It's a weird week to be writing about Rick Remender, I suppose, after all that business from a couple days ago. But I actually wrote this last month. I was prepared to write a different column, based on something I'd read Sunday that I was pretty excited about, but that announcement was never made, replaced instead by damage control over a firestorm created by a few people misreading 21 issues of Captain America.
Anyway, this is what you get. Enjoy!
Killing is bad. Some people are killers. Those people won’t stop killing unless they are killed. But killing killers makes the killers into killers. And then what’s the difference between the killers and the killer killers? And if you don’t kill the killers, are you responsible for all their future kills?
Cross-eyed yet? Welcome to the rabbit hole that is Rick
Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, quite
possibly the best book ever to bear the name X-Force. The series is 37 issues (Marvel threw two of those .1
issues into the mix) of the above moral dilemma, featuring five of the darker,
edgier, more X-treme X-Men, and nothing but the biggest villains.
Magneto, Apocalypse, Sabertooth, the Shadow King, Mystique,
the Blob, Daken, the Reavers, Lady Deathstrike, the fake children of Omega Red,
the gang’s all here. Literally: Many of the aforementioned villains formed an
alliance to take down Wolverine & Co.
The team also goes on reality-hopping adventures in the Age
of Apocalypse and Otherworld, the omniversal home of the Captain Britain Corps.,
and travels to the future to see what their actions hath wrought, complete with
elderly super guest stars.
Our story starts with the age-old dilemma: Would you kill
Hitler as a baby? Only in this case, baby Hitler is a 10-year-old Apocalypse.
How the team decides to handle young Evan sets into motion the events of the
entire series, which alternate between bloodbaths and mental anguish.
“I’m making sure to tell you stories with beginnings,
middles and ends, and when those stories are put together, they form a much
bigger story – like a Voltron of nerdocity,” Remender told Comic Book Resources
in a
2012 interview.
One of Remender’s greatest feats is fleshing out Weapon
XIII, Fantomex, the smooth-talking spy/sentinel created during Grant Morrison’s
run on New X-Men. Fantomex’s actions
at the end of the first arc set in motion much of the plot of the rest of the
series. Watch the master of misdirection woo Psylocke, stand trial by order of
Betsy’s brothers and face off against the Skinless Man, aka
Weapon III, a newly introduced graduate of the Weapon Plus program, another Morrison-bred concept. Fantomex is hands-down the most
physically tortured member of the team, but in undergoing said tortures – and
remember, this book is for mature readers, so it’s some pretty grisly stuff –
he finds redemption.
But if Fantomex spends the series being physically tortured,
Psylocke, the team’s resident telepath, spends it being mentally tortured.
Betsy hasn’t been this interesting since Chris Claremont turned a purple-haired
British woman into the Mandarin’s personal ninja in the late ’80s. In her
attempts to be the team’s conscience, Psylocke is repeatedly forced to make
difficult choices and then forced to watch in horror as the consequences of
those choices play out, both in the present and in the future. Her despair is
so great that at one point she makes a deal that requires her to yield her
ability to feel sorrow, and though she makes it, it really doesn’t stick, as
her former captive, the Shadow King, exacts revenge on her as a member of a
newly formed Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
Remender’s Deadpool may be my favorite version of the
character in any of his ongoing titles of the past few years, primarily because
he’s sharing the spotlight with four other people and therefore not exhaustingly
front and center as he is in his solo title and spinoff series. You could argue
the fact that he’s not the center of attention makes the character work harder
for it. I’m pretty sure I laughed harder at his heart-to-heart with Evan at the
end of the series than I have in much of Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn’s
current Deadpool solo book. And I’m a
Deadpool fan from
way back.
And lest we forget, there’s Wolverine, the whole reason this
incarnation of X-Force exists. At this point in his career, Wolverine has
become all things to all people. On X-Force, he’s the head killer in charge. In
Wolverine & the X-Men, he’s the
head of a school, raising the next generation of mutants to fight the good
fight. On the Avengers, he’s a brawler in an army of supermen ready to be
fastball-specialed at Thanos on a moment’s notice. And while Wolverine is the
best at what he does, he still struggles with his conscience and the animal inside,
just like he did 40 years ago when Claremont first gave the character depth.
And nowhere is his conscience more active than when it comes to his son, Daken,
who assembles an Army of royal X-pains – including Sabertooth – to work out his
daddy-abandonment issues.
Archangel is also in this book, but I’m not quite sure how
to talk about what happens to him without spoiling one of the series’ best arcs,
except to say about midway through the series, Nightcrawler joins the team. Not
the 616 Nightcrawler, of course, he’s dead at this point. Instead, we get the
Age of Apocalypse Nightcrawler, who is much like our Nightcrawler, except he
has a red face tattoo, he doesn’t like being called Elf, he’ll betray the team
if it means getting revenge on the ones who wronged him, he gets along well
with his mother, Mystique, and he really likes teleporting people’s heads off
their bodies. Otherwise, totally the same old Kurt Wagner.
And then there’s Deathlok, who serves as the team’s Jiminy
Cricket, crossing the time stream to show X-Force how its kills affect the
future.
One of the best things about Remender’s run is that it’s
self-contained. You don’t have to read a whole bunch of other X-titles or drown
in an incomprehensible crossover to enjoy the book. It even completely
sidesteps Fear Itself and Avengers Vs. X-Men.
Speaking of the latter crossover, Remender’s next book, Uncanny Avengers, picks up after the
events of AvX with a combined team of
Avengers and X-Men who spend much of their time cleaning up the messes X-Force
made in their last book, in addition to facing big Avengers villains such as
the Red Skull and Kang. So if you like Uncanny
X-Force, keep reading.
Remender’s Uncanny
X-Force is collected in seven trade paperbacks: The Apocalypse Solution, Deathlok
Nation, The Dark Angel Saga Books 1
and 2, Otherworld, and Final Execution Books 1 and 2. The
series is also available in a hardcover omnibus.
