74 – X-FORCE

Subject: X-Force
Roster: Cable, Cannonball, Feral, Boom Boom, Warpath, Shatterstar, Siryn
First Appearance: New Mutants #100, April 1991

One thing you can say about Liefeld and X-Force, they desperately demanded your attention, even when in the end, that’s about all they were good for. Hell, I fell for it pretty hard as a kid, though clearly my artistic allegiance lay elsewhere.

Speaking of which, this is a terrible team picture, with a third of the card taken up by a miniature Cable carrying a HUGE gun. The weird proportions and unimaginative composition almost seems like an homage or fuck-you to Liefeld himself. Everyone’s individual cards are expressive masterpieces by comparison.

The card’s back again forgoes a picture of the team’s base, even though it specifically states in the X-Tra Card that they were operating “out of an abandoned Sentinel base in the Adirondack mountains.”

I have two copies of X-Force #1. One is one I’ve had for years (since read and reread), and another still sealed in its polybag with the trading card inside. I got that one in a huge box of comics selling for a dollar each at a Goodwill store (I also picked up two copies of the deluxe X-Men #1 in that same box). Earlier this year I attended a signing with the original Image founders celebrating Spawn #200. I brought my X-Force, but there on the counter the store had another pile of X-Force #1′s, still sealed, selling for a dollar each, and they didn’t seem to be running out.

God knows how many of those they printed (this link claims around 1.75 million, dwarfed by X-Men #1′s 8 million!), and with a 1991 cover price of $1.50, it just goes to show how much of a bubble the 90′s speculator market really was.