By Zach Rabiroff — Benjamin Percy and Joshua Cassara’s X-Force may or may not be the valedictorian of the Dawn of X line, but it’s certainly the most improved student. From its humble beginnings as a somewhat perfunctory entry in the new era of X-Men comics — a healthy, harmless dose of gratuitous violence for those put off by the heady sci-fi meanderings of Jonathan Hickman’s work — it has grown into one of the strongest and most interesting ensemble books coming out of Marvel. Against the odds, a book that seemed to be about blood and guts turns out to be full of heart.

This week’s X-Force #10 finds the team knee deep in battle against the weaponized, plant-based “telefloronic” technology of Terra Verde, activated against the mutant nation of Krakoa by virtue of Hank McCoy’s secret, if initially well-meaning, experimentation. It’s a story that gets at one of the central ecological themes that Percy has been gesturing toward since the start of this series: the question of nature, technology, and the capability of the two to live in any kind of harmony.

One of the more bizarre facets of Krakoan nationhood is that it isn’t merely a home or a habitat, but a living, breathing mutant in its own right: one, indeed, that has even shown the capacity to reproduce with or without the supervision of its residents. Recall Doug Ramsey’s stern reprimand to the Quiet Council in House of X that Krakoa is a voting member of the government, with thoughts and agency of its own. Like New York City, Krakoa is a character in this movie.

The telefloronic hive mind of Terra Verde (what certain wise scholars on twitter have dubbed Plantinels) is not an altogether different thing, as Beast acknowledges in his logbook entry this issue: “Terra Verde is now a fierce, collective intelligence. Not so different to Krakoa except as an enemy.” True enough, but the real distinction is perhaps a more fundamental one: not the allegiance of the lifeform, but the nature of citizens’ relationship to it. It’s a telling revelation that the loss of teleflora originally came as a result of mankind’s increasing sense of cultural supremacy: pollution, modern technology, “Roman Catholic acculturation” that wiped away indiginous knowledge in the name of colonial superiority. Beast, for all his self-reflection, is incapable of looking beyond that paradigm, and seeing these collective intelligences as more than simply a means to a technological end. The teleflora have been weaponized because Hank McCoy can only conceive of them as a weapon.

This has ever been the original sin of Hank McCoy, going back to his original transformation from big-footed prep school kid to furry ape-monster way back in Amazing Adventures #11. Like his fellow wayward scientists Tony Stark and Reed Richards, he cannot shake his faith in science as something with the capacity to control the uncontrollable -- be it the power of his own mutation, the political radicalism of his erstwhile teammates, or the kill-power of brain-hijacking plants. What comes through so clearly in this issue is that this outlook is born of arrogance, but also of fear: because the comfort of control is the only security a mutant like Beast has ever really known. Hank McCoy refuses to abandon his faith in himself because, having lost by now his friends, his colleagues, and his ethical absolutes, it is the only thing left for him to have faith in.

It is to Percy’s enormous credit that this characterization shines through so clearly throughout this comic, and not only for McCoy. Character voicing in general has become a key strength here: a remarkable accomplishment for a writer whose dialogue read as drily serviceable back in the first issue. In true Claremontian fashion, he makes the rounds of his characters, giving each one a chance to develop real personality in a limited number of pages, from Black Tom's brogue-tinged complaining, to Quentin Quire's over-intellectual internal monologue. Some of the issue’s best dialogue comes during a quick, early exchange between Domino and Wolverine over the former’s agency in choosing to eliminate some of her memories during the resurrection process. In the quasi-classic “Crucible” issue of Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men, we saw how resurrection can serve as a voluntary reclamation of lost identity. Here, we get its mirror image: resurrection as surgery to cut away the painful scars of the mutant past. It allows Domino to function; it is, in the end, her mind and her choice. But if it also enables Domino simply to return to the same patterns of pain and violence, as she does here, is the cure really all that curative?

But perhaps no character fares better under Percy’s keyboard than the team’s co-leader Jean Grey. For a top-billing character in the X-Men franchise since 1963, Jean has been puzzlingly ill-served throughout most of her publication history, more often a plot device or a motivating foil to the men around her than a fully-rounded character in her own right. In the ‘60’s, she was the team’s damsel in distress, ever the lusted-after object of affection and rescue from her male peers. In the ‘70’s, despite Chris Claremont’s conscious desire to make her stand on her own as a hero, she ended up as a cautionary tail of uncontrolled power and passion -- hardly the stuff by which feminine stereotypes are broken. Here, however, we find her as an X-Man par excellence, ready and able to take charge of a team whose moral center has been left as a vacuum by the actions of her co-leader. Assuming command in the issue’s climactic battle, she shows no reluctance to do what it takes to strike at Krakoa's enemies. But confronting Beast, she brooks no excuses or ethical sophistry to allow for the deception of her own people. 

She embodies, in other words, the tense balance on which Percy has been centering this series since its inception: the way that Krakoa can function as a secure, independent state without violating the principles on which it was built. If Beast is ever the Machiavellian operator, possessed by a belief that all things are necessary and permissible in the name of mutant security, Jean is the public face of mutant patriotism. To the enemies of the outside world, no apology: “It’s about getting the dirty $#&% done. By any means necessary.” But to those she protects, virtue and honesty above all: “You’re exactly wrong,” she tells McCoy, “the lies are for the humans -- not us! X-Force only exists because of trust. A trust in the vision of mutantkind.” She is, in short, someone who has been through too much to brook the kind of illusions and self-deception in which her teammate is engaging: the truth must out, or else why even bother fighting? 

This kind of engagement with political themes through the lens of individual characters and conflicts is what the best X-Men comics have always strived for (if only periodically achieved), and Percy is hitting that balance better than any other writer in the line right now. If X-Force lacks the big ideas and intellectual meditations of Hickman’s flagship title, it may have something that Hickman himself has often struggled to find: a genuinely engaging emotional core.

Ah, but then there is that final scene at the Broken Baths, and it’s the only one anyone will be talking about. The fans must be served, of course, and far be it for me to ask the chef to take the soap opera out of my X-Men comics (if Hickman can’t do sexy, someone ought to). But here I must put my cards on the table: I have never quite cottoned to Marvel’s repeated desire to play up the Jean-Wolverine romance, the least interesting leg of the Grey-Howlett-Summers triangle of lust (give me a year of repressed Danger Room growling between Scott and Logan before I suffer through a single page of Jean leaning into sweaty Canadian manhood). The trouble, to my mind, is that Wolverine has long since become a kind of projection for a certain kind of male fan; an adolescent power fantasy of the unsightly, socially-maladjusted outcast as tough-guy object of female desire. Does the world perceive you as an angry, aggressive, hygienically-challenged oddball? No matter: we, the readers, know that you are a beloved samurai with a heart of gold.

So to repeatedly stress Jean’s reluctant but uncontrollable desire for this character in particular is the most depressing sort of pandering. After ten issues of watching Jean Grey grow, at last, into an adult, multifaceted person of her own, at the last moment she bathetically descends into the pure, beautiful love interest of a reader self-insert. It’s an oddly disappointing note on which to end an altogether impressive issue. But then, it’s an X-Men cliffhanger, after all, and I owe it to this series to give it a chance. It wouldn't be the first time Percy proved me wrong.

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Zach Rabiroff is a writer and editor who has written for Open Letters Monthly, Open Letters Review, and Xavierfiles.com in addition to this column. He has read every Marvel comic ever published, and regrets the life choice only mildly.