X-Force... it begins!

I couldn't tell you exactly why, but I've always been a fan of X-Force. I think it was in college when I discovered Deadpool. Deadpool's first appearance was in New Mutant 98, which was only 3 issues before X-Force 1, he was created by Rob Liefeld who also created X-Force, and many of his early appearances were in early issues of X-Force so when I started gobbling up all Deadpool's appearances I ended up with quite a few issues then too. Add to that how prevalent they were in the old Shinders quarter bin and it was an easy title to decide to collect every issue of.

Fast forward to late February and I finally completed my collection; I now own every issue of X-Force. Well... Sort of. In 2001, after the team was seemingly killed off in issue 115, Peter Milligan and Mike Allred rebooted the title with an entirely new team and direction. I bought those first 6 issues in trade form as they were very scarce at the time, but for my purposes here I'm only looking at the traditional, Cable-led, Rob Liefeld X-Force and I do have all of those. Jump ahead 5 more months and I'm finally ready to start reading through all 115 issues of X-Force. So I've decided to keep tabs on my progress here. Every time the creative team changes or a storyline ends I'll give my thoughts. Not necessarily as a review, just some observations and fun. 

We shall start with issue one:

As I alluded to earlier, X-Force was a follow-up title to New Mutants. The New Mutants had been running since the early 80's as kind of a "junior X-Men team," being trained by Professor X at the school to maybe someday graduate into X-Men. Around issue 85 or so, Rob Liefeld took over on art duties, bringing his terribly drawn feet and horrible sense of proportion with him, eventually taking over plotting the book as well. During this time a number of new characters were introduced while he "revolutionized" the book, including the "mysterious" Cable. He ended up being a popular enough character that they had him take on the role as team leader and the new mutants proceeded to go rogue and become X-Force, just in time to wrap up The New Mutants title with issue 100. X-Force 1 would go on to be the best selling single issue of all time... at least until X-Men 1 came out later that summer and took that title away.

The crazy thing to me is how this was basically a continuation of New Mutants, but almost all the characters in this issue were introduced within the last year of that title! The team consists of Cable, Cannonball, Boom Boom, Warpath, Feral, Shatterstar and Domino. Cannonball, Boom Boom and Warpath had been around for ages, but Feral just debuted in NM 100, Shatterstar in 99, and Domino in 98! Then the villains: Stryfe and the Mutant Liberation Front just made their first appearance in the late 80's, and G.W. Bridge was a new character in this issue! So this huge "1st issue collectors item" consisted of like 75% new, unestablished characters.

Finally, let's talk about the art. It's Rob Liefeld. It's kind of terrible. The guy has no sense of proportion and couldn't draw feet. But he was really popular at the time, so whatever. Done. What I really want to discuss is the character designs. Like I said most of these characters had recently been introduced by Liefeld himself. And you can tell! Look at this:

Why do Wildside and Feral have the EXACT SAME HAIR? Who else has ever had that hair?

Speaking of Wildside, check out Domino and Reaper:

WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE DOTS OVER THEIR EYES!?!?

If you ask me, that's just lazy character design.

Going forward I'm sure I won't dwell on a single issue as much as I did here, but there's a lot of background here too. And it's the first issue! Sorry I mean, 1st Issue Collectors Item!

Now reading: A Game Of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

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