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Two X-Force Series? Why the Hell?
The other day I told you guys about the new Cable and X-Force title coming up in Marvel NOW! It was a new take on the X-Force franchise, and actually looked and sounded kind of cool. Plus it fit with the idea of Marvel NOW! being a relaunch of titles and trying some new ideas.
Well apparently Marvel isn’t yet ready to let go of the old ideas. They’re still going to publish Uncanny X-Force, giving us competing X-Force titles for some godforsaken reason.
The adjective makes the team
Right now, Uncanny X-Force is a popular series by writer Rick Remender about Wolverine leading a team of black ops X-Men on kill missions. It’s a very good series, starring characters like Deadpool, Fantomex, Psylocke, Dark Nightcrawler and, at one point, Archangel. But Remender is moving on to bigger comics, and with last week’s Cable-related announcement, I thought for sure that Marvel was hanging up this series as a job well done.
Nope! They’re going to hand it off to a relatively untested writer, who is going to get rid of most of those characters and instead write about a black ops team starring Psylocke, Storm, Spiral and Puck!
He’s Puck!
I’m as much of a Puck fan as the next geek, but really, Marvel? This is what you’re doing for Marvel NOW!? This relaunch is your chance to clear out some of the clutter and cut away some of the excess comics that the world doesn’t need. And nobody in the world needs a series about these characters trying to be a black ops team. Did you learn nothing from Regenesis? Over the past year, Marvel has been publishing several dozen different X-Men books, including X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine and the X-Men, X-Men: Legacy, and Astonishing X-Men, among other extra titles like New Mutants and X-Factor. In order to populate these books, Marvel was just throwing mutants at them. Astonishing X-Men starred Wolverine, Iceman, Gambit, Karma, Cecilia Reyes, and Northstar. What kind of team is that?
I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think it’s safe to say all those extra X-books didn’t do nearly as well as the main series.
Yet it looks like Marvel is doing it again. Just throw a random group of characters together, give it an already familiar name, and just hope people buy it. How long until we see the likes of Uncanny X-Factor? Mimic and the X-Men? Superfluous X-Men? X-Men: Regency? Probably a year from now after Marvel goes through it’s next Big Event/Relaunch…
This interview with new writer Sam Humphries doesn’t really explain why Marvel wants competing X-Force titles. But at least he seems happy to be writing comics, lucky bastard.
New X-Force, Because Why Not?
I thought about complaining how team comics never last long enough for their membership to really gel, to really come together as a solid cast of characters with relationships and friendships and drama. But then I realized that my favorite comic, X-Factor, has done just that over the past 5+ years. So moot point.
The real point is that there’s going to be a new X-Force in Marvel NOW! Marvel is ditching the Wolverine-led black ops team angle and going with Cable and friends on the run as some kind of fugitives. And now we know Colossus comes out OK from Avengers vs. X-Men.
Which one is Keyser Soze?
So we’ve got Cable, Domino, Colossus, Forge and Doctor Nemesis…who is looking a little worse for wear. What the hell have they done to Nemesis? They do know he’s supposed to be this 100+-year-old scientist/curmudgeon, right? Now he looks like an anime character. Still, it’s nice to see Forge back in action, and I like the orange/silver/gray look they’e got going on.
The premise sounds cool too: they’re going to be wanted fugitives for a reason we don’t yet know, on the run from more prominent heroes. That could be a pretty cool storyline. It’s also going to be drawn by Salvador Larocca, a favorite artist of mine.
But then we come to the big problem: It’s going to be written by Dennis Hopeless. He gave an interview about the series here.
Now I have never read anything that Hopeless has done. I don’t know what kind of writer he is, or how good his comics might be. But I do know that he is also the writer behind Avengers Arena, the comic that’s going to be about killing fan favorite characters as wantonly and as indiscriminately as possible. And any writer who brags about how his comic is going to feature deaths already gets a black mark in my book.
But we’ll see. I think I might check out this new Cable and X-Force series.
Henchman-4-Hire 