Inglorious X-Force #2: A Hell of a Day to Have Supernatural Prison Blues

There’s a great deal going on here in issue two. Seeley and the team hit the gas from the get-go. Teammates bickering and flirting badly, terrible close ups, a subtle dig at the current generation. Cable and his secret double edged plans to route out someone in the team, he believes is a traitor that kills the future mutant president Kamala Khan! Domino and her new squirrel buddy watching Cable and company from the shadows through the site of a large rifle. Undead zombies and a supernatural fight in the most haunted prison in the country oh and an honest to goodness angel thrown in for good measure!

What makes this work is while Cable is certainly the focal point of this series, every character around him feels fully fleshed out, Seeley has admitted several times to being a major x-fan and it really shows in how he writes every single character. Everyone feels like a fully fleshed out personality on the page. This issue Daken is the focus of Cable’s attention and while the mission to sort out the supernatural human terrorist group is the face value goal, Cable always has an ulterior motive as the assault on the prison not only tests and proves Daken’s innocence but also shows off why Kamala Khan is the purest of souls and as Cable says a leader worth dying for. There’s some gnarly supernatural action toward the end of the book as Seeley and the team juggle pushing the story forward with the kind of violent action you would expect from an X-Force book but the additional element of Kamala Khan right in the middle of it all makes it feel fresh.

It’s really fun stuff that in lesser hands might be a much harder sell but Seeley sells it with exactly the right balance of intrigue, seriousness, irreverence and ass-kickery that tempers the dry serious nature of the mission at hand and offers something for fans of both classic X-Force stories and folks who love Kamala Khan as part of mutantkind (me, I’m folks). Even Domino, watching from the shadows, gun at the ready (who is she meant to be pointing at?) with her new squirrel buddy ( yes you read that correctly) feels like part of the story being told and not just a foil on the side.

Michael Sta Maria and Romulo Fajardo Jr get to have a great deal of fun here as they get to show off Angel facing Daken in the Danger “Living” Room (this book has got jokes, good ones) in a subtle nod to Archangels classic fight against Wolverine in the ’90s, supernatural brawling against all manner of creature in the prison fight, a goat man, an actual angel, Cable catching the heavy end of some blood magic to more subtle but fun stuff like the team flying off on a mission with Ms. Marvel enjoying the in-flight snacks, her older companions’ body language perfectly communicating their personalities to Domino looking through the scope of her rifle at the supernatural battle below with her squirrel buddy in frame to the side.

Characters’ expressions match the script and art is always 100 percent in sync with story being told. Colors are only slightly to the darker side of things from Fajardo palette-wise. Overall the book looks and takes itself seriously but breaks that seriousness with smart funny in-jokes and dialogue from the script. There’s a ton of cool sound effects for VCS Joe Caramanga to have fun with from the classic snikt to Goatman bleating menacingly and RB Silva rocks another solid cover.