It seems the “brand split” for X-Force is coming to an end. As USA Today told us, Simon Spurrier (of the underrated book X-Men Legacy) and Rock-He Kim will be launching a brand new X-Force book in February, as the current titles of Uncanny X-Force and Cable & X-Force will be ending their runs early next year with a four-part crossover called “Vendetta.” It’s the All-New Marvel NOW, y’all – plus, there’s an X-Force movie in development over at Fox, so it’s time to distill the name back down to its essence.
Spurrier is a dense, layered and occasionally bombastic writer who has made a huge mark on Marvel Comics with his wildly entertaining X-Club miniseries, along with accomplishing the miracle of making Legion, aka David Haller, a compelling protagonist in X-Men Legacy. The fact that crazy government overreach with the NSA and drone strikes is on the front pages will really play into his take on Cable’s paramilitary squad’s methodology.
“Switch on the news and you’ve got unmanned drones violating international borders, governments listening in on their enemies – their allies and their own civilians alike – unregistered aeronautical tech deployed in the field, defected oligarchs dying of radiation poisoning, whistleblowers vilified and so on,” Spurrier noted. “Some of the things X-Force gets up to, like all attempts to achieve political ends through violence, are extremely questionable. Readers, like the characters themselves, are going to have to come to terms with that and decide how they feel about it.”
“It’ll come as no surprise to X-Men Legacy readers that I’ve always been a little cynical about some of the more saccharine manifestations of the “team-up-and-do-good-by-punching-stuff” formula,” Spurrier told CBR, “so the chance to play in the really badass end of the mutant pool was very seductive.”
“X-Force is about factionalism, it’s about control and it’s about politics. The kind that needs body bags. The oldest kind there is,” he continued. “I get to write dialogue for some of the most amazingly distinct characters in the X-pantheon, with some of the most entertaining conflicts between them. I get to bring a dose of mutant centric weirdness and a healthy sprinkle of snark to the twilight world of global espionage.”
Cable will be joined by Fantomex, Marrow, and Psylocke at first. He describes Cable as a Clint Eastwood type, Psylocke as a deadly person trying not to be deadly, Marrow as a woman way too damaged by her own experiences to ever fit in (which includes losing her powers in the big M-Day event), and Fantomex as “a wonderful bundle of extreme coolness and gentle insanity.” It’s an interesting take on the artificially-created mercenary. “It’s been programmed into his genes that he’s literally incapable of conceiving that anything could be greater than himself — which sounds kind of cool, though if you think it through that’s actually a sort of torture. This is a guy forced to spend his life living up to his own messianic expectations of himself. I figure that’s enough to drive anyone secretly insane.”
Spurrier also revealed that he’s bringing Dr. Nemesis back into the fold – a character he wrote with great aplomb in X-Club, and who has been running with Cable and X-Force since its beginning (which makes this book an instant must-read) – and a new, mystery character named MeMe, whom we’ll get to know in issue #2.
“Some stuff has happened. One event in particular — we’re calling it ‘the Alexandria incident’ — which has shaken the international intelligence community to its roots,” Spurrier said of the plot of his first arc. “And mutantkind is bearing the brunt. So Cable has been thinking. He’s realized that the only way mutantkind is going to survive is to start dealing with The Modern World on its terms. Mutants need to start thinking of themselves as a state — without borders, without government, without centralized rule, but still: a disparate country in its own right. And for that? They need to start playing the shadow game. As Cable himself puts it: ‘Nation of mutantkind needs a dirty tricks department. We’re it.'”
On what Rock-he Kim brings to the table? “Style, mood and texture. He’s got a bit of an Adi Granov thing going on, albeit with a very subtle and very attractive wisp of an Asian sensibility about it. He does great faces, great bodies, great weapons and amaaaazing super spy exploding-fist ragemonsters.”
As you can see, Spurrier’s flair comes through even in his interviews, which are usually more staid, straightforward things. Read the way this guy speaks naturally, and imagine what he can do when crafting a story. This is gonna be good, folks. Get on board his Great Space Coaster.
It also bears noting that the very engrossing X-Men Legacy is coming to a close, but Spurrier doesn’t want you to feel too broken up about that – well, maybe he does, because he gets a perverse satisfaction from it, according to his Tumblr – because it was an inevitability. “We all knew the solo David story was going to end sooner or later,” he said. “Stories that don’t have endings aren’t stories: just perpetually drawn-out pantomimes of exponentially increasing irrelevance. I tried to write the tale in as modular a way as possible, so each chunk felt like a story in its own right. Frankly, I only ever expected to get one or at most two chunks before the axe fell: experimental solo comic about a bizarre character traditionally regarded as a big-haired villain? That’s a tough sell. But we got four strange, beautiful, fucked-up, surprising, twisty, convention-defying volumes out of it. Twenty four issues! 480 pages! I’m so, so proud of that, and so thankful to those of you who took a chance on something different.”
He also told CBR that his X-Force work is “not far off the stuff I was doing in Legacy. And we’ll still get a lot of the same sensibilities too. I’m very aware that just because I’m writing a book in which, for the sake of argument, someone headbutts an airplane in mid-air — cough — that doesn’t mean there isn’t infinite scope for the sort of very intimate, very personal, very feels-oriented story lines I’ve been crafting with David Haller. That’s the beauty of comics: the epic and the intimate can so easily coexist. And then, above all, there’s the simple human side of it. A group of soldiers trying to do what they think is right even when it looks and feels wrong.”
“Also, guns. THE SUBTEXT IS GUNS.”
For more Si Spurrier action, check out Six-Gun Gorilla, Extermination, Numbercruncher, and his free weekly webcomic Disenchanted.
