One of the best things about being an X-Men fan is the variety. The team’s massive growth in popularity in the late ’70s and early ’80s led to the mutant side of the Marvel Universe becoming truly massive, as numerous heroes and villains were introduced. This led to the building of multiple teams over the decades, giving readers all kinds of superhero books. One of those teams has become a legend and led to one of the most important X-Men books of the last 15 years: X-Force. This team first appeared in the early ’90s as a different kind of mutant team, and it pushed the envelope many times since, all of which would lead to Uncanny X-Force.
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Uncanny X-Force has become something of a legendary book. X-Force has always been the deadliest X-team, as the group was introduced as Cable’s black ops team. They would change over the ’90s and ’00s, fading away after becoming the X-Statix. However, House of M would smash the mutant race, and eventually, they needed killers to survive. In 2008, X-Force (Vol. 3) returned as the mutant kill team, playing a big role in the Messiah Trilogy of stories, before the Cyclops shut the group he had started with Wolverine down. This is where Uncanny X-Force picked up, and it did so by blowing away what readers expected a team book to be in 2010.
Uncanny X-Force Was an Amazing Mutant Superhero Soap Opera
Uncanny X-Force (Vol. 1) ran for 35 issues. It was written by Rick Remender over its run, with various artists like Jerome Opena, Mark Brooks, Phil Noto, and many more drawing the team’s adventures. It was basically just a continuation of X-Force (Vol. 3), with Wolverine deciding that even though Cyclops doesn’t want to have a hit squad anymore, mutants still needed one. Logan, along with Archangel and Psylocke, started a secret team using the Worthington fortune, recruiting Deadpool and Fantomex (with a Deatholk and the “Age of Apocalypse” Nightcrawler joining down the road), with the new group beginning their existence by hunting down Apocalypse’s last clone.
The series has two focuses: the first half mostly focused on Archangel’s legacy with Apocalypse, how it affected his life and relationship with Psylocke, and how that all messed with Psylocke’s life. The next focus of the book was the World, the home of the Weapon Plus program from New X-Men, which was responsible for the creations of Wolverine, Deadpool, and Fantomex. It used these two focuses to tell stories about the characters whose lives were affected by Apocalypse and the World, taking them in directions no one would have predicted.
Uncanny X-Force has numerous amazing stories, like “The Apocalypse Solution”, “The Dark Angel Saga”, and “Final Execution”, but what makes them work so well is they play off the classic formula set by revolutionary X-Men writer Chris Claremont. Claremont made the X-Men into a giant soap opera, playing the characters off each other wonderfully, intertwining their lives and using that to inform the stakes of the stories. Remender did much the same. From the love triangle of Archangel, Psylocke, and Fantomex to Wolverine dealing with the demons that being himself brings to the fore to Deadpool annoying everyone, the character interplay is why this book works so well.
X-books work the best when the characters inform the tales, and Uncanny X-Force has this in spades. Something like “The Dark Angel Saga” works so well not just because it was a something of a sequel to the fan-favorite story “Age of Apocalypse”, but because of the drama between the characters that Remender built up over the book’s early stories and how it all wove together. “Final Execution” is a brutal story, but it only hits so hard because of the journey that the characters have been on getting there. Each of the stories is good on their own, but the way it all connects together, each tale growing because of the last, makes this book a true best of all time comic.
Uncanny X-Force Was Anything But Formulaic At a Time When Everything Else Was
Team comics have changed a lot over the years. Nowadays, a team book is more about the spectacle of the adventure, the big fights. The personalities of the character, and how the events affect them, have become less important over the years. Remender’s Uncanny X-Force came to be in an industry defined by that kind of team book storytelling. However, instead of following the leaders of the time, the book went its own way, using its ideas to tell character-focused stories that made the spectacle hit even harder.
Since 2010, we’ve gotten a lot of X-books, but few of them can match Uncanny X-Force (Vol. 1). It was one of those books that was a perfect storm of awesome. It had great creators telling amazing stories with some of the most interesting characters in the X-side of the Marvel Universe, and it felt like every story was better than the one before it, which pushed everyone to grow. It’s a comic that has become a legend, one that will live in the hearts of fans forever.
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