Although it occasionally has been hard to admit, I think that Chris Yost and Craig Kyle have been a good thing for the X-Men line. Sure, their teenage slaughter in the pages of New X-Men was a bit hard to swallow, and the initial arrival of X-23 felt overly shoehorned in, but since that point, they’ve been more hit than miss. So when the Necrosha event was announced, it seemed like it would be a good thing. Many events had led up to this, and now we’re getting the payoff.
But Necrosha, unfortunately, came off as a bit of a mess, both as a story in X-Force as well as a “crossover” in general. Calling it a crossover at all is a stretch, as though the brand name appears with both X-Men: Legacy and New Mutants, X-Force politely ignores both books in the effort to tell its own story. As for them on their own, they take opportunities to push themselves forward and do absolutely nothing to help the main plot of the story. Of course, the main plot of the story doesn’t really do many favors for the main plot of the story.
Necrosha’s entire build-up is a bit of a mess in itself. When X-Force first debuted, the villain Bastion (from the easily forgotten Operation: Zero Tolerance mess) returned complete with no aspect of his original personality. He took the opportunity to conveniently resurrect a group of mutant-haters from X-Men history (Stephen Lang, Bolivar Trask, Cameron Hodge, William Stryker, Graydon Creed) through use of the techno-organic virus and set them back into their former roles in society. That actually has nothing to do with this story, other than that separate characters used the exact same means to resurrect countless mutants for this story. The two are barely related to one another, if at all. Just wanted to mention that.
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