X-Force: Under the Gun
By Rob Liefeld, Fabian Nicieza, etc.Marvel Comics, 2017Watching the 2007 Robert Rodriguez film Planet Terror, fans of cheap-looking, exploitative cinema find themselves in Heaven. It's a zombie story in which an experimental green gas smothers small town Texas, and the Sheriff's department joins with a band of colorful locals to battle the undead. Rodriguez celebrates the genre with digitally scratched frames, intentionally missing scenes, and blood squibs the size of trash bags. Campy writing and acting embellish what already watches like an artifact from the 1970s. When the grizzled Sheriff (Michael Biehn, from Terminator and Aliens) realizes that the heroes' last hope is to finally give troublemaker El Wray a gun, he says, “Give him that gun... Give him all the guns.”Studying the cover of Marvel's newly collected X-Force: Under the Gun trade paperback—the dozens of ammo pouches, the absurdly coiffed hair, and yes, the excess firepower—I'm reminded of a time when, “Give him all the guns,” wouldn't have been such a hyperbolic punchline. That time was 1991, after the Cold War supposedly ended and before Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs wet our palette for a decade of brutal cinema. Back then, guns were part of Hollywood's repertoire of cool, alongside the right suit and haircut. Since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre (with 141 further victims shot on campuses across the nation to this day), guns in America have been pronounced both detestable and a fundamental right—but they aren't cool.This collection aims to prove otherwise, reprinting the first fifteen issues of the 1991 X-Force series, created by artist Rob Liefeld and writer Fabian Nicieza. Cable, the team leader, is a walking arsenal who's come back in time to save Marvel's mutants from their own war-torn future. With military gruffness, he commands a crop of super-powered teens whom X-Men founder Charles Xavier had been teaching at his School for Gifted Youngsters (in a previous comic, The New Mutants). The repackaging of these issues coincides with two successful phenomena already underway, the first being Marvel's thick Epic Collections, paperbacks which give completist fans what they've wanted from the beginning of the modern reprint era—deep storyline runs, in remastered color, that fully encompass the publishing life of their favorite titles (there are Thor volumes, for example, numbered 1, 4, and 11, implying more to come).The second reason I'm holding Under the Gun in my sweaty nerd hands is Ryan Reynolds. His X-ceptional performance in the 2016 Deadpool film fueled speculation for a sequel that would feature Cable. Deadpool is another Liefeld/Nicieza creation (along with X-Force members Shatterstar and Domino) whose early appearances in this paperback make some terrible stories quite sought after.Wait, terrible? Surely I mean cheap-looking and exploitative, closing the circle of nostalgia that would allow a fan who bought the issues as a child to appreciate their retro flair as an adult? What's not to love when the evil Thorn rips off half of Cable's face—and Terminator 2: Judgement Day—to reveal a metallic skull? She asks, “What kind of animal are you?” He replies, “The kind...that'll do whatever it takes to survive the fight!”If you read the original X-Force, not just flip through it for kicks, you find that these comics are pile-up-on-the-expressway awful. But because Liefeld's failings as an artist (and writer) have already been mocked for over two decades, I'll start with what I enjoy about his work: the energy. The man knew what twelve-year-olds wanted, so he and Nicieza minimized the plot and character development in favor of issue-long fights. The first issue sees the team in Antarctica, breaking into a secret base of the terrorist group the Mutant Liberation Front. These pages show Liefeld at his career best, inking his own pencil work, and showcasing characters and costumes he designed. Everyone has a petite leprechaun nose, gritted teeth, and squinty eyes.This is questionable stuff for readers who expect comic characters to display a range of emotion—to act, in other words. Yet the figures charge through the panels, abetted by Liefeld's flamboyant designs. Shatterstar, a warrior bred for televised gladiator games in another dimension, has flowing locks, a white costume and cape, and gigantic swords. He steals every scene he's in, not necessarily because he severs hands with abandon (and later just stabs people), but because he's this tense object Liefeld hurls between the first and last page. In horror and action films, white clothes tell the audience blood is coming. While Liefeld may have wanted to give readers a splatter-fest—the character Cannonball is gutted and impaled on separate occasions, but the action happens just off panel—Marvel's editorial standards wouldn't allow it.Then we have Deadpool, who cracks wise during fights like Spider-Man (or tries to: “OUCH! Quit it with the jaw, will you?! Had my mouth wired shut for two whole months a little while ago!”) and can survive cartoonish amounts of violence like Wolverine. He embodies the ethos of the time, one in which stunts—like the “death” of Superman—were foisted upon an emotionally invested audience to goose sales. The violence was then reversed or ignored as needed to continue publishing the title. When Cannonball is “eviscerated” by teammate Feral during a training exercise, he miraculously heals. Later, he's straight-up murdered by the humanoid pterodactyl Sauron only to miraculously heal again, this time because he conveniently belongs to an immortal subgroup of mutants called the Externals.Gimmicks, events, and reboots still rule comics today, but storytelling comes first, especially at Marvel. The recent Secret Wars series, by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic, recombined the fractious Marvel Universe into a fresh, coherent whole. It's also a narrative of such surpassing complexity and beauty that it reads more like a love letter to the audience than a superhero tale. A look back at X-Force, meanwhile, shows the industry suffering growing pains. Liefeld and Nicieza clearly wanted comics to stand alongside the adult action movies they loved. Their efforts resulted in X-Force #1 moving five million copies, making it the second best-selling individual American comic book ever (Jim Lee's X-Men #1, at seven million, is first). So, is Under the Gun that tough to read?Indeed, it is. The collection proves less consistent by the issue, and Liefeld himself only draws half of them. His X-tremely limited visual vocabulary—character illustrations aside—includes walls, boxes, trees, mountains, and motion lines. Sloppy thickets of crosshatching stand in for backgrounds much too often. And when Liefeld can't quite finish a page himself—the compositions of which were likely swiped from some 80s comic—there's a stash of uncredited inkers to shore up his breakdowns (pages noticeably tweaked by Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen are at the end of issue #2).And panel-to-panel, would we understand what's happening without Nicieza's dialogue? Not always. In issue seven, X-Force battles the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. When the Toad says his mutant powers have been enhanced, he smears green stuff on the face of Siryn, a hero who can unleash a “sonic scream.” In the next panel, Toad is struck from behind while explaining that he's using, “A secretion which bonds my hands nicely to your throat—which will also seal the lips—which whisper such dulcet tones of violence!” Siryn's reaction shot shows the secretion on her cheeks, not her throat or her mouth. The following page reveals Shatterstar as her rescuer, and as he sermonizes about teamwork, Siryn is drawn minus the green stuff anywhere. So she wiped it off between panels, right? Multiply this instance of Hey, Who Cares by several dozen and you have a reading experience that's about as substantial as a Twinkie.Other artists represented in Under the Gun make Liefeld look even worse. Todd McFarlane draws an issue of Spider-Man that's included because Web-Head helps the mutants defeat Juggernaut. Even if you loathe his style—rubbery faces and lavish debris—the world McFarlane creates has visual weight beyond esoteric costumes. His heroes and villains enliven the dialogue rather than skirt its influence. Mike Mignola, Hellboy creator, draws a flashback issue, but unlike Liefeld and McFarlane (who along with Jim Valentino, Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, and Whilce Portacio founded the aptly named Image Comics in 1992), his work gorgeously balances line and shadow without the stink of overcompensation. When he gives us a clean close-up of Domino's face, there's a wryness at play and it's like we're meeting her for the first time. Greg Capullo, who becomes the regular X-Force artist during the title's second year, debuts his pencils in the oversized Annual. Here we glimpse the Mojoverse, Shatterstar's home, and the Dark Future that could happen if he became its dictator. The Batman artist, even at the start of his career, offers a wealth of charismatic layouts and emotionally resonant moments, like the conflict in Shatterstar's eyes as he's manipulated by his court Scheduler.Most of the coloring in Under the Gun is provided by Joe Rosas and a slew of others, and complements the art by being not too hot against the eye. But certain issues feature the work of Brian Murray, who saturates the pages with tropical orange, green, and purple. The effect might succeed on an alien world or in a dream sequence, but during a fight against the Juggernaut in NYC, garish swatches that highlight skin, clothing, and provide entire backgrounds make everything feel radioactive.Liefeld and Nicieza's shortcomings keep the opening run of X-Force from being a hip, ironically enjoyable read. Yet I appreciate it as a snapshot from comics' history. A few years before, in the mid-80s, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen revealed the medium to be capable of daring versatility. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was (and still is) a story that absorbed decades of narrative momentum and drove the character in an exhilarating, more mature direction.This makes X-Force a kind of collateral damage. Its creators strove for relevance in the wake of numerous artistic explosions, both inside and out of the comics industry, and within a stridently militaristic world. If Deadpool feels like an unintentional parody of Deathstroke, the Teen Titans' nemesis, it's because he is. If Cable is a grayer version of the Terminator, that's perfectly fine. Successful comics from the early 90s were callow and silly in their attempts to be macho, like the kids reading them. They stole from their betters, treated death like a joke, and I'm glad to know them as well as I do. Today I'm reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur which, all threads in the comics tapestry considered, wouldn't be so good if X-Force wasn't so bad.____Justin Hickey is a freelance writer, and editor here at Open Letters Monthly.
