Thursday, April 27, 2017

MARVEL 1990s: X-FORCE #1

I’m slowly working my way through Marvel Firsts: The 1990s Omnibus [$125] - all 1288 pages of it - a story at a time. I was not a big fan of Marvel during the 1990s, but I want to take another look at the characters and comics launched in what has been called “comics' most divisive decade.”

Today, we’re looking at X-Force #1 [August 1991]. The series was a continuation of New Mutants, the series on which cover artist and plotter and interior artist Rob Liefeld made his bones. The line-up for the team was: Cable, Domino, Cannonball, Shatterstar, Warpath, Feral and Boomer. There were five bagged variants of the issue containing cards featuring Cable, Shatterstar, Deadpool, Sunspot & Gideon and X-Force.

The 52-page issue featured “A Force To Be Reckoned With” (32 pages) by Liefeld with scripter Fabian Nicieza. Chris Eliopoulos was the letterer, Brad Vancata the colorist and Bob Harras the editor. I’m sure I skimmed the issue when it came out, but the 1990s were more than a little tough on me financially and my comic-book buying was limited. With my aging memory, reading this story again is almost like reading it for the first time.

SPOILERS AHEAD
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The story commences with Cable and his team invading an Antarctica base of the terrorist Mutant Liberation Front for about 17 pages of hitting and punching and hand cutting off and jaw breaking before the villains escape somewhat worse for the wear. You can use even extended action sequences like this to explore the combatants, but this sequence doesn’t really do that. The layouts and drawing are big and bold, but the depth isn’t there. The most interesting part of this opening is the realization that mutants who were students are now soldiers. Their lives have changed.

The remainder of the story has more meat to it. We see Sunspot, a former member of the New Mutants, training with Gideon. The story doesn’t tell me much about the latter, but it establishes that he is some sort of mentor to Sunspot, both in this training and in the young mutant’s entry into the world of big business.

We meet SHIELD commander G.W. Bridge, whose mission is to capture Cable and his team. Bridge seems to recognize that his targets are not evil per se, but, for him, they cross the lines between right and wrong. This wasn’t a remotely fresh character concept, not even in the 1990s.

We learn a little bit about Cable that helps us understand why he wages this war. We also learn that he’s keeping some of his mutant powers secret from all but one of his team members.

Sunspot’s business meeting goes south when the head of their rival corporation has Black Tom Cassidy take him and Gideon hostage. I’ve been in meetings like that, albeit figuratively.

In the final scene, Bridge calls the Canadian military’s Department K to request the services of someone called “Weapon X” to go after X-Force. Given a secondary feature of the issue has a fact page on Deadpool, I’m guessing Weapon X is Deadpool. Sherlock Holmes ain’t got nothing on me.

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If I came across as a little flippant in my comments on the story, it’s because it’s not a terribly interesting one. At least, not to me. I know it was a big hit with younger readers and that’s all to the good. Not every comic book has to be written for me. If others like it, I’m more than okay with that. Variety in comics is one of my big issues, even if that variety means a particular comic book isn’t for me.

If you’ve been keeping score on this series of reviews, we are now  4-4 with stories I liked tied with stories I didn’t like. Which is honestly a better score than I expected. But we still have around a thousand pages to go.

One more thing. This issue also contains “Cable Guide: A Look into the Files of X-Forces Mysterious Leader.” The four pages, scripted by Nicieza and drawn by Liefeld, offer information on Deadpool, Feral, Shatterstar and G.W. Bridge.

When next we return to “Marvel 1990s,” I’ll be writing on X-Factor #71, the issue that changed the focus and the cast of the series. Look for it sometime in May.

I’ll be back tomorrow with different stuff.

© 2017 Tony Isabella

4 comments:

  1. Marvel hyped X-Force to the moon, so much so that Liefeld landed an endorsement deal-----with Levi's, where he was interviewed by an off-camera Spike Lee. Unfortunately, his stock fell after co-founding Image, largely because he stopped keeping deadlines.....

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  2. If I recall correctly, Weapon X wasn't Deadpool, but a character whose first appearance was in the next issue of X-Force.

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    1. That sounds right....A guy who was a cyborg...had fists that he could launch at opponents.

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  3. This Weapon X wasn't Deadpool, It was a man named Garrison Kane.

    Kane was a former team mate of Cable in Cable's mercenary group Six Pack. During one their missions against Stryfe (who was Cable's clone), Kane lost his arms and legs. The organization called Weapon X — the same organization that gave Wolverine and Deadpool enhancements — gave Kane enhancements in the form or bionic arms. (Yes, the program that created Wolverine and other enhanced warriors also named one of its operatives Weapon X. I don't see how that could ever have been confusing to anyone.) That means this Weapon X and Deadpool were related in a way, but they weren't the same person.

    Kane believed that Stryfe and Cable were the same person, so he wanted revenge on Cable, because it was Stryfe that cost Kane his limbs. Later in Kane's story, Cable took him to the alternate 40th Century timeline that Cable came from, so Kane could learn the truth about Stryfe and Cable. In this future world, Kane received a full-on bionic body made out of a techno-organic liquid metal, because TERMINATOR.

    That's about all I want to remember of this character. The rest of his story was a convoluted tale of time travel and alternate futures and things that make my head hurt.

    Bob

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