Looking back at John Francis Moore and Adam Pollina's 'X-Force'

With the recent news that pioneering comic-book website Newsarama has finally been fully shut down, I thought I would dig up this 2003 article I wrote for the site on John Francis Moore and Adam Pollina's run on Marvel's X-Force, my first-ever piece of comics-related journalism. Presented as originally published, painful overwriting intact.

Sure, X-Statix is all cool and meta and probably too smart for the average comics reader, but do you remember when it was X-Force? Not X-Force by Milligan and Allred, and not even X-Force by Warren Ellis and a team of trained monkeys, but X-Force by John Francis Moore and Adam Pollina, two names not often on the tips of fanboys’ tongues these days. Moore and Pollina chronicled the adventures of Marvel’s non-postmodern former New Mutants for 20 issues from 1997-1998 (Moore continued with artist Jim Cheung for 17 more). While they didn’t set the sales charts on fire and didn’t reinvent superhero comics with a wink and a nudge, they did turn in some of the most underrated stories of the 90s, a time when other X-books were mired in constant creative turmoil and endless crossovers. 

For those of you who’ve somehow managed to avoid learning about Marvel’s mutant characters, X-Force was spun off from New Mutants, a book about teenage students at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters (later the Xavier Institute), in 1991 as a vehicle for Rob Liefeld to create a new, supposedly “edgy” version of the teen mutant team. Mainly that meant giving them very large guns. Liefeld (as was his wont) didn’t last too long, and a string of writers and artists (including Fabian Nicieza, Jeph Loeb, Greg Capullo and Tony Daniel) subsequently worked on the book, moving it back toward mainstream mutant continuity.

Moore and Pollina were allowed to do something rare with comic book characters—have them grow up—and thus the teens of New Mutants and the early days of X-Force turned into college-age young men and women who were looking to find their identities. “They were my age, imperfect and confused...just like me,” Pollina says of the characters who populated the book. When Moore took over as writer from Jeph Loeb, he set about putting the group on its own path, away from mentor (and Liefeld creation) Cable. “I honestly didn’t have much love for the posturing and angry whining of the Liefeld era,” Moore says. “Most of all, I wanted to get rid of Cable. I hated the fact that every X-team book featured an adult mentor/teacher/sergeant. I wanted to write the team on their own.”

Most of all, it seemed like the strangest thing the X-Force characters did was actually have fun. Warpath, Siryn, Boomer, Sunspot, Rictor, Shatterstar and Dani Moonstar (all members at one point or another during the Moore/Pollina era) were young people doing what young people did—only they also had superpowers and had to deal with those pesky villains. The book hit a high point when the team finally ditched Cable and hit the open road, forsaking the standard X-Mansion, Blackbird and all the other trappings of mutant team-dom. “I think the heart of that storyline was an exploration of what it meant to be nineteen or twenty and on your own for the first time,” says Moore. “That’s the age when people break away from the authority figures in their life, and try on new clothes, attitudes, boyfriends and girlfriends to see who they might be.”

The X-Force kids hit roadside diners, amusement parks, and, perhaps most famously, the “Colossal Man” festival, a thinly-veiled take-off on the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. “For me the high point of our collaboration was the Exploding Colossal Man issue,” Moore recalls. “All the characters were so beautifully drawn and their body language so expressive.” Moore’s off-beat stories combined with Pollina’s distinctive, angular drawing style set the book apart from its mutant brethren, something the creators describe as an organic process. “Honestly, I was totally clueless,” Pollina says about his drawing. “To this day, I’m still learning how to draw. I will always be a student to the medium. My flaws became the ‘style’ you know.” Moore, too, was only doing what came naturally: “I always felt that my job was to try to distinguish X-Force from the other X-titles. It’s a difficult task to do,” he says.

While Moore and Pollina’s X-Force had decent fan buzz during its run, it’s held up even better over time as an example of the best kind of superhero storytelling: character-driven and emotionally affecting but still full of action, pulling in different elements from a vast continuity but still remaining focused on the story at hand. Looking back, both Moore and Pollina see it as a career highlight: “Until just now, I never realized just how much I actually grew during that period in my life,” Pollina says. “It was some of the best times I’ve ever had in the industry.” Moore agrees: “I knew I was fortunate to work with two really fantastic artists over the course of my tenure on the book, and I believed that we were producing comics that were well worth the cover price.” 

Neither Moore nor Pollina confesses to reading many X-comics these days, and that’s probably for the best: Their version of X-Force might look out of place in the brave new Grant Morrison world. But ask almost any die-hard mutant fan who’s stuck through thick and thin and even thinner: Quietly, with very little attention and fan-fare, Moore and Pollina made X-Force the best mutant book of its day, and even though that day has passed, the book still stands up.