X-FORCE #106-109 (2000): Murder Ballads

This story is part of the “Shockwave” event that tells what happened to the characters during the 6-month “Revolution” gap.

Basically, after the mutants were temporarily de-powered by High Evolutionary, they realized that they needed to be able to handle themselves even without powers. So Pete Wisdom trained them in combat and covert ops, and they became his muscle in his espionage work trying to protect mutants from bad humans.

Domino didn’t like the idea, wanting to protect the young mutants from the darker side of superheroics that would be revealed to them in a world like Wisdom’s.

That was all flashback, since Wisdom is now dead and the team is at his grave.

The preacher at the funeral can apparently transform from a young man (above) to an old lady (below).

I’m guessing that’s a typo.

Pete Wisdom’s older sister shows up at the funeral: Romany Wisdom.

Then we get to the main story, which involves a murderer who is hunting Domino. His name is Marcus Tsung, but he won’t be seen again so don’t worry about it. He stalks the team, fights and beats nearly all of them, and in the end is shot by Romany Wisdom’s men.

At the very end, Romany reveals to them that he wasn’t always acting in the best interests of mutant kind. She warns them to get out of the spy business–it doesn’t suit them.

Hm. She also goes from old to young. Maybe the priest thing isn’t a typo? Did I not read closely enough?

There’s a lot of violence here–much of it killings by Tsung on his way to find the various X-Force members. An especially cool touch is when The Hand try to recruit him and he kills the recruiter and mails him back to The Hand.

But as you can tell from the summary above is fairly light on plot. That’s not a criticism, though. The storytelling is crisp, the pacing is very good…It’s a solid comic.

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