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Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!

Updated: Guide to X-Force

September 6, 2022 by krisis

This week I have another update to one of the original Crushing Comics launch guides that I created back in August of 2010. Despite updating it many times over the years, I decided to tear this one down and re-built it from scratch to make it easier than ever to find the physical and digital collections you want – plus, I added over a dozen new collected editions! Welcome to my all-new, all-different Guide to X-Force.

Guide to X-Force

My last update of the Guide to X-Force was before the first collections from Dawn of X were announced, so clearly I had a lot of updating to do! That not only included collections of Benjamin Percy’s 2019 Age of Krakoa series, but also X-Men Milestones reprints of several major crossovers and several new X-Force Epic Collections announced over the past few years.

That’s not the only big addition to this guide. I’ve added all of the features of the newest guides on the site, including a “Where to Start” section, a summary of both oversized hardcovers and paperback Epics & Complete Collections, digital purchase links, and links to read on Marvel Unlimited!

Like I said: rebuilt from scratch. Even though the guide includes a lot more information, it’s also significantly simpler than it ever has been before.

That rebuild included one subtraction, but it was for a good reason! Since X-Statix made a comeback this year into their all-new The X-Cellent series by original creators Peter Milligan and Mike & Laura Allred, I decided it was time for X-Statix to graduate to it’s own guide! X-Statix is one of my favorite X-runs of all time, but they’ve never really had anything to do with X-Force other than squatting in their title for 14 issues.

I’ll be back tomorrow to share that new X-Statix spinoff guide once I’ve polished it up a bit. For now, enjoy this renewed Guide to X-Force – and, let me know in the comments which X-Force incarnation is your favorite version of the team.

X-Statix & The X-Cellent – Definitive Reading Order & Collecting Guide

X-Statix and X-Cellent comic books in a definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2023 with titles scheduled for release through October 2023.

Grant Morrison isn’t the only author who revolutionized X-Men comic books in 2001.

Like Watchmen, X-Statix is a comic dissecting the convention of superheroes. Except, instead of a dystopian 1984 we get a celebrity-as-reality obsessed modern day with absolutely no overarching plot. About the same amount of sex, though.

Fans revere Morrison’s New X-Men run for good reason. They completely changed the dynamics of mutant society and forever altered the X-Men by splintering Scott and Jean and bringing Emma from the sidelines of the line to the center.

However, New X-Men wasn’t the only ground-breaking run of X-Men comics that kicked off in 2001. The other had an unlikely birth in the pages of X-Force before graduating to its own title: X-Statix.

X-Statix had a humble beginning. It came on the heels of a Warren Ellis-led “Counter X” initiative across the three more-youthful titles of X-Force, Generation X, and X-Man. X-Man was cancelled outright, with its star shuffled into obscurity. Generation X saw its cast spread across several titles (including Emma and later Monet in Morrison’s run).

X-Force took a different approach, bringing in an unlikely indie stars Peter Milligan (2000AD, Shade The Changing Man) and Mike & Laura Allred (Madman) to reboot the title. (Milligan had been writing for Marvel on and off for half a decade by this point, but not to much acclaim.)

True to their indie and often counter-culture comics roots, Milligan and the Allreds completely altered X-Force in the span of a single issue – #116. They changed it from the proactive squad of Xavier’s dropouts to a group of disaffected mutant reality TV stars going on dangerous missions – with the draw of their show being that any of them could die at any moment.

While this sounds like a well-worn concept at this point, Survivor and Big Brother debuted in America less than a year prior to X-Force #116 (and it was another year until American Idol). The idea of a reality-TV ride-along was more rooted in shows like COPS and Real World that came before the early-00s explosion of reality shows.

It wasn’t only the (sometimes brutal) framing concept that make Milligan & The Allred’s run on X-Statix such a revolution. While their mutant cast came with all of the angst you’d expect, it was hardly ever tied into the wider mutant universe apart from Morrison’s concept of there being millions of mutants in the world. Brief appearances by Xavier and Logan were played largely as gags.

The book also broke ground in bringing sexuality and gender identity to the fore for its cast, as well as tackling substance abuse, body image, PTSD, self-harm, and mental health – and, Marvel’s long-established themes of racism and race relations. Each one is framed in terms of what it would mean to be a superhero struggling with that incredibly common human condition. Despite the wry, ironic humor of the series (and its iconic camera-thing, Doop), it could turn on a dime to serious personal topics and outright tragedy. The pop art style of the Allreds made the occasional weight of the subject matter even more surreal.

X-Statix is really weird. Do not think of it as an X-Men comic, or even a Marvel superhero comic. There are no “villains” to speak of, though the team certainly faces ongoing challenges. It is an indie comic about relationships that happens to use the concept of mutants as its framework. It has close to zero connection to X-Men continuity. Think of it like Reality Bites or Chasing Amy – or even Hunger Games – something that is incredibly self-aware and constantly comments on the real world culture surrounding the fiction.

Some of this material reads differently over two decades later. Today, comics in general and X-Men in specific are much more queer and more apt to discuss the trauma inherent in super-heroic life. However, for a Marvel mutant book in the year 2001, there was nothing anywhere close to X-Statix.

After its cancellation in 2004 it seemed that the last gasp of X-Statix would be its Dead Girl limited series in 2006. Jason Aaron later adopted Doop as a mascot in his Wolverine and The X-Men run in 2011, which introduced him to a new generation of fans and yielded an unlikely Doop mini-series in 2014!

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Marvel announced a Giant-Size X-Statix issue alongside Jonathan Hickman’s launch of the Krakoan Age in 2019 … which made an amount of sense, since his status quo meant any mutant could return to the title. After over two years of constant teases by Marvel, Milligan, and the Allreds, their sequel The X-Cellent debuted in February 2022.

New for Patrons: Guide to Infinity Inc.

September 5, 2022 by krisis

I’m back with a third and final foray (for now) into my initial exploration of the JSA after my Guide to Doctor Fate and Guide to Justice Society of America launches over the past week for Pledgeonaut Patrons of CK. For this third guide, I realized that a title I was trying to mash into the JSA guide deserved its own space – just as its cast broke away from the JSA in 1984 to form their own superhero that withstood the transition from Earth Two to Earth One. Of course, I’m referring to JSA’s original next generation, now covered in my Guide to Infinity Inc!

This guide will remain exclusive to Patrons even after the public debut of the JSA Guide in October.

Infinity Inc. occupies a unique and often-forgotten corner of the DC Universe as a book that had as many Pre-Crisis issues set on Earth Two as it had Post-Crisis issues set in DC’s main continuity.

If you’re not familiar with any Crisis other than me, allow me to explain that to you!

In 1984, the Teen Titans were a wildly popular title for DC – effectively, their X-Men and New Mutants rolled into one! If the Teen Titans were the next generation of the Justice League, then it made sense to introduce Infinity Inc. as the next generation of the Justice Society of America (JSA) of Earth Two. The JSA were DC’s Golden Age heroes who kept on living and aging on a parallel Earth to the main Silver Age and Bronze Age Earth where they introduced the Justice League.

At the time, the JSA didn’t even have a present-day title of their own, so the launch arc for their junior team had to be a time travel story set in 1942 in the pages of the JSA’s retcon title, All-Star Squadron! The original team a number of JSA legacy heroes like Alan Scott’s children Jade and Obsidian, The Atom’s godson Nuklon, Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s son Silver Scarab, Wonder Woman & Steve Trevor’s daughter Fury, Batman and Catwoman’s daughter Huntress, Superman’s relative Powergirl, and more.

Infinity Inc. became the home to Earth Two adventures in DC’s Universe in 1984 and 1985, where the team battled the evil Helix – including a character modern readers would come to know as the D.E.O.’s Director Bones! Then, Crisis on Infinite Earths happened. This was DC’s way of simplifying their complex, multi-Earth history – including merging Earth Two into Earth One! [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Infinity Inc.