virile men don't get AIDS, of course. But it does undercut Wolverine's own masculinity and undercut heroic masculinity more generally, yes.

Uncanny X-Men 246

Wolverine takes a leave of absence. What's important here, though, is not the what but the how.

In this brief scene with Storm, Wolverine announces that he's taking a break. And he should, because he looks like absolute hell. This is notable precisely because - outside of stories where Wolverine is getting pummeled, set on fire, blown up, nearly killed, etc. - Wolverine never looks tired. (Fun Fact: in a much later story, a major clue that Wolverine had been replaced by a Skrull was that he said he was tired. Because Wolverine doesn't tire.)

When Wolverine stares into the mirror, his hair - usually standing straight up, like the ears of a wolf - droops sadly to the sides. Normally erect and fearsome, his hair looks weak and flaccid. Sure, it's partly a joke about the Wolverine and Havok miniseries. But if this isn't also a dick joke, I don't know what is.

(Note: This style of hair reappears in Alex Ross's Earth X comics, where Wolverine has become alcoholic and obese - but denies that either is even possible - and it is painfully clear that, yes, the limp hair is a really obvious dick joke.)


Uncanny X-Men 251-253

Wolverine is beaten, crucified on a giant wooden X, hallucinates, and left for dead. It's overkill, but let's unpack the symbolism anyway. This makes sense within Claremont's larger arc for the character - every near-death experience has been more traumatic, more harrowing than the last - and also within the larger X-Men narrative, where the team has gradually become isolated and fractured, to the point that it effectively no longer exists. Basically, Wolverine is the last member of a superhero team that no longer exists.

This might seem like a win for Wolverine's masculinity - last mutant standing! crucified like some sort of mutant Christ! - but Claremont subverts that expectation in several ways. For one, Wolverine is beaten and captured by Donald Pearce and the Reavers with embarrassing ease. For another, he's saved by a 13 year old girl.

Most importantly, though, is the contrast between his outward demeanor and his interior dialogues. While Pearce is enraged by Wolverine's smugness and aloof response to his own torture, Wolverine's true torture is psychological and self-inflicted, as he sees visions of everyone he has disappointed, now dead and blaming him. He's the last one standing, sure, but only because he abandoned everyone else to die.

He's being too hard on himself, sure, but it also turns out that he's wrong. We can read this self-torture can also be read as a manifestation of his masochistic nature - he always runs through bullets, after all, when he could easily avoid them - and the masculine hero's compulsory martyr complex, since he seems to want to die as some act of penance, not because it's truly hopeless. It also reads as a meta-joke about his prominence and popularity, even in 1989: of course it's Wolverine's fault that they're dead because Wolverine is the most important X-Man ever. Of course.


Uncanny X-Men 257-260ish

This is the 'something is still not quite right' storyline that, sadly, goes nowhere. Because that Christ-like imagery from the last storyline? It didn't come with a resurrection. Wolverine continues to hallucinate - though mostly only about his old war buddies, Nick Fury and Carol Danvers - and is demonstrably slower and weaker than he should be, if he's fully healed. In a battle with the Mandarin, Jubilee's blast knocks Wolverine out even though Psylocke and the Mandarin appear merely dazed. Wolverine even collapses in mid-conversation at one point, and thereafter begins to bleed for no discernible reason. It's shocking and unsettling - Jubilee comments that "You'll be dead, you keep this up! You go an' drag me all across the world, mister-- You better make sure you survive to bring me home!"- but... nothing really comes of it. Eventually, he's back to normal. He got better.

I should add that the decision to saddle Wolverine with hallucinatory ghosts of Nick Fury and Carol Danvers is a weird but suggestive one. On the face of it, this is a sort of nostalgic gimmick (that John Wayne, thing again) that merely gestures toward the military and historical elements of Wolverine's masculinity, and there is something very old-fashioned about how Wolverine talks to his ghosts. On the other hand, these ghosts and their conversations are made to seem awfully ridiculous, especially when the hallucinations try to fight the real bad guys. Also, Jubilee thinks that Wolverine is going insane - he probably is - and the only moment in which the ghosts appear to actually do something is when Psylocke, who is tapped into Wolverine's mind and sees their bullets, psychically kills their targets. The scenes are absurd and so to, by extension, are the things that Fury and Danvers represent.

Had Claremont been allowed to follow this storyline through, it was meant to culminate in Wolverine's actual death and resurrection as a bad guy - an idea that was later used not once but twice, for The Twelve storyline and by Mark Millar. (Claremont's only plan is teased at in the scene where he's captured by The Hand, whose brainwashing of Wolverine appears to be working until it suddenly is not. Since Claremont has said The Hand would resurrect him, I'm guessing this would've been revisited.)


In closing

In Geoff Klock's book, he writes that "comic books are often cyclical, stuck in pointless repetitions of, among other things, violence, homoantagonism, misogyny, cheap and easy juvenile bullshit, and the twentieth return of Magneto, and this is what needs to be broken at the end of Avaritia, [the third Casanova miniseries] so we can get something new."

It's worth recalling, again, Magneto was reformed under Claremont, becoming the headmaster of Xavier's and fighting alongside the X-Men before concluding that death follows him everywhere and choosing a life of solitude. Throughout the late 80s, Claremont repeatedly broke with cycles and repetitions - and broke the format of the team itself. So, too, did he systematically undermine the sexy cool masculinity of Wolverine, and start to give us something new. Before the cyclical, pointless repetitions and cheap, easy juvenile bullshit got in the way.

Uncanny X-Men 503 and THAT scene

I wanted to write something else - less contentious, more literary - about Matt Fraction on the X-Men, so it's a shame that this has to be the first thing. See, there's a scene in the middle of 503 where Cyclops and Emma Frost are investigating the Hellfire Cult's warehouse, during which Emma dresses up in some bondage gear and, presumably, things get a little unprofessional.

The thing is, as we learn at the end of the issue, it's not Emma in the bondage gear. Apparently, I was the only person (on a message board, at least) who was immediately skeptical - "this is kinky even for you", Cyclops' mentioning that she's unnecessarily in his head, and the uncharacteristically glowing red eyes were pretty much a dead giveaway. Or so I thought. But there are other, rather obvious clues: the story arc's mystery villain, the Red Queen, is shown telepathically extracting information about Emma Frost's personality earlier in the issue, and Emma admits to having no idea what Cyclops is talking about when he mentions the scene at the end of the issue - after which Cyclops immediately sees the Red Queen, who he identifies as his ex-wife, Madelyne Pryor. So it's implied and not totally clear until the end, but it happened nonetheless: Cyclops was telepathically raped. (If you're still not with me, see my brief discussion of the issue of consent in the very last paragraph of his blog post.)

When I asked why no one was talking about this on the message board, it was suggested that it's a sort of comeuppance for Cyclops. During Grant Morrison's run, Cyclops and Emma had a psychic affair that the former dismissed as not disloyal to his wife because it wasn't physical, and so Maddie is sort've toying with that logic - that is, it must not be sexual assault because it was only psychic. And, going back to Claremont's pre-Inferno days, the same person suggested that the story element of tricking him into doing something without his informed consent is not unlike the process by which Madelyne was herself transformed into a villain during what she thought was a dream. Notably, Cyclops didn't accept this as an explanation of her transformation, nor did he accept any blame for the mental distress that led her to that point, much of which was his fault.

So to the extent that it seems to be invoking these earlier moments of Cyclops' hypocrisy and using it against him, it works. But there's something so incredibly distasteful about the suggestion of rape, here, that I just can't get past. Maybe it's just that sexual assault is so often sensationalized, and that instances of gender-reversal of his sort are so often handled poorly, that I'm having a knee-jerk reaction that will turn out to be unfounded. And maybe it's also because I have some affection for Madelyne's original character and didn't like her transformation into a villain in the first place - and so I find it additionally detestable that she's been reduced again, this time into a rapist.

[I should also note that this scene caused me to reconsider an element in the last Casanova story arc where something surprisingly similar happens, though it escaped my notice in the moment. In that story, Casanova is undercover as his sister, Zephyr, and has a sexual relationship with a male terrorist named Kubark - who, predictably, feels deeply betrayed and disturbed when he learns that Zephyr was never Zephyr at all. This fits all the same criteria for any legal or moral definition of rape - you can't give informed consent when someone is withholding information that prevents a full awareness of the consequences of your actions, ie. when they're lying about who they are or intend to do you harm. And yet I totally missed it - probably because Casanova is deeply apologetic and Kubark is totally evil, responding with homophobia rather than admitting any emotional pain. It's probably to Fraction's credit that he can do this twice before I catch it, and that it can work so well in the context of the story. But I still find it a troubling sort of trope.]

Matt Fraction on the X-Men!

It's been a long time since I've made any comics-related posts, but this'll be a short one. From Comic Book Resources:

"Ed Brubaker will co-write 'Uncanny X-Men' with [Matt] Fraction starting on issue #500. Greg Land and new Marvel exclusive Terry Dodson will rotate art chores. 'Stuff explodes, everybody has lots of sex, and then everybody dies. And the team moves to San Francisco,' Fraction said. That may have been a joke."

Fraction doing the X-Men? If it's half as good as his work on this, then it'll still be the best reading on Uncanny X-Men since Pierre Trudeau was last in Parliament*. And if you've never read Fraction's Casanova, you can find a free (and legal) copy of it online here.

*1984, for those of you who aren't Canadian. Or who are, but don't particularly know or care about who has been PM and when.

Comic book round-up...

I have two weeks of comics worth to blog about - and an unusually busy two weeks, for me at least - but I've put off making any comment at all until now. (Too busy, and so on and so forth.) So I'll make some brief comments here, which I'll eventually get around to expanding into longer reviews on comicboards.com. (Which is, incidentally, where every blog I write about a comic ends up anyway.)

Astonishing X-Men #23 - I've pointed out a number of times that Whedon's individual arcs have largely the same structure. I won't belabor the similarities that I've drawn out in other posts, but there are some more worth mentioning: Cyclops' resurrection after last issue's suicide marks the second time that the Breakworlders have brought an X-Man back to life; more to the point, this is the fourth time in four arcs that Cyclops has either been killed or recovered from being near death, which seems a bit excessive; as well, his break-out and bad-ass pose on the final page bears much familiarity both narratively and visually to the similar "you've taken your best shot, bub..." poses at the end of AXM #10 (Xavier) and AXM #15 (Kitty). Whedon also continues with his habit of borrowing tropes from old X-Men comics, though the "Cyclops actually can access his powers" swerve is less obscure than those he made in the last couple issues. (Jason Powell notes that this turning point is also featured in Uncanny X-Men #134, #150, and #272, to which I also must add also add X-Factor #39.)

Whedon does manage one repetition with a much subtler and cleverer variation to it, though. In the opening scenes of the issue, two of the rebel Breakworlders discuss the likelihood of an X-Men victory against Kruun. One expresses optimism and Aghanne, their leader, suggests that she has been driven mad by the "hope" that the X-Men have brought with them. It's an interesting choice of words - the mutant cure in the first arc was, we should recall, also called "Hope".

The Order #4 - There's something very Lost-ish, I think, about the frame narrative 'interviews' (job interviews? or therapy sessions? we're not entirely sure) that are probably the most distinctive feature of this comic. New books written in total sincerity and full of characters we don't know are a tough sell, and this quirk shoot straight for the heart every time in trying to compel us to like these people. It's probably not working quite as well for me as I would hope: the first issue's interview was able to integrate Apollo seamlessly into the Marvel Universe and cleverly critique Tony Stark at the same time, making the entire notion of the Order feel somewhat discomforting. The subsequent interviews just haven't cut that close to the bone.

I'm also ambivalent about Barry Kitson's art. He's ideal for the interview panels, where his raised eyebrows or smirks are perfectly expressive without ever being too explicit. But his entirely generic face designs are often confusing, making it difficult to tell one character from another, and there's very little dynamism to their movements. (This is my same complaint of Jim Lee, whose characters similarly seem to be posing when they are ostensibly fighting.)

All-Star Superman #9 - All of the comments I've seen from other fans of this series - I tend to not bother reading actual 'reviews' - seem to agree that something is missing from this issue. Perhaps its the heart. Superman seems weak and whiny in this issue, (and the reason for the weakness, which actually leads to his victory in the end, comes from out of nowhere) and the villains' motivations are cliché but without serving any redeeming metatextual purpose. We certainly don't learn anything about these villains as we did about Lex or Zibarro in their issues, nor do we learn anything particularly interesting about Superman.

Even the political commentary (or what passes for a criticism of Superman's seeming apoliticism, anyway) is rather confused and superficial: the Kryptonians criticize Superman for being at the beck and call of the humans while refusing to release the miniaturized inhabitants of Kandor into the sunlight, but nothing more comes of this potential exploration of Superman's alienness. He meets their complaints with some empty-sounding platitudes and we hear nothing more of it.

Scott Pilgrim #4 - Of all these books, I've read the latest Scott Pilgrim most recently and so given it the least thought. It's easily the most melodramatic of the four books, which doesn't immediately strike me as a good thing. One of the pleasures of the early books is that the heavily stylized art, often esoteric (or, rather, geeky) allusions, and ironic tone have affected a comfortable distance for the readers from the characters: the stories have a kind of magical realism (as opposed to superhero stories which, while featuring fantastical elements, are typically aimed at approximating realism) that borders on the absurd, with dialogue that's too self-conscious and, accordingly, characters that are hilariously adept at meeting our expectations of their type. O'Malley seems to have made a habit of delivering more of everything with each new volume, and this one takes a misstep by turning up teen angst (which is particularly bothersome, for me at least, because these characters are very nearly my age): discussions about the 'L-word', the introduction of new-old love interests just for the sake of complicating things, misunderstandings that could easily be cleared up if the characters weren't sometimes idiots...

Perhaps worst of all, I suddenly realized that Ramona is entirely out of Scott's league and I have no idea what she would see in him. (Which is to say that the consequence of humanizing your characters and giving them real emotional problems is that we begin to regard them as real people and question their decisions accordingly. And there's no question in my mind that their relationship makes no sense.) A recurring exchange perhaps illustrates this best of all - Scott makes repeated mentions of how Ramona's age is "unknown", as if she's some sort of villainous 80s wrestler. And despite this being a cute quirk of the book's style, O'Malley turns it into some sign of their communication problems before finally revealing her age at the book's end as a way of patching things up. (Spoiler: She's 24.)

All this said, O'Malley also continues to widen his range of always entertaining geeky references: that Scott's dreamscape resembles a Legend of Zelda game, complete with a "forest elf", is priceless. It's a wonderful escapist moment in a book that, despite its previous successes in eliding flirtations with the mundaneness of too much realism, seems aimed at demystifying precisely what's made it so interesting.

She was just seventeen/And you know what I mean...

One of the great things about Fraction's Casanova is that it is at once wholly accessible and utterly obscure. (To quote Fraction: "I'm fine alienating the stupid.") I could cite any number of instances, but I'll focus on one particularly silly one: the scene in which Zephyr watches a tape of her next target and remarks that "I want to shoot this guy so bad my dick is hard." It's a hilarious line, but it's made all the better when Fraction's notes at the back explain that it's a paraphrase of a line from New Jack City, as spoken by Ice-T's character. (Ice-T, of course, is famous for recording "Cop Killer" and feuding with the LAPD's chief - and now he plays a cop on TV. Zephyr, on the other hand, is famous for feuding with her dad, who's in charge of the SHIELD-like organization EMPIRE - and her parallel self was an EMPIRE agent.)

For the as-yet-unconverted: I feel it necessary to wax ecstatic just a bit about what Fraction (and, to a lesser extent, Moon) does with the final few pages of each issue of Casanova. See, each comic is only 16 pages - 6 fewer than the standard. Fraction fills up the remaining few pages with the equivalent of a director's commentary - sketches, biographical details that are pertinent to the plot, (and sometimes not pertinent whatsoever) and various other stuff about the visual and textual allusions that might otherwise go unnoticed. And after several of these notes - about a film collection, one about the first issue of The Order, a random Rolling Stones line... - he also admits that one of them is a total lie.

He doesn't explain everything, though. Take the title of the issue: "Seventeen". It's vague enough that it could be referring to pretty well anything. Two good possibilities spring to mind immediately, both of them speaking to the focus of this issue - Zephyr Quinn's unpredictability, desirability, and maniacal evilness (err, evilability?). The first is Seventeen, the Booth Tarkington novel, which is also a film. (And Fraction has made his love of old films quite clear.) Long-story-short, it's about a teen-aged small-town boy who alienates everyone in his attempt to seduce a big-city girl, only to fail when she leaves at the end of the summer. The second is The Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There", the song which features the memorable opening line, "Well she was just seventeen/And you know what I mean". The Beatles would subsequently explain that there's just something ambiguous and wonderful about the age of seventeen - no longer totally naive, but not yet world-weary - and seventeen year-old girls are a mystery to both the boys and themselves. It's not a stretch to suggest that we should have Zephyr Quinn in mind here.

Update: Fraction notes that the phrase 'asa nisi masa', which appears quite often in this issue, is from Fellini's 8 1/2. Double that number and you get 17. Also, the number of bodies (including Zephyr and Kubark) in the final panel of the comic? 34 - which is 17 doubled. I realize that I'm flirting with the Law of Truly Large Numbers here, but maybe that's part of the point?

Casanova 8: pure, distilled fun

Reading Casanova is like inhaling the expression oils of some otherwise inaccessible essence of entertainment as they are boiled in an alembic, vaporized, and then condense in front of our noses, producing the aroma of pure, distilled fun. Nothing else that the superhero companies put out can compare to this stuff - it's as electric as the shockingly blue accent colors within its pages. (Electric blue? The gall!) Jean-Baptiste Grenouille couldn't have concocted a more enticing aroma. (Am I mixing my aroma and electricity metaphors? I don't care!)

The first issue in Fraction's new arc, it hits us with three quick acts - the first entirely bathetic but necessary in order to establish Casanova's new status quo, the second reestablishing the tone, character, and humor of the comic, and the third pulling the rug out from underneath us by discarding everything that came before it. In 16 pages, Fraction can pack an embarrassment of story and humor into a space that's smaller than that which lesser writers can only fill with such trivialities like 'establishing the setting' or 'introducing the characters'. The cliffhanger question that closes the book - it was included in solicits, but I won't copy it here for fear of ruining the surprise - is at once stupefying and, when we realize that Fraction can and will get away with absolutely anything, totally appropriate.

As an added bonus, Fraction provides a sort of journal entry at the end of the comic, explaining why Casanova was beset by so many delays this year and linking his personal life to various parts of the story that we've just completed. It's sort of a director's commentary, and makes an immediate re-read even more rewarding than it already would have been. If you haven't read the first 7 issues or picked up the hardcover, do so now - if only so you can appreciate just how fantastic this issue is.

Fraction's The Order

My first instinct is to accuse The Order of being Peter Milligan’s X-Force but with all the fun sapped out of it. Or most of it anyway. It’s not a totally fair accusation, but it lingers with me. Here’s a team of people trained to be heroes by a massive corporation, who can be fired and replaced by members of the farm team, and who must be ‘on’ and play to the media at all times. They’re recorded by another, unofficial team member, and
their leader has lingering
doubts because of his self-destructive streak. Death is a constant threat and two team members are melted in the very first battle.

Another similarity that also provides a slight but meaningful difference: rather than a team beholden to an owner or stockholders, this team is beholden to the taxpaying public. This is perhaps where the decision to tackle the topic with some seriousness makes sense. X-Force was expected to act in outlandish ways, to be public with their personal problems and do outlandish things that would increase their Q-rating. So long as more people were watching or buying their products, it was all good. Not so much for the Order, though.

What the Order does particularly well is reveal the hypocrisy of a consumer-culture that pays money to see pictures of intoxicated celebrities but throws closeted politicians to the wolves. Once the team is paid with tax money instead of free capital, it seems, self-destructive behavior is no longer tolerated - much less celebrated - and the public’s obsession with the night-lives of these celebrity-heroes becomes a burden for the Order instead of a marketable angle. It’s a funny (or disturbing) truism that people will freely and readily throw their money at the same ethically bankrupt people that they would never allow anywhere near public service – as if they’re even mutually exclusive categories that are occupied by different folks to begin with – and the Order turns out to be no exception. And our irony tolerance is pushed to its limit when Tony Stark, a recovered/ing alcoholic, forces team-leader Anthem, another recovered/ing alcoholic, to fire four of his team for violating their morals agreement by – you guessed it – going out and getting drunk. The exchange is subtle but powerful, and full props to Fraction and Kitson for avoiding the melodrama that a weaker team would have milked this scene for. This is not the sort of ethical dilemma that would’ve made it into X-Force’s pages, and we’re better for it.

Much of the concept remains unclear to me – like why Stark and the government aren’t converting military-types into the Order, rather than punkish girls with pink hair who would seem to be less easily controlled; or what the deal is with the military stepping all over the Order’s authority – but Fraction seems to delight in filling his comics with more subtextual content than we’re able to consume on the first read-through, and I'm willing to give him the time to develop these stories. You can bet that my copy will be well-worn before the next one hits the shelves.