Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: Back From the Dead Part 3: Homeland Defense
Written by: Peter Milligan
Penciled by: Mike Allred
Inked by: J. Bone
Colored by: Laura Allred
Lettered by: Cory Pettit
Editor: Axel Alonso
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Note: the following review is written in “stream of conscious” format, meaning I wrote it while reading the issue.
We start with a flashback to some years past where a man with a white, featureless face-mask with a bar code on it is lecturing a seminar audience. The masked man, calling himself “Mr. Code”, goes on a rant about the coming apocalypse and kills one of the audience members who asks why Mr. Code wears his mask. As we pan towards the audience, we see a young Spike Freeman in a short-sleeve dress shirt and tie clapping in awe of Mr. Code.
We cut back to the present as we see a teenager with multiple piercings and a pony-tail lecturing his fat mother about healthy nutrition. Suddenly an invisible force slashes his mother and other random people in the parking lot.
We cut to a newscaster talking about the slashings, which are occurring all over the country. We see Mr. Code (who has brown hair) talking about how this is a sign of the impending apocalypse while a reporter interviews the Secretary of Homeland Defense, who asks the American people to be safe and to keep spying on their neighbors in the name of protecting America.
We cut back to the X-Statix HQ as Vivisector rants that they should stop trying to kill Henrietta Hunter (aka Princes Di meets Marianne Faithfull, or Princess Marianne as I will call her in this review) and catch the slasher terrorizing the country. Anarchist and Spike Freeman tell Vivisector that killing Princess Marianne is a higher priority until Spike starts listening to Living Dead Girl’s idea for murdering Princess Marianne, which pisses Anarchist off. While they fight Lacuna eavesdrops on the conversation.
We cut to the Caribbean, as Princess Marianne contemplates sleeping with one of the crew on the ship when X-Statix shows up. Phat knocks the horny crew hand as Lacuna shows up and warns Princess Marianne about X-Statix’s intentions to kill her.
Lacuna defends Princess Marianne on the grounds that she stands for something while X-Statix don’t, unless feeding Orphan and the Non-Threatening U-Go Girl Replacement’s narcissism counts.
We then cut to Afghanistan where X-Statix are on a mission against the Taliban. Here we get our big casualty as Skateboard Dude gets hit by a missile Phat deflects before it hits Princess Marianne. The missile blows off his legs, ending his X-Statix career provided that X-Statix doesn’t provide artificial limbs to maimed members of the team.
Speaking of which, this would have been a GREAT chance to finally kill off Orphan once and for all. Given that the debate in this arc seems to be mainly between Anarchist and Princess Marianne, it would be a good chance to kill Orphan off and cement Anarchist’s spot on the team as their senior member and opponent towards Princess Marianne. But instead the new guy gets crippled instead.
Back at the ranch, Tike bitches out Phat for getting Skateboard Dude maimed. Half the team are glad Skateboard Dude is crippled and the rest of the team are furious that Phat values Princess Marianne more than his teammate. Phat responds by accusing Vivisector of being pissed off do to him being attracted to Skateboard Dude, which causes a fight that Orphan to break them up.
Orphan makes the biggest piece of s— statement of the issue, as he accuses Princess Marianne of destroying X-Statix. Sadly no one calls Orphan out on his own splitting of the team in X-Statix #1-4 as he tore the team apart do to his egomania and brooding about how miserable he is and such as well as the follow-up arc that had Guy Smith running around and letting everyone think he had turned evil after no one outside of Venus would stop their lives in order to pour pity onto him.
We cut to another slashing as the newscaster from earlier this issue interviews Secretary of Homeland Defense, who gets torn a new asshole by the newscaster until he admits his inability to find any information about the slasher. Wolfman then goes on a tangent about how X-Statix should be helping to find the killer.
Princess Marianne decides as her first act as X-Statix will be to have the team track down and catch the killer while Orphan reveals that he plans to use the slasher case to utterly discredit Princess Marianne in the eyes of the public.
