Man-Slaughter Teams Up With The Mutants In X-Force #22

Remember Man-Slaughter? Us neither! But he’s back for more plant shenanigans in X-Force #22 by Benjamin Percy, Robert Gill, and Guru-eFX and Joe Caramanga.

Ari Bard: The plants are everywhere! There are different strains and they’re infectious and they all matter EXCEPT Black Tom Cassidy and his veg. Percy has made it very clear that he barely matters.

Kenneth Laster: Where the HELL is Black Tom when you need him? This on top of Gorrilla Man’s exclusion in Children of the Atom #6 really makes it feel like the X-Line doesn’t want me to see my favorite little freaks! Instead we get to hang out with another little freak, Manslaughter. He’s not little and he’s all over this issue! Let’s make like cows and chew on this grass!

Stream (M)oss Baby 2 on Peacock

Ari: Uh oh, did Krakoa do a big pharma addiction event? I’m not gonna lie, it is possible that I’ve been doing too much side research on the opioid epidemic for a side project, but the first thing I thought of during this opening scene is the allegation that Krakoa is shipping countries all over the world drugs which they either do not know the addictive properties of, or are covering up. Like if those plants really are addictive, long-term negative health effects or not, that’s a pretty big deal, wouldn’t you say, Kenneth?

Kenneth: Well if I’m remembering my Wolverine correctly, I think the pollen drug is more of an offshoot based on the Krakoan meds so this blame game feels very indirect. Or at least I think that’s the case? If it is, don’t think that’s incredibly clear and I definitely can see your read on it. On an unrelated note I do think it’s funny how the Peacock Man drives Bloodroot like he’s his uber driver. It’s really killing his man of mystery persona along with a twist coming later on. But while this intro scene is a little messy, I once again have to mention I see Percy’s tick in the next scene. Once again we get a detailed recap of mysterious events that happened to targets and I hate that I have noticed this because I can never not notice it now. It’s not even good or bad, just a thing I have noticed. Anything else from these early pages?

Ari: The more you look at the logistics of the Peacock Man driving his own mid-sized sedan with his mask on in the middle of a cemetery in the pouring rain and getting out in his fancy suit and his own umbrella to manipulate this mourning scientist, the more the scene kinda falls apart, doesn’t it? In the meantime, X-Force has a case of poisoned individuals to solve, and Sage and Beast are on the case with a little help from… Man-Slaughter!

The Floronic Network (dir. David Fincher)

Kenneth: Plants! Gotta love em! The hottest character find of (whenever that Weapon + book came out) makes his way to Krakoan shores to get to the bottom of whatever the plot is for this comic. And I have to say, in a comic that didn’t grab my attention, I was pretty into seeing specific plant based character interact with Krakoa in an interesting way. What about you Ari?

Ari: Manslaughter interacting with Krakoa was neat. It really doesn’t make sense to me that Black Tom Cassidy is nowhere to be found right now. Maybe Percy has something up his sleeve, and I know Beast was thinking some nasty war-crime thoughts around some not so humane experimentation but he really feels like he should be a part of this conversation. Does he communicate with Krakoa in the same way? Can he feel Man-Slaughter’s presence? Why don’t we know any of this? Honestly the way to describe Man-Slaughter’s interaction with Krakoa is that he took something inherently fascinating to me, and focused on the parts that I didn’t care about, which is the very linear cause-and-effect chain that’s going on in the present moment.

Kenneth: I agree– I miss Black Tom so much. Every issue without him is an issue of heartbreak. I hope he’s off visiting his husband, the Juggernaut, in the city. But yes! The Floronic Network is a much cooler thing in concept than in execution. As an idea it reminds me of the telepathic space Jean and (Insert Correct Cuckoo Sister Here) showed Quentin during his whole thing. But here it kind of just amounts to a kind of interesting panel layout. It’s just a little underwhelming based on the set up. On another note I did enjoy Manslaughter’s little finger babies and also that war criminal McCoy didn’t even fathom asking if he could cut his fingers off. Ah, never change Hank (no pls do).

Ari: No harm is too great in the name power grabs thinly-veiled as science, that is the Hank McCoy way! This section really made me think a lot about page real estate, because look at how many panels Percy and Gill devote to setting up Dr. Bloodrot poisoning the Order of X and sending them loose on Krakoa, and then look at the fact that we got no actual communication between Krakoa and Manslaughter. This is what frustrates me about Percy’s writing. With each new issue, I feel like his priorities and choices repeatedly demonstrate his view of mutants as tools for him to move around on a chess board instead of characters with heartbeats, souls, and driving narrative threads. It’s all about lining up a shot or setting a fun sequence in motion instead of portraying moments that are integral to a culture. After all, I would think the relationship between Man-Slaughter and Krakoa, as essentially analogues to DC’s avatars of The Green, deserves a few more panels.

Mulch Madness

Ari: The plant-based cold war quickly heats up as Dr. Bloodrot and Manslaughter have a serious confrontation! I have to be honest, this scene really makes clear the weirdness disparity when Joshua Cassara is on the book vs. Robert Gill, who wasn’t bad but was certainly less weird and more static for me. Part of the allure of Cassara’s floral horror is a sense that some of the plants he draws are slowly growing even as you look at them on the page. There is an oozing dynamic to the work usually because everything is sort of entangled with one another and the outer, silhouette line work isn’t as sharp or bold. This confrontation felt a lot more like a compilation of still images to me. What did you think, Kenneth?

Kenneth: That’s an excellent point! I feel like that’s the biggest drawback of the tighter continuity in this era is that there isn’t a ton of room for the delays that keep the consistency of the “main” artists that have such a specific style that fits the tone of the book. I’m thinking about the latest New Mutants without Rod Reis as well. It’s not that Robert Gill does a bad job here, it just feels like there’s something lost in trying to keep a similar enough style to Cassara while obviously having different focuses. I will say, I did enjoy Gill’s parallel story going on in the panels to either side of the page. It gave an extra dimension to the conflict and is better than having those stakes play out off panel, but I do wish we could have gotten more of it. I do think the revelation of the Peacock man setting Bloodrot up was kind of an interesting twist. It did remind me that we really still don’t know anything about him. Seems odd for his mysterious persona to be on the streets pushing mutant drugs to frame Krakoa but hey, I don’t presume to know the day to day of this guy.

Ari: I agree. Gill has his own charms as an artist and the parallel storytelling was a very interesting choice I haven’t seen in awhile. As for the final narrative twist there, it definitely felt like a classic, “Of course the villain did the bad thing!” moment much to the detriment of the overall narrative. It takes an extra layer of complexity that could have been placed in a core facet of the impetus of Krakoa, and instead places it in the hands of a villain that isn’t all that interesting. We don’t know the day to day of this guy, and to be honest, I’m not very interested in knowing that either.

Kenneth: Well hopefully the fire of X-Force gets reunited next month when we finally enter…INFERNO!