Off The Shelf -- SWORD #1 Review

Hello and welcome to the first installment of “Off The Shelf”, our new comic book review show. These are designed to be brief reviews of current books and series that we think you should check out.


I’ll be reviewing S.W.O.R.D. #1 by the creative team of Al Ewing, Valerio Schiti and Marte Gracia.


If you’ve been reading the X-books since Jonathan Hickman started steering the franchise, you probably feel like I do – it’s been amazing at times and downright disappointing at others. While HoX/PoX proved to be massively successful, the X of Swords event was tremendously disappointing in execution. Maybe that’s the sophomore slump here, who knows. And while jumping in at this point may seem tremendously intimidating, the new series S.W.O.R.D. is a great place to start for new readers of X material as well as fans.


In issue 1 we see the setup for S.W.O.R.D. right off the bat – S.W.O.R.D., which served as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s off-world intelligence and intervention agency, had abandoned their space station called The Peak. The Peak was taken over by Cyclops and Cable during the events of X of Swords, and has now been commandeered by the mutants of Krakoa to serve as a platform for their off-Earth enterprises. Thankfully the writers give a quick two-page spread that provides us info on who is on the station and their roles. Many of these are secondary characters, so don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize them. More familiar faces will include Cable (he’s young now, by the way), and several teleporters: Blink, Lila Cheney and Gateway. Lesser-known and newer members include Wiz-kid, a teenage technopath, and Risque, who can generate gravity fields that can condense inorganic matter and project it with great force.


S.W.O.R.D. by the way stands here for Sentient World Observation and Response Department, and is linked therefore to the comics and Earth 616 as opposed to the S.W.O.R.D. we see in WandaVision, so don’t expect continuity between the two.


The premise of the first issue is to simply show what the “mutant space program” can do, which, through the synergistic combination of powers and abilities, amounts to being able to break more than one cosmic law. This seems to be a series less about fighting and more about doing incredible things creatively.


How all that happens is the big payoff of the first issue. If you’ve read HoX/PoX, you’d know that the biggest advance in mutant civilization comes from mutants using their powers in complimentary ways. In the past we saw this in the famous “fastball special”, where Colossus throws Wolverine at something so he can stab it lots of times. Now though, the mutants have advanced this into its own kind of technology. In Krakoa, five mutants are able to combine and enhance each others’ abilities to bring back other dead mutants. Now in S.W.O.R.D., this is played out on a cosmic scale.


Now if the phrase “mutant space program” made you think this was going to involve weird spacecraft I wouldn’t blame you, but you’d be wrong. In S.W.O.R.D., mutants combine their abilities to achieve instantaneous universal transport, and are even able to bring back some of the fundamental particles of the universe, Kirbons (named for Jack Kirby naturally). How they do that is too long to explain, but it blows the mind of Magneto who serves as the Krakoan emissary to the station.


The writing is quick, with Ewing doing a great job of introducing us to these characters and their motivation while still maintaining a sense of mystery, and the artwork is top-notch. His takes on classic characters, especially Magneto, are fresh and welcome. Mags actually comes off as a happy, almost grandfatherly figure, rather than the glum stodgepot we often see in the other X-books.


And speaking of the other books, don’t feel like you need to buy every other title just to know what’s going on in S.W.O.R.D. Continuity between titles is, well, not a huge priority on Jonathan Hickman’s run with the X-titles. That can be a blessing and a curse. In this case count it as a blessing. This is probably the best thing to come out of the whole X of Swords event, trust me.


It certainly seems like S.W.O.R.D. will open up whole new areas for the mutants, as well as the Marvel universe, to explore. The resurrection protocols removed the limitations of death from the mutants, and now the limitations of the entire cosmos seem easily broken.


This review is for issue #1 and issue #2 is out now, and both should be available at your local comic merchant of choice.


That’s all for this time – check back with us again and, as always, geek be with you!