My tipping point as a comic book fan happened in 1986, when I was in middle school. As Reed Tucker puts it in Slugfest, his history of the fifty-year Marvel-DC competition, I am part of a wonderfully unique era, a generation who “didn’t need to age out of superheroes.” Kids like me lived through the Frank Miller and Alan Moore earthquake; the epicenter of a cultural maturation dramatically coincided with our own emotional maturation, like separate universes phasing together in an ideal harmonic convergence. I like to think of myself as manifesting my mutant power of cataloging and chronicling four-color fantasy on that fateful day when Brian led me to the back room of Best of Two Worlds and pulled out longboxes of Silver Surfer, Daredevil, and Warlock. He told me to read Love & Rockets “when I got to high school.”
Where am I going with this? By the early 90’s, despite still reading the shit out of just about every superhero book to hit the stands (my mutant power compelled me), I had very little interest in this antihero era of big guns, no feet, and everyone being, somehow, part ninja (I came around to the Psylocke reboot; her I liked). To this day, I am lukewarm towards Deadpool, Venom, Cable, and all of those similarly steroidal creations that immediately preceded, and helped “spawn,” Image Comics.
But, then there’s my brother. Seven years my junior, he grew up during that 90’s comics glut of cover gimmicks, clones, and continuity conundrums. And he admittedly has a fondness for some of those characters in a way that, maybe, I look back lovingly on goofball books like West Coast Avengers and Power Pack. There are books and characters that benefit from boosts of nostalgia; reinterpretations that we welcome openly, no matter the absurdity of their pre-enlightenment origins. Which brings us to X-Force.
I would have guessed that writer Ed Brisson falls into my brother’s camp (but reading this article on Marvel.com actually makes me think he slots somewhere between the two of us), as his work in comics over the last few years has trended towards the darker, edgier, and more antihero side of the superhero spectrum. I’ve enjoyed much of his work for Marvel, and wholeheartedly appreciate what he, alongside Kelly Thompson and Matthew Rosenberg, is doing to revive Uncanny X-Men. But I wasn’t that jazzed for a new X-Force book, particularly one that reassembles the original team (minus Feral, plus Deathlok).
Thank goodness for Dylan Burnett. I loved this guy’s work on Cosmic Ghost Rider, and his singular style, something akin to the fluid boldness of Paul Pope mixed with the cartoonish distortion of adult animation, has clearly been begging for a team book. I may not have given a crap about this group at the onset, but I’m suddenly onboard as “Kid” Cable (see Brisson’s Extermination series) leads the kill/hurt/maim contingent of mutant heroes into a black ops adventure of political intrigue in the formerly safe haven of Transia.
Brisson seems to have a fondness for these characters (although, to be fair he did kill the Cable we were all used to), and he’s cleverly combined a self-awareness of 90’s-inanity (“is that my gun?”) with a knack for tight storylines and witty dialogue. Like Rosenberg with the New Mutants, or Thompson with Gambit & Rogue, Brisson and X-Force seems like a perfect pairing. I like it because he loves it.