And finally for this week's X-books, Weapon X: Days of Future Now.

This is the resolution to Frank Tieri's Weapon X plots, but he's going about it in an unusual way.  Conventionally, what you'd want to do here is simply go back to the characters and explain what happens.  That's basically what we got last issue.  But this issue, Tieri jumps years into the future, apparently with further jumps to come.

Of course, the conventions of Marvel time travel are well established by now - anything set in the future doesn't count, for continuity purposes.  It's the way things might happen rather than the way things will happen.  So by going in this direction, Tieri has effectively chosen to write a non-binding series.  He's inviting his readers to run with him and find out how he would have wrapped things up, rather than providing an indisputably canonical resolution to his stories.

The actual content of the future material doesn't do a great deal for me - there's a lot of violence, the Director gets his face slashed up again (which admittedly makes for a good visual when he resumes using the same mask crudely stitched back together), and a mass slaughter of secondary characters seems an odd way to resolve their stories.  Mind you, if you were a fan of the original Weapon X book, and you're in the target audience for this title, then this is probably just the sort of thing you're looking for.

But I do rather like the tack Tieri's taking here, focussing entirely on resolving his own story and not worrying about the bigger picture.  Breaking free of continuity with a story in progress isn't something we often see, but there's no reason why it can't work as long as readers are prepared to accept that they're getting an authentic resolution to Tieri's story rather than an authentic resolution to the lives of the mainstream Marvel characters.  Given reader expectations, it's a bold move, and on some levels I rather admire that.

Rating: B-

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