The third volume of Si Spurrier’s X-Force run is also the last.  Given the sales on the one hand, and the imminence of Secret Wars on the other, you have to wonder whether Spurrier would have let this run for longer given the choice.  But it doesn’t feel rushed; Spurrier makes his point in this fifteen issue run and draws a line under it.  Yes, there are unusual narrative jumps in the closing issues which could be a sign of cancellation-driven compression, but they’re played (successfully) as deliberate creative choices.

Put shortly, Spurrier has devoted his run on X-Force to critiquing and rejecting the entire concept of the team – that is, the darker, paramilitary version of the X-Men that Rob Liefeld brought about in 1991, and which formed the template for the recent versions.

The basic arc of this series is to set up X-Force as a typical ass-kicking team of grim heroes, and have Hope (relegated to the fringes as MeMe) increasingly realise that the team is not in fact a collection of awesomely cool bastards, but a dysfunctional crew whose questionable moral values are only outdone by their questionable mental health.  So Spurrier does the usual set pieces that glorify that sort of team and, in an understated way, undercuts them.  The vindictive torture of the captured baddie, which often gets tacitly filed under “the ends justify the means”, ends up killing him and producing nothing of value whatsoever – preventing it from justifying anything.  And so on.

By these closing issues, it’s abundantly obvious that Spurrier has no real interest in the aspects of the plot that would normally be at the forefront, and he’s going out of his way to tell the audience that they ought to feel likewise.  The mechanics of raiding an enemy base are glossed over because Hope’s narrator is far more interested in the character dynamics.  Arnim Zola is revealed as a disguised Mojo but nobody is interested in listening to his speech about his motivations.  Volga, previously presented as the arch-villain of the series, is captured between issues and turns out to have nothing to do with the resolution at all.

That last one could, as I say, be a sign of Spurrier compressing the plot.  But whatever the genesis, it works as a creative choice.  It ties up the loose end of Volga’s plot (or cuts it off, at least), but it forcefully rejects the supposed importance of that plot, and also means that what would otherwise be an thematically inconvenient moment of triumph for Cable’s approach gets bumped off panel to minimise its impact.

Along similar lines, the series starts pushing the idea of a series of Cable clones to its logical conclusion.  The book started off by passing them off as the same character, before making clear that it was a different Cable clone each day, copying over the memories from the day before.  The logic of that is that none of them is the real Cable at all, and indeed here Spurrier drops the pretence of treating them as a single pseudo-character, by having multiple Cables in operation at once.  It plays neatly into the subplot of his degeneration; not only are his moral choices becoming increasingly questionable but his very integrity as a narrative concept is starting to fray.

Just as in X-Men Legacy, Spurrier is not exactly afraid to speak through his characters to spell out the big ideas.  There are essentially three here, though I rather suspect they were intended to coalesce into one.  First, there’s a general rejection of the dark superhero team as a debased version of the genre; Forgetmenot spells this one out in issue #13 when he tells us that superheroes are a “dumb dream” but “a dream worth having”, and says that if “you spend any time around here…, all you’ll see is the dream being torn to shreds”.

Second, there’s a rejection of any sort of “Us vs Them” philosophy (that phrase also gets used as the title of the final issue, in case anyone still hadn’t picked up on it), presumably in favour of an aspirational ethics of inclusivity.  So Cable’s numerous speeches over the course of the series about putting together a team to protect and promote the interests of the “mutant nation” are, by the end, explicitly held up as wrongheaded and dangerous.  By looking out for his own group, apparently, the story sees Cable as contributing to a form of competition which is ultimately mutually destructive; true heroes ought to be trying to rise above it.  Fantomex, with his determination to re-mould the world to conform to his idea that he’s the best at everything, winds up as the symbol for this worldview; it’s not so much his self-interest that makes him dangerous, as his unalloyed competitiveness.

Third, there’s some sort of celebration of the values of the ordinary, common person.  Hence Forgetmenot as the outsider bringing a sane perspective to characters who have got caught up in the rules of their own little micro-genre; hence Hope as the normal one watching from the margins in a team full of crazies; and hence the actual Meme getting to do something important in her final moments.

This is where it gets a bit vague.  For one thing, it’s far from clear what the values of the ordinary, salt-of-the-earth person have to do with a rejection of tribal competitiveness, or indeed with a reassertion of the values of the traditional superhero as against the dark antihero.  I suppose on one view Spurrier is trying to offer an alternative “anti-hero” model but it’s woolly at best.  And while it works to put Forgetmenot and MeMe in this role – he’s intentionally a character who doesn’t fit as a regular hero, and she’s a deliberate cipher – the story also wants to present this realisation as a generational shift from Cable to Hope.  That requires Hope to be tacitly positioned as every-girl, a role for which she is not particularly well suited given her back story (and the fact that virtually every other writer has played up her exceptionality).  Spurrier’s solution to this problem is basically to ignore (though not contradict) all her inconvenient features, which works to a point, but only to a point.

There are other glitches here too.  The sequence at the end of issue #11, with Fantomex turning on the team, is horribly confusing as to what sets him off.  The plot mechanics by which Fantomex inadvertently generates a cure to Volga’s infection, thus allowing the reset button to be hit on Hope and Cable, are convoluted and arbitrary.  And Spurrier’s tendency to speak through his characters is sometimes too obvious – “He’s what happens when you live your life in competition instead of community” is a perfectly reasonable summary of Fantomex, but not a very good line of dialogue for Marrow.

And it’s nice to see that the final arc gets largely consistent art, with Rock-He Kim doing four of the issues.  (The other is by Legacy regular Tan Eng Huat, and close enough in style.)  I wasn’t wildly keen on Kim’s art at the start of this series, but it’s grown on me, and seems a lot less stiff than it did at the outset – possibly because he’s dumped the digital painting effects in favour of line work which feels much more expressive and lively, and possibly because the slightly muted feel to some of Kim’s work is less of a problem the less interest the book itself has in its action sequences.

X-Force is not going to displace X-Men Legacy as Spurrier’s magnum opus in the X-books.  But, as with Legacy, it’s a book with plenty to say, perhaps even too much, in a line which all too often feels like it’s marking time these days.  It’s inconsistent but it’s got ambition and ideas, and it feels like a coherent story on its own terms rather than a cog in the line.  Worth your time.