|
By Jason Bourgeois
Is...is it safe to come out? Are there no Brian Bendis books looming on the horizon? Well, there are, there ALWAYS are, the man has like ten books a month these days, but at least there's other comics NOT being written by him I can talk about.
Which leads us to the weird situation of X-Force. The title started off as a restart of New Mutants with a more 90s flare to it. Which meant bigger guns, more explosions, and Rob Liefeld. Fortunately, he left after about two dozen issues, and the book sailed off into more manageable hands.
The title has been cancelled and restarted numerous times since then, as have most every title, really. But it's drifted from its idea of 'modern New Mutants' quite a bit.
A few years back, the name was dug up and remade into Uncanny X-Force, and used as the title for Cyclops' more black ops team, a group of bad-ass mutants taking out threats before they would become a problem. Okay, that's a sensible reuse of the name, and stressing on the FORCE side of action being taken.
So, that did well, and tickled my senses, since it dealt with a lot of stuff that harkened back to Excalibur, as well as an amazingly epic storyline with Archangel and Apocalypse, finally culminating a bunch of stuff for them. But once the writer was done with his stories, they decided to cancel the book.
And then bring it back a few weeks later with the same title and a new #1. Sigh. Well, at least I can get behind it with an all-new creative team, new mission statement, and characters. It's not a direct continuation of what came before, although it does carry a few threads while forging its own path. I can at least accept starting anew here.
But just as Uncanny X-Force is getting started, I turn around and BAM! get smacked with ANOTHER X-Force book right in the face; Cable & X-Force. I'm not going to lie, I never thought there would be a day that there would be TWO X-Force books on the stands.
Both titles are very different, and both have some vague claimage to the name X-Force. Uncanny has some of the more recent characters on the team, but has very little to do with any previous X-Force book. The only reason it's called X-Force is because Psylocke and Fantomex are there. They've not really given much of a reason why this book exists, and just has a bunch of characters teamed up because they all walked into a bar at the same time. No, really. I'm only half joking.
While I wish there was more of a reason, more of a point for these characters to be together, Sam Humphries is at least writing a fun, entertaining book, so I can forgive it for not really justifying its existence quite yet.
Meanwhile, Cable & X-Force get away with the name, because, well. Cable. He kinda IS X-Force personified, isn't he? You hear one, you think of the other. Bonus points for having Domino along for the ride. And they're also a group of mutant terrorists, so if any book is a proper X-Force book, I'd lean more towards Cable's.
Oh, and Cable's team had their base of operations get obliterated. You cannot be considered a TRUE X-Force team until your base goes kaboom.
One book has a vague plot, but with fun characters doing fun stuff, and the other has a more clear mission to it, with Cable and his team trying to stop threats before they happen thanks to visions that their leader is having. While their actions to stop these terrible futures from happening end up making them look like terrorists, they're at least trying to do good things. Both books are pretty good, and even in the stuff where explosions are plentiful, they do some great characterisation moments.
After a crisis of faith in their mission, Colossus turns himself in, and most of an entire issue is spent to him adjusting to prison, and his friends trying to talk him out of it. When Kitty comes to visit, we end up with one of my favourite scenes this year.
If I had to recommend one over the other, I'd lean more towards Uncanny X-Force, because that book is playing more for fun, with a less grim cast and plot, although that could change at any moment. Still, both books are worth checking out if they sound interesting. I was expecting to be pretty neutral on both books, but they've both done just enough to impress me and hold my interest for the time being.
Which is something I never thought I'd say about two X-Force titles at once. What a world...
Jason M. Bourgeois
|
