Marvel Comic's greatest hunter and supposed apex predator, Kraven the Hunter, is brutally hunting the X-Men's secret hit squad in a new cover for X-Force #31, which will tie directly into the upcoming Judgment Day event. The mutants have been working hard since 2019's House of X/Powers of X to establish Homo superior as the dominant species on planet Earth, and Kraven is clearly not happy that humanity may soon not be on top.
While the mutants of Krakoa have said that they are just interested in being "left alone" and allowed to form their own nation without outside oppression, they also have been doing a lot of things to make mutantkind the supreme force on Earth. Their actions encompass everything from creating a series of drugs that cure human diseases to terraforming Mars into the mutant planet Arakko. Kraven, who considers himself the number one apex predator on Earth, is not pleased, and one can imagine that if he ever finds out about the mutants' ability to resurrect he will be even more upset.
X-Force #31 - written by Benjamin Percy with art by Robert Gill - is the second X-Force tie-in to the Judgment Day event. The crossover will see the Eternals attempting to hunt the mutants to death while Marvel heroes and villains also contend with judgment from the Celestial Progenitor. While Kraven is set to show up in X-Force #30 it seems like issue #31 will dive really deep into his hunt for the black-ops team, and it will hopefully set up a brutal confrontation between Kraven and Wolverine, the first official fight between the two ever on page. The stunning new cover, revealed by Marvel Comics, is illustrated by Joshua Cassara (X-Lives of Wolverine) and shows Sergei Kravinoff fiercely hunting the X-Force team, perhaps through the forests of Krakoa itself. Kraven is stalking through the forest with Deadpool's severed head pierced on a spear. This may be a pretty common sight for Deadpool, who is effectively immortal, but the really shocking reveal is that Sergie is literally wearing the skin of Beast, meaning he killed and skinned him... yikes!
Described as a "mutant hunt" in the solicit for the issue, it seems clear that Kraven needs to "...prove once more he’s the apex predator," by killing the X-Men's toughest team. Out of all the current X-Men teams who might be "judged" during the Judgment Day event, it is safe to say that X-Force might be the ones with the most blood on their hands. Beast in particular has chosen to ignore any and all ethics in his single-minded fight to keep threats to Krakoa neutralized. While the mutants are now technically immortal, it is not as if they just automatically come back to life as soon as they die; there is an entire process that the Five must go through to resurrect a dead mutant. With the other horrible things happening to the X-Men during the Judgement Day event, it is not a huge leap to think that the Five may be preoccupied, or even killed themselves by Druig's evil Eternals, meaning that death might finally be an actual threat to mutantkind once again.
Marvel promises that this tale of Kraven hunting X-Force is, "...sure to reverberate for decades to come," meaning that the consequences of Sergei killing X-Force could have a lot longer impact than one may think. Joshua Cassara's gorgeous but terrifying cover of Kraven the Hunter shows how he has killed both Deadpool and Beast, but how will he hunt down and defeat the rest of the X-Men's toughest team?
The Judgment Day tie-in X-Force #31 from Marvel Comics will be released on August 31.
Source: Marvel