Uncanny X-Force #15 - Dark Angel Saga continues

[sherkahn]

What is the Dark Angel Saga coming to?

What is Archangel's plan?



As of last issue....
Wolverine is down, barely able to keep up as the radiation from Nemesis lingers in his bones and continues to burn him from the inside.
Psylocke is still a prisoner of Clan Akkaba in the North Pole, under the watch of many of the Horsemen.
Archangel has Genocide destroy a 10 mile radius of Montana and wiped it sterile clean of all life, including the local population and channel the time manipulation powers of the World (home of Fantomex) and the stolen Life Seed from the Age of Apocalypse in new and creative ways.

And Fantomex must lead Deathlok and Deadpool to try to save the day.




Archangel and Dark Beast inspect their work. They face off against the remaining members of X-Force, and leave the Horsemen to finish the murderous bunch and check in.

The Horsemen do not fair well against someone who is already dead (Deathlok).
Famine is captured and tortured for info, and the Hoseman Death is killed.

Archangel and Beast check in.


More than one Apocalypse? Uh oh!



Holy crap!

Got to admit this is firing smoothly on all cylinders and is a true saga.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Comments

[shadowpsykie]

okay,.... i havent been following this that closely... (i know i should) so im a little confused.... ummm is Angel evil... i mean i know he's apocalypse... but he's not very EVIL... twisted and warped yes... not evil...

[darkknightjrk]

I haven't been either (trades for me), but I'm under the impression that Apocalypse has possessed him completely. Plus, Archangel has always had a touch of evil in him--Warren's just been fairly good at pointing Arch in the right direction in terms of who needs to die.

[drmcninja]

Right, but twith the recent killing sprees he's been on with the team, and the killing babies controversy, he's mentally grown more unstable, giving Apocalypse either the ability to possess him fully or warp his mind.

[sherkahn]

He just had Genocide decimate a small town in the previous issue just to find a place for his Tabula Rasa. He's definitely on the dark side now...

[kusonaga]

Nice.

[q99]

Evolution nitpick: Different evolutions won't make "mammals" and "insects" and so on. They will maybe make "mammal-like" and "insect-like" and "amphibian-like" types, but the specific features will always vary, often not fit our groups well at all, and of course genetically they'll always be completely unrelated, and it'd be much more accurate to give them their own group names.

Too much for a short scene like this, just saying.

[sherkahn]

This cycle of rushed evolution is based on the seed for Earth life.

Off topic: Where is the High Evolutionary in this?
Or the last of the Evolutionaries created by the Eternals?

[q99]

Yes, even new life from earth life will evolve into new groups with their own features. Both birds and mammals are results of reptiles going the warm-blooded route (and heck, crocodiles might've been too, only to lose it later on as they ended up just in the ambush predator niche).

Even if you started with mammals, amphibians, etc. in their complete form, over that scale of time you'd have completely new groups of them coming up too and splinters into a variety of groups.

[misterbug]

Even more obvious is that Evolution is largely defined, as I understand it, as Natural Selection, whereas the above display is taking place within a controlled and observed environment, hence making it Artificial Selection...

[q99]

Not exactly. Natural selection is the mechanism that drives most evolution on Earth, but artificial selection would still be evolution.

Also as they are apparently just letting it run wild within it's confines, I think that's fairly 'natural,' even though it's limited and observed.

[misterbug]

Ah, right. My mistake.

Another nitpick - why on Earth would amphibians live in the trees and bury their dead in the ground? Since it's theorized that humans enjoy living and working in tall-structured buildings that subconsciously recall our ancestors' living-spaces in trees and caves, wouldn't intelligent amphibians make their homes in a marshy country and submerge their dead in a river?

[q99]

Yea, that'd make sense. Or maybe digging small pools. Though they could've adapted to tree life and less water... and thus become rather different from what we'd call 'amphibians'.

(We are tree-adapted amphibians after all, via the Amph>Reptile>Mammal route)

[misterbug]

Too true, too true. I suppose we can't know these things for sure unless we see them happening.

Did you ever read "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH"? There's a brilliant bit where a rat speculates that, had his species overtaken the Earth, as opposed to skyscrapers the cities would be constructed of thousands of interlocking tunnels.

Similarly, there was a very 'Walking With Dinosaurs'-esque show a few years ago, with top speculative Naturalist Dougal Dixon advising, where they predicted loosely which animals would take over the Earth after that Ice Age happens in 5 million years. Apparently after 100 million, Squids will become the new tree-dwellers.

It was called "The Future is Wild". I'd recommend checking it out, or alternately hunting down a copy of Dixon's "After Man: A Zoology of the Future", if you haven't already.

[q99]

-Did you ever read "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH"? There's a brilliant bit where a rat speculates that, had his species overtaken the Earth, as opposed to skyscrapers the cities would be constructed of thousands of interlocking tunnels.-

Saw the movie, and it makes sense :)

-
Similarly, there was a very 'Walking With Dinosaurs'-esque show a few years ago, with top speculative Naturalist Dougal Dixon advising, where they predicted loosely which animals would take over the Earth after that Ice Age happens in 5 million years. Apparently after 100 million, Squids will become the new tree-dwellers.
-

Excellent series, though I have nitpicks ^^ The Squibbons and giant walking squid, basically, looked too squid-like for their roles, they'd change features like skin and such more than they did, even though the chain of events made sense (squids>swamp squids>climbing and walking squids). The Flish looked too fish-like even being shown to be well-adapted to the air, etc.. Still, I'd love to see more on similar lines, I'm disappointed other shows weren't made after it did well.

There was an 'explore the life of an alien planet' series around the same time too, Alien Planet, which had cool evolution stuff and I'd recommend.

[misterbug]

I had heard of that alien series, will give it another go when I have some time.

Can't argue with the nitpicks, after all it's the nitpicks that make up life. I too did feel the Squibbons and Megasquid looked a wee bit too aquatic for forest life - surely some hardened, dry skin or hair-like fibrils would have helped a tad? Plus, the giant Tortoise thingies seemed a tad ridiculous, scale-wise.

You'd definitely love Dixon's book, though, if you have those qualms. With full control of a team of conceptual illustrators he has a much more, shall we say, believable look at the difference in anatomy of future animals - I'll toss the words 'Rabbuck', 'Island of Batavia', and 'Desert Shark' to give you some ideas. The other work of his that I've read is "The New Dinosaurs", and I'm not spoiling that one for you. Give 'em a try! You're sure to find them in a secondhand bookshop somewhere. :)

[drmcninja]

After how little I liked the previous arcs, this one is surprising me. Well played.

[drmcninja]

Oh, and I love the Apocalypse-Celestials connection. For an army of multiversal entities obsesses with evolution, Apocalypse would be the prefect fit for them.

[minervasolo.livejournal.com]

Something I find quite funny is when Chamber was given his Apocalyse makeover, it was implied at the time that editorial insisted he was only brought back if he was taken in a dramatically different direction to before, i.e. the makeover would be used to tell Apocalypse-based stories. Instead, he spends most of the time in limbo, appearing for a while in New Warriors, and then, just as all this Clan Akkaba stuff is getting going, he's switched back to his old appearance. What was the point of all that, then?

[biod]

Sentient Psychic Tapeworms. Only in comics.
Kudos for somehow making that frightening.