Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews

X-Force #28X-Force #28
Marvel Comics
Kyle, Yost, Choi & Oback

One of my biggest criticisms of crossover and events of late is that they all seem to be filling an issue quota rather than telling the story in the natural amount of issues the story needs to come to its conclusion. The Second Coming crossover falls squarely in this category with this issue leading the way as the example of nothing really happening in it. This is a problem because it is the penultimate issue to the fourteen part crossover.

Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle ReviewsEssentially this entire issue is about Cable, with the rest of X-Force, showing back up in the present. How did they manage this? Cable unleashed the techno-organic virus living inside of him to keep the portal open. How the others made it through is not entirely clear, at least not made clear by this issue, but there are more important things in this issue than explaining a plot.

Cable crashes to the ground and as he seems to be dying Bastion attacks for the kill move on Hope. Hope explodes into a violent fit after she realizes her only friend, Cable, isn't getting out of this alive. It would appear Hope's powers come to maturation here but I am not entirely sure what they are exactly. It appears she can blast energy out of her body or something. That's the whole issue.

The artwork gets an opportunity to provide a lot of grand images and present some cool looking fight scenes. The art is polished as usual and it makes for some nice photo-like qualities of some real-life images, like the Golden Gate Bridge for example. With the battle only really using a handful of characters the art never gets a chance to take over the comic or drive an otherwise not so entertaining story. It's a shame the art team wasn't utilized more.

This issue isn't terrible. Its executed fine but there just isn't much of a story to tell here. Cable brings back X-Force, Cable's wounded, Hope fights Bastion and uses her powers. It almost doesn't feel like it could fill six pages but it's been stretched out way too thin. Besides that, we really don't get any sort of explanation on any of this to fill in the blanks. I struggle thinking that this is the big finish to such a long story. It's shaping up that if you skipped the single issues for the trade to come out you won because you really aren't missing much with this story.

3 out of 5 Geek Goggles