X-Force 2, X-Men Legacy 300

X-Force 2
Spurrier (w) and R. Kim (a and c)

Cable is adamant about uniting mutants in terms of seeing everyone as one people as opposed to their separate factions. In that hope, he contacts every individual faction he can (including Wolverine and Storm at the Jean Grey School, Mystique wherever Mystique's at leading her villains, Magneto wherever Magneto's at, Cyclops at the Xavier School, Polaris at X-Factor, and Havok with the Avengers) to tell them about the recent attacks to mutants and about the new mutant they've found, who he and his team have dubbed Meme. Everyone he talks to is very reluctant to actually care about his information about the war they're fighting and the idea that the mutant race needs to really take care of its own, even after he reveals that Meme is just one in a line of people who seemingly have been experimented on and whose powers have been tested and synthesized. Of course, it seems like both Hope and Marrow are members of that group with Marrow being particularly a strange case as she was depowered on M-Day. The key for Cable and his X-Force now is to track down the person responsible for the events at Alexandria. Cable goes to Fiqh, a higher-up in Saudi intelligence and strikes a deal; Cable and his team will kill someone in his way and he'll give them information. The team succeeds, giving Fiqh a direct line to the head of his agency. He happily gives up the information he promised, leaving Cable and his team with a look at Yevgeny-Malevitch Volga, a billionaire with the means to destroy Alexandria.

Another really compelling issue. I think this one is a little heavier than the last, covering multiple locations and giving a harder-to-follow running narration from Cable instead of Marrow this time. Still, it's a more worthwhile read for how deep it gets. Like in issue one, there are mysteries peeking in from the corners here and ones that you already know will be driving points later down the road but are secondary to the missions now. It's a lot of very cool stuff and Spurrier has very clearly defined the sort of story this one is going to be and the sort of parameters driving the team. I think that Cable being so determined to make the mutants see themselves as one race is really interesting and a really smart move that hasn't really been done before. It's been touched on in the past, particularly after M-Day and with the X-Men's move to Utopia but it's never been on this sort of scale, where Cable so desperately wants everyone involved. The characters are showing a lot of personality and the story certainly has legs. I think this one is going to be another one that builds its world first and then really takes off, like Spurrier did in X-MEN LEGACY, though I'd be surprised if it took quite as long here. Great stuff.

X-Men Legacy 300
Spurrier, M. Carey, and Gage (w) and Huat, Kurth, Sandoval, Yeung, A. Martinez, and Tarragona (a) and Villarrubia, Rosenberg, and Arreola (c)

A young woman with serious injuries to her face has appeared at the Jean Grey School and subsequently been trapped by one of the defense measures surrounding the school: a fence that sucks you in and keeps you trapped more and more the more you want to get into the school. She's trapped pretty badly and none of the X-Men appear to be on hand to help her except one, a mutant man named ForgetMeNot. ForgetMeNot explains that he is an X-Man but is one who is almost entirely unknown because his power is one that makes anyone not focused on him forget about him entirely (not unlike the Silence from Doctor Who but, you know, he's a good guy). The girl explains that she came to the school in the hopes that the X-Men, who she always loved, would accept her although she's not a mutant because, after a sexual attack from a man in her town, her entire home life has pushed her away. However, there's apparently no way to get out of this gate. ForgetMeNot decides to tell her a story to take her mind off how much she wants to get in, something that will hopefully release her. So he tells her a couple of stories, including one about his efforts saving enemy soldiers, or at least giving dying ones some brief moments of peace, when the X-Men were at Fortress X, one about Professor X being the kind of guy who set his watch to remind him about ForgetMeNot every hour so someone knew he was always there, and one about trying to get Weapon Omega and Mimic to take his powers after Professor X died so that he could be noticed at last. The lesson of the stories end up being, essentially, that you are what you are and you are what the past has made you but the key is to do something with it that matters, to live the life you have and make the best of it. Eventually the wall traps ForgetMeNot, who Beast apparently forgot when he programmed the defenses, and frees the girl, allowing her to escape with the lesson learned but forgetting about ForgetMeNot.

It's a solid frame story and the sort of story that makes you go "ahhh, clever" as you start to get the gist of the idea. ForgetMeNot is the sort of perfect character for a retrospective and sweet tale like this one, one that requires an observer from X-Men history but one who is decidedly separate from it. It's like dropping the Watcher in something like this, but a Watcher who is human and therefore more complex. The character and the issue are also impressively tailored to fit the themes of this long and storied series. While ForgetMeNot only interacts briefly with Professor X and never with, say, Rogue or Legion, he spends a long time dealing with Weapon Omega and Mimic, who have powers rather similar to Rogue's and who had spent a lot of time with Rogue in their most recent appearance, and the entire key to the issue is about being forgotten as a character who had never before existed, like a sort of opposite Legion. There's a lot to like about the oversized issue and it's certainly worth a read as long as you're not looking for something that will contribute to a larger story or a larger world and rather looking for a standalone and very introspective issue like so many of these style books tend to be.