Variant Covers: One Uncanny Comic To Rule Them All!
This is Variant Covers! Every week I humbly show you the titles that I’m excited for on Wednesday, and I ask you to kindly splay yours out in front of me. It’s a nice pow wow in front of the paneled ponderings and the like. This week though, I’m not really feeling anything. Oh sure, there’s a list of titles that I’ll be buying, and probably even enjoying. Nothing that’s really getting my fires burning though. So indulge me, let’s play a game this week. You can buy one title this week. What is it? No fucking cheesing! One title to stem your tide until next week.
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Uncanny X-Force #8
I feel like I should have a more intellectual pick for the week. That somehow by going with Rick Remender and Jerome Opeña’s X-Title, I’m selling myself out. Yes sir! Underneath the pretension lies the scabby husk of a withering fanboy. Listen man, that’s just the way the dice fell this week. Perhaps in another week it would have been Nate Simpson’s fucking glorious Nonplayer. The first issue dropped. It’s outstanding. An examination of the continuous reductions into virtual worlds we’re pulling ourselves, the melting of meaning or perhaps the building of meaning within these intangible worlds.
But it didn’t come out this week.
Uncanny X-Force did drop, and I’m excited for it. Remender and Opeña are bringing the only X-Title that I’ve enjoyed in something like ten years. If you subtract Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men and Ed Brubaker’s X-Men: Deadly Genesis miniseries, I simply haven’t given a fuck. None of the heavies that I worship could bring me to care about the universe. Not Fraction, not Ellis, not Brubaker. I snagged Uncanny X-Men #534.1 or whatever a couple of weeks ago by Kieron Gillen. Dude is much buzzed about. I was confounded. Don’t understand the allure at all. Nope. No sir. A universe bogged down in continuous crossover, pelted by perpetual events.
What separates Uncanny X-Force? Well (so fucking far, knock on funny book), it’s a tight little enterprise. There is no bleeding into the rest of the X-verse. For the most part. It hasn’t been subject to having to watch Hope I’m Clearly Jean Grey Summer stomp around campus and being an annoying little twat. It hasn’t had Magneto and Xaviers playing grab ass, or had to sit around on Utopia and just be really, really, really fucking irrelevant. As I said, the book is tight.
And off.
Remender has his crack killing squad running around neutralizing various targets. At first it was Apocalypse, reincarnated in the form of a little boy. Remender took the typical “If you had the chance to kill Hitler as a child, would you?” question and slathered it in homosuperior. Augment that premise with acerbic dialogue, a breakneck pace, and a Deadpool who is actually amusing again – I know, insane, right? – and the title caught me by the balls. The title is beyond enhanced by Opeña’s artwork. Opeña handled the first issue, and he’s returning for this arc it seems. Gorgeous artwork. Perfectly capturing the ambience of all the oddity that Remender can dream up. If you haven’t heard of this massively swelling talent yet, you will. Trust me.
So there you go. Roll of the dice. If it was another week, it may have been Sweet Tooth. Or S.H.I.E.L.D., or Butcher Baker. But it wasn’t, and here I am. I’ve made my case.
What are you buying?