Review by Frank Plowright

There’s considerable speculation online about why Frank Tieri’s Weapon X series suddenly completely changed direction, not bothering to conclude plots that had sustained it to the material collected in The Underground. Originally released two years later, Days of Future Now wraps up those plots.

Tieri begins with an analysis of Malcolm Colcord and his hatred of mutants, then moves into the mess left behind in which two competing groups of bigots are hunting mutants. Such is the level of activity that it’s now attracted the attention of Fantomex and Wolverine. Tieri adopts a complicated method of storytelling involving both flashbacks and flashes forward, also fast forwarding through some events, presumably in order to compress this wrap-up into five chapters. Be warned, aspects make more sense if you’ve read the issues of Weapon X never collected as a graphic novel until a 2018 Omnibus, particularly the presence of Chamber, formerly of the X-Men, Fantomex and John Sublime.

Everything leading up to this point, at least as far as the Weapon X title was concerned, had been drawn by Georges Jeanty, but it falls to Bart Sears (sample art left) and Andy Smith (sample art right) to complete the job. Both have a far more dynamic style than Jeanty, ensuring greater visual excitement, and both cope with the constant introduction of new characters.

Days of Future Now is sustained by Colcord’s hatred of Wolverine, which has been well built and documented beforehand. It motivates almost everything here, with the side dish being power struggles elsewhere. If the title didn’t already give it away, what will gradually become apparent is Tieri is bolting on the story of how the world ended up in the future depicted in classic X-Men story ‘Days of Future Past’. It’s ambitious and includes some horrifying moments, and particularly clever is how this grim future is constructed via the most unlikely source. Better still, any fans considering what’s going on heretical ought to be appeased by the smart ending.

For all the good aspects, though, this greatly suffers from the shorthand presentation, Tieri contracting massive events into a few pages, sometimes only showing the prelude and aftermath. Everything here is needed, and the scope is entirely comprehensible, but Days of Future Now cries out for more chapters, not least because readers captivated by the mismatched cast from the earlier connecting stories might be disappointed in how little space most are allocated.

This is ambitious, but flawed, a rare case of a superhero story that’s not long enough. It’s also found with plenty of extra content as part of Weapon X: The Return.