It was my (possibly flawed) understanding of the story that it wasn't Wolverine who killed that woman in the beginning, but Mystique posing as Wolverine and setting him up when he arrives so he'll have to fight off locals and she can escape.
For one, it's established in the story that she'd blown him up earlier and the top part of his cowl was torn, and continues to be in all "present day" scenes. The "Wolverine" that kills the woman has a perfect uniform. Also, the final confusing scene shows Mystique still posing as Wolverine with a bloody set of claws, and the real Wolverine with the tattered uniform and bloodless claws.
I don't know if that in any way affects your opinion of the issue, but I think the underlying ethics and morality of Wolverine himself are somewhere closer to sane.
Paul, I thought the whole twist with Wolverine this week was that Mystique posed as Wolverine upon entering the Afghan town and killed the lady, so that when Wolverine gets there (as shown in the last panel on page 19 of story) people are looking to kill him.
She set him up, basically.
Ohhhhh.
That makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?
As for X-Force and Emma, why do the X-Men even need a team of trackers when, erm, they have a powerful telepath like Emma?
Ah. Beaten to it by the other commenters - I thought it was Mystique who killed the woman also.
Taibak - And I want to know when Emma got hit by cosmic rays. She seems to have had a HUGE off-panel powerup recently for no apparent reason except to bring up questions like that.
*also curious about why Garney's drawing a mangled version of Wolverine's current costume only previously seen at the hands of Rob Liefeld. And that was because RL was reusing old art with a minimum of changes. This is supposed to come straight after MCX13, right?*
I completely ignored X-Force when it came out, and it seems with good cause. It seems that no one besides Brubaker knows what to do with Cyclops (outside of Whedon in Astonishing, but that's so delayed it doesn't count), and that he's turning evil faster than Tony Stark has.
Also, how can you hide this from a telepath? She was just seen getting in Scott's subconscious while they were sleeping in UXM #495, and something like this would stay at the top.
You know, for as well as editorial did putting Messiah Complex together and executing it, they're dropping the ball with the fallout. But that's normal Marvel editorial these days.
Also, I forgot to add this, but does Marvel have a deal with Apple now? In X-Factor the iPhone thing read more like product placement than actual plot point. Especially when they keep repeating iPhone and actually have Monet hold it in a way that it is the center of the panel on a page that keeps saying iPhone.
Siryn talking about it on the first page, fine. But to keep repeating it took me out of the story for a moment.
Brubaker said in an interview this week that he's known about the Skrull invasion storyline since 2004.
As such, perhaps an easy way to bring in kewl killing and Xtreme etc is for Cyclops to sanction it, then Cyclops revealed as a Skrull, but the teams still continue.
> That makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?
Actually, your original point was that it made no sense how Mystique was here. At the end of MC, Rogue did say her powers pretty much suffered the Reset Button. She didn't absorb Mystique. Now these writers thought it would be smart to have Wolverine have a follow up on that and do an X-Force on her before she kills more people.
On the subject of X-Force, I don't think anyone sensible ever thought that it was a good idea to begin with. The first issue pretty much proves the point. It's just not possible to do an on-going series with so much character derailment and lack of logic.
@Ken B.
Were it any other writer and I would agree with you, but this is PAD. I think he was just having a good kick on how silly Americans are by being obsessed by that useless gadget.
Ivo - note the big glaringly-intact HSBC sign in the dystopian future from X-Factor #11. The book's not immune.
Re: X-Force #1
You know, I thought it was funny that the first page basically nails the entire point of the Wolverine: Origins series. In one page! I guess it just goes to show how much padding is in that series...
@Somebody
Emma's power level wildly fluctuates, even now. Morrison's run saw her quell an entire crowd of angry rioters and later she retooled Kimura's memories almost as surgically as Jean or Xavier might. But against Kitty Pryde hiding in a mirror she's useless. idgi.
At best, Emma functions as any higher-level telepath has: she's there to clean up with some unlikely turn of her powers when things are dire, but writers stop short of having her take center stage every battle and just shut down the opposition's mind(s), which would be reasonable but horribly boring.
Not to feed into the Marvel hype machine too much, but I suppose it could all be chalked up to her being a Skrull. She is, after all, the X-Man most likely to be a sleeper agent.
Not enough creators have drawn the lesson that the FF are explorer heroes who should be constantly confronted with things that are new, mysterious and different.
Although Chris Claremont was criticized for bringing in "Excalibur rejects" during his run on Fantastic Four, I found it interesting when he did have the team interact with parts of the Marvel Universe (like Roma, the Capt Britain Corps and Geneosha) that they hadn't seen before (although the readers had).
X-Force's "secret" costumes strike me as coming from the same well of cretinous ideas as the ones from Bendis' Secret War, in which a bunch of heroes wore kewl black leather, but nonetheless utterly recognisable, versions of their old costumes, including a Captain America still wielding his trademark shield. Sigh.
I agree with your comments about Millar's writing. I like the big ideas he has (and the cynicism to a degree) but the dialogue has always suffered from the same ticks. There isn't dialogue, there's DIALOGUE in bold italics. Every third phrase feels artificial, like it's been expertly researched and constructed to suit a particular demographic. His characters rarely speak like real characters and a its a shame because it'd make the big ideas stand out more.
I understand it's ill-advised to scrutinize inter-book chronology too closely, but it does seem odd that both X-Force and Wolverine featured the same opening scene this week.
We are treated to a scenic overlook; Scott stands around looking constipated; Scott utters Logan's name in an ominous tone; Scott tells Logan he's left off superheroics in favor of commissioning hits, and in defiance of much previous characterization sends Logan off to kill someone; Logan replies that this is the best/worst idea he's ever heard, then goes off to kill said someone. Rahne may or may not be lurking in the background deprived of lines, depending on the writer's fancy.
Well, that's not a chronology problem. WOLVERINE comes first, because it expressly picks up on Muir Isle, just after the end of "Messiah Complex." X-FORCE comes second, because Wolverine says Warpath has vanished after Messiah Complex and gone to bury his brother.
But it's repetitious, I agree.
Scott's turned into a bloodthirsty so-and-so, it seems. Isn't he supposed to be sending the Young X-Men off to kill a former teammate in the first issue of that book too?
Ah, yes. Remind us how stupidly awful Young X-Men will be. X-Force was a bad idea, but Young X-Men? Young X-Men is like Loeb's Ultimates with teenager characters that nobody cares about. It's amazing how they stripped every interesting character from the "parent" book, leaving only Sooraya and Blindfold(!) doing completely ridiculous, out of character things. This Brand New Day of the X-Universe is, in lack of better words to describe it, lame. Very lame.
I'm not sure why they're bothering with the Young X-Men title, either. Presumably they're creating some sort of association with Young Avengers, but I can't see why, as there's no connection between the concepts.
I just stumbled across the X-axis a few days ago. I was surprised at the length of the reviews, but more so the high quality of the writing and critique.
It's nice to see someone who has the ability to engage in literary deconstruction, but enough respect and understanding of the medium to apply it fairly. It’s a good sign for the industry when commentary matures alongside the art form.
I’m really enjoying the site, and appreciate the added frame of reference for comics I love reading. Thanks for putting in the effort.
Ps.
While I agree that the basic conceit behind the creation of X-force (A covert black ops X-men team) goes against type in terms of character motive (especially Cyke selling out the innocence of the young members) I like the personality dynamic of characters they chose.
The father daughter bond between X-23 and Wolverine; Warpath seeking to define himself apart from his dead brother and being Cables protégé ; Rahne relative temperance and compassion as a foil for the rest of them.
The powers are similar, but they are intriguing and fairly distinct characters apart from that. If they can counterpoint the gratuitous violence, with grounded and plausible human interaction, I think it could be very good.
And the art was fantastic.
Young Is The New New. Looking forward to that Young Excalibur!
Young Excalibur? The hilarious adventures of little Brian Braddock trying to win the Amulet of Right from his older brother Jamie and the bullies in the rival house at school?
Scary thing is I can actually see that....
How about New Young New Excalibur? 
It could run and run!
Even worse will be when they run out of adjectives for the main titles and have to call them Old X-men, to keep them apart from the new X-men, who are actually the young x-men, or maybe the old x-men, but in a new bok. Then, The New Old X-men, when the old x-men get a new team together, with the old guys. The new old young x-men? Guess that'd be an original New Mutants re-union. Can someone at Marvel PLEASE take heed and change the new avengers title to the secret avengers.
I haven't read X-force yet, but I actually think it's beyond time that the X-men had a black ops team. Have their nice little public mutants do nice little public relations stuff, but have the black ops team doing the dirty, non public stuff. Parading Wolverine around in public has always struck me as a bad idea. The new avengers kept him off the radar but not having him at the unveiling of the new team (though that was wolverine's own personal choice) but he's a public member of the x-men, so why not be a public avenger as well?
Meh, the prevailing rumour is that the New & Mighty Avengers titles will be merged post-Secret Invasion anyway.
Oh, CBR, if only you didn't shine light over all the hypocrisy.
YOST: (...) Nothing about X-Force is going to make him [Wolverine] happy. Ever.
KYLE: (...) I think people will have a much deeper read and richer emotional experience as they move through the pages of “X-Force.”
YOST: Look how bad-ass Cyclops is here. Just looking it at him, it's like the only reason he's not doing the missions all by himself is because he doesn't have time for it.
Oh, and who can forget the completely non-sense Rahne line: "I have to know!" Talk about no substance.
KYLE: We still have no idea what Rahne's doing here, and we need her to say something enigmatic.
YOST: Oh, I know!
@Matt, the idea of a black ops team is great. What we have here however is a train wreck trying to pass as cool and edgy.
Don't forget it, true believers: "Unleash the X-Force."
New Mighty Avengers! Huzzah!
Like I said, have yet to read it (I'm always behind on comics being that I'm a TPB collector), but I usually agree with Paul's reviews. Oh, and I doubt they'll merge the 2 avengers books after the invasion storyline if both the books are moving units. You'll likely find that anybody buying one avengers book is buying both, meaning that unifying the title will not mean increased sales, quite the opposite, unless of course they do a spiderman and release one title more than once a month. And I'm shocked that after cival war the book didn't get renamed the new new avngers... though spiderman did make that joke in volume 6....
Perhaps they'll just cancel both and let Jeff Parker start up the old Avengers again.
Commenting by HaloScan
