In the vast, interconnected web of X-Men comics, the team known as X-Force has always occupied a dark, necessary corner. Unlike the main X-Men teams, who strive for peaceful coexistence and public heroism, X-Force exists to do the jobs too dirty, too violent, or too morally ambiguous for Cyclops or Jean Grey. The 2018 volume of X-Force , written by Ed Brisson with art by Dylan Burnett, arrived at a pivotal moment in mutant history—the so-called "Age of Krakoa" was still a year away, and the mutant race was scattered, hunted, and traumatized following the events of Extermination . In this bleak landscape, Brisson and Burnett crafted a lean, mean, and surprisingly philosophical story about what it means to be a weapon when you are no longer sure who the enemy is.
The core thesis of X-Force (2018) is that survival often requires abandoning moral absolutes. The team—led by the time-displaced young Cable (Kid Cable), alongside veterans like Deadpool, Deathlok, and the monstrous yet tragic Shatterstar—is not a squad of heroes. They are a black-ops unit hunting a mysterious, genocidal organization known as the Mutant Liberation Front (MLF). However, Brisson subverts the typical "good vs. evil" trope almost immediately. The MLF of 2018 is not the cartoonish terrorist group of the 1990s; they are a fractured, desperate resistance movement trying to prevent a horrific future. The real antagonist is revealed to be the child soldier Stryfe (Cable’s evil clone) and the concept of predestination itself. This forces the reader to ask: If you kill a child to prevent a future holocaust, are you a savior or a monster?
Where the 2018 X-Force truly shines is in its rejection of easy answers. By the end of the twelve-issue run, the team has prevented a terrible future, but at a staggering cost. Innocents have died, alliances have been shattered, and the surviving members are left with psychological scars that no healing factor can mend. The final issue does not end with a victory celebration; it ends with Kid Cable standing alone in a rain-swept graveyard, realizing that by trying to change the future, he has become exactly the kind of monster he swore to destroy. It is a bleak, sobering conclusion that echoes the best of 1980s and 1990s anti-hero comics while pushing the genre forward.