The first volume of the new X-Force will likely read better as a collection, but for not for the usual reasons.  By no means is it paced for the trade; quite the opposite, it’s carefully structured as a serial, with issues containing their own self-contained side mission or character study, all contributing to a larger story.

But X-Force #1 was a bit underwhelming on release, and it’s only in the light of the later issues that the book starts to pick up.  Luckily for me, completism compels me to stick around long enough to discover that fact.

Coming off a successful run on X-Men Legacy, Si Spurrier always seemed an odd choice to write X-Force.  It’s not merely that Legacy was a quirky, offbeat title; more that the title’s attitude to conventional superheroes (strictly, Legion’s attitude, but the book largely seemed to share it) hardly suggested a writer who was dying to write a book about large men with larger guns.

But as this run progresses, there turns out to be a ton of ideas floating around, both for individual characters and the story as a whole.  And as with Legacy, there are also a few things that don’t work.  Some cases might actually be deliberate; others may just be lapses of clumsiness.

There are quite a few problems with issue #1.  Spurrier’s basic idea is to set up a load of mysteries and then reveal them over the course of the first arc, until the full details of the set-up are revealed.  Trouble is, that means most of the interesting and intriguing stuff doesn’t get revealed until later.  The first chapter does clearly set up many of these plot threads, but doesn’t do such a good job of explaining why we ought to care about them.  It starts with Cable, Marrow and Psylocke rescuing Fantomex from a big Chinese guy who’s never mentioned again.  During that, we get flashbacks to some exposition about the “Alexandria Incident”.  This, we’re told, is a massive explosion at a “defence symposium” which has killed 3,000, with a mutant in the middle.  This, apparently, is a game-changing event; Cable wants to know who was behind it, and Marrow was apparently picked up in the wreckage.

Cable also gives us some spiel about how mutants need a “dirty tricks crew” just like other countries have; this, by all appearances, is set up as the book’s high concept, though the story immediately throws in the fact that Hope is now in a coma for reasons as yet unexplained.  Returning to the present time frame, Fantomex gives X-Force a lead on the whereabouts of a mutant being held prisoner and used as a weapon; the team then spend the rest of the book rescuing her.  Oh, and along the way, we establish that Marrow has somehow got her powers back.

So quite a lot going on in just that first issue.  But it doesn’t really work.  Two half-formed action set-pieces and an exposition scene don’t quite gel as a story; and there’s not enough context to really know what’s supposed to be at stake in the action scenes.  That context gets filled in rapidly over the following issues, though.  The initial high concept of “black ops crew for the mutant nation” is not desperately interesting; fortunately, it too recedes in importance as we find out more about what’s actually at stake for the individual characters.  And the Alexandria Incident doesn’t register as a plausible game-changer, given the sort of things that happen quite routinely in the Marvel Universe.  This, of course, is a problem with the accrued history of the Marvel Universe generally, and writers deserve a degree of leeway here, in order that the universe can continue to function as a recognisable version of the real world at all; but even in that spirit, it’s hard to see why this explosion would have the impact that Cable is claiming for it.

But the story that actually emerges over the next few issues doesn’t turn on the Alexandria Incident being a game-changer at all.  It does, however, turn on most of the characters being directly affected by the Incident – Cable and Hope were at ground zero, Marrow and Fantomex were found in the wreckage.  It becomes clear fairly quickly that Cable’s real priority is to track down the villain responsible in the hopes of uncovering a cure for Hope; there’s a clever twist in issue #6 which expands on that, but the basic point remains the same.  By the end of these six issues, it’s plain that Cable’s blather about the mutant nation isn’t the real motivation for anyone in the cast, and doubtful whether it was ever anything more than a pretext for action in the first place.

Alongside that main story, we have some genuinely interesting takes on Marrow, Psylocke and Fantomex.  There is in fact a proper reason why Marrow suddenly has her powers back, which both ties into the main plot, and sets up a new angst point for her.  Admittedly, it’s a particularly melodramatic angst point, and the first part of the reveal is likely to prompt groans.  But it’s quickly followed by a second part, all the more effective because you think you’ve already had the reveal – and that one  says a lot more about the character, and how desperate she was to get her powers back.  (It’s telling, also, the rest of the team seem to already know about what Marrow learns; they don’t tell her, by all appearances, because they want to keep using her as a weapon and don’t want her whimpering in a corner.  Hardly heroic behaviour, but I assume that’s the point.)

Psylocke has spent the last few years as damaged goods, with repeated variations on stories about her loss of identity.  Spurrier finally moves her on to something else; the idea here is that she’s become addicted to killing, and signed up with X-Force as an outlet which she can’t quite convince herself is a morally justifiable one.  It’s something to work with, and finally gives the character some much needed direction.  And his take on Fantomex revisits an old Grant Morrison line about Fantomex being unable to conceive of anything greater than himself.  Taking that literally, the book asks the obvious question: how does Fantomex deal with being surrounded by people who are just plain more powerful than him, or who can do things he can’t?  The answer, naturally, is “very badly”, but again Spurrier follows that train of thought to its logical conclusion and beyond, pointing to promising new stories for him.

Against all of that, the book takes an odd tack with its villain.  Volga is an evil arms dealer who’s built up hi-tech gimmickry through a mixture of his own scientists and raiding parallel worlds.  That’s all pretty conventional.  But he’s played unambiguously as a one-dimensional comedy figure.  He’s powerful, to be sure, because he’s the Big Bad and he’s got to run rings around the team in the early months of the season; but he’s also an exaggerated comedy foreigner who talks in broken English and who speaks almost entirely about Business.  The message is clear: this thing is not a character to take seriously.

It doesn’t seem like it should work, but Volga’s sheer incongruity is surprisingly effective.  We’re not being invited to take him seriously as a human being, but we are being invited to take him seriously as a threat; and if you’re not going to worry about the villain’s inner life, you may as well crank him up to 11.  He works as comic relief, but given what’s at stake for the heroes, there’s also something almost offensive about the fact that they’re facing a villain who isn’t taking this more seriously.

So there’s a lot that’s good in these six issues – it’s just that this only really becomes apparent towards the back half of the story.

What there isn’t, is a consistent artist.  Rock-He Kim was originally announced as the regular artist.  His digital painting on the first issue is lucid enough but isn’t desperately great; there are too many moments of characters just sort of lost in deadening expanses of space.  That’s a little surprising given that he’s apparently a storyboard artist, and it has to be said that it gets a lot better over the next two issues.  But it’s a step up with issue #4 when Jorge Molina takes over.  Instead of the digital painting, we’re suddenly onto clean line work and more dynamic layouts.  It looks very good on issue #4, which is the Fantomex issue.  Issue #5 is a bit more cramped but still solid.  Issue #6… well, a big chunk of that has a “security camera footage” conceit which doesn’t work in the slightest, because the camera angles don’t look remotely appropriate.  I’m not sure this is Molina’s fault, so much as a scene that has to be compromised somewhat to work on the page.  It seems we’ll be back with Kim for issue #7; I’m not altogether convinced that cutting in and out of his style is going to be the best move for the book in the long run.

Still.  After X-Men Legacy, I had reasonably high hopes for this series, and I certainly considered the first issue a disappointment.  But it picks up.  It picks up a lot.