Exit Wounds

“Exit Wounds” / “Mister Sensitive” / 
“And Then There Were Six” / 
“What’s One Life?” / “Snikt!”
X-Force #116-120 (2001)
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Mike Allred

Peter Milligan and Mike Allred were given the job of entirely revamping X-Force around the same time Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely came on New X-Men, as part of a larger radical reinvention of the X-Men line led publisher Bill Jemas and editor-in-chief Joe Quesada in the early 2000s. Whereas Morrison and Quitely’s X-Men held on to core X-characters like Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey, Milligan and Allred pretty much only kept the name “X-Force” and created something entirely new on their own. Their X-Force was based on approaching the question of “what if there really were mutants and superheroes?” from a drastically different perspective than anyone done before, with the “Days of Future Past” nihilism replaced with media studies cynicism. 

Milligan and Allred’s X-Force is based on the premise that in the real world, mutants would be celebrities, and superhero teams would be heavily merchandised and motivated primarily by capitalist incentives. The violence they would face in the field would be actually scary and damaging, and members would routinely die horribly on missions. The end of the first issue makes this point quite dramatically, as five out of the eight established members of the team are slaughtered in battle as they attempt to rescue a barely-disguised NSYNC analog. The aftermath of that scene is incredibly gory in a way that deliberately subverts the slick, cartoony look of Allred’s art. X-Force was created by Rob Liefeld to be the more violent and extreme version of X-Men, but had never come close to being as bloody and shocking as Milligan and Allred’s debut.

The first issue establishes the stakes of Milligan and Allred’s story, but more importantly sets up a tone of paranoia and “live fast, die young” hedonism that is central to the series through the end of its first year and into its second phase, when the book is rebranded as X-Statix. There’s a high turnover rate in X-Force/X-Statix membership through the end, which allows Milligan and Allred to play with different celebrity archetypes as they go along. It’s also meant to feel somewhat like a reality TV show, and Milligan deliberately apes that tone when introducing a new batch of members in the second issue. 

Some characters are more “types,” like the intellectual grad student Vivisector, or the out-and-proud token gay Bloke, or emo boy team leader Mister Sensitive. Others are obviously patterned on established celebrities – the closeted b-boy Phat is a thinly veiled Eminem, The Anarchist is basically Dennis Rodman, and U-Go Girl is an amalgam of several troubled starlets but whose given name Edie is a nod to doomed Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. Spike Freeman, the despicable and sadistic venture capitalist creep bankrolling X-Force could be any proto-Silicon Valley bro but is plainly patterned on Liefeld as a meta joke. 

Milligan is a tricky and sometimes frustrating writer whose work is always at least somewhat interesting on a conceptual level but whose quality of execution varies wildly. He can be brilliant or he can be tedious and it all mostly depends on how excited he is about an idea in the moment. When he’s at his best, as in Shade the Changing Man, Human Target, and X-Force, his writing feels wired and hyperactive, as though he’s improvising and free-associating from page to page. But even his best work tends to taper off as that buzz wears off, and he sticks around on series a bit longer than he probably should, and that absolutely was the case about midway through X-Statix. It’s always pretty clear when he’s just clocking in, but as a professional writer myself, I totally get it. It’s a living. The weakest Milligan work is still a lot more imaginative and charming than most other mainstream comics writers, and his consistent obsession with identity – as both a fixed and fluid thing – has always been well ahead of his time. 

Milligan is fully in the zone in his first year of X-Force, especially in the first run of issues at the start where he and Allred are really popping off with genuinely fresh ideas for X-Men comics. You can sense their giddy joy at what they’re getting away with – the jokes, the commentary, the sex, the gore. It’s mostly arch and cynical, but there’s some heart to it, mainly in the creators’ obvious affection for U-Go Girl in particular. She’s never presented as “likeable” but she’s easy to love in all her ambitious pettiness and glamourous messiness. When she dies at the end of the first year, it’s a “kill your darlings” move that removes the heart and soul of the series. Subsequent female leads are never quite as interesting, and of the other major characters, only The Anarchist is anywhere near as compelling. 

X-Force/X-Statix is very rooted in early 2000s pop culture but it’s remarkable how well this all holds up. If anything has changed, the world has only become more like this series, and social media has given us an endless wave of disposable pop culture mutants. Clearly the creators themselves feel this way, as midway through writing this post a new iteration of this series by Milligan and Allred called The X-Cellent has been announced for release in 2020. Should be interesting to see if they have an interesting take on mutants in the Instagram era.