USAToday: Dennis Hopeless, who's moving from Avengers Arena to Avengers Undercover in the new year, and Sam Humphries, the Avengers A.I. writer whose creator-owned Sacrifice was just released in hardcover, talk with USA TODAY about what's coming in the crossover and their own history with X-Force, a team that began in a 1991 issue of New Mutants.
Q. Since launching each of your own X-Force titles early this year after Rick Remender's black-ops take on the group, have you kept in touch with each other during the course of your runs?
Hopeless: When we first took over the books, we had very casual conversations about how there were two X-Force books and we should probably cross them over, especially with the Cable/Hope/Bishop connection. But that was all really preliminary while we got the books off the ground.
Humphries: Dennis and I have known each other for a long time, and both of us were really looking forward to collaborating on a story like Vendetta.
Hopeless: The two books don't have that much in common, thematically and just from a basic storytelling standpoint. Mine's more of a '90s action comic and Sam's is more of a weird David Lynch cerebral story that plays with a lot of characters from Rick Remender's run.
It takes the two different kinds of X-Force – the chocolate and the peanut butter – and interweaves them.
Humphries: There's no fan of X-Force who is going to pass up on seeing what happens when you get Cable and Bishop and Hope back together in the same room or on the same battlefield. That's an encounter everybody wants to see.
Q. So, folks can expect a bunch of drama with this trio.
Humphries: There's a lot of pent-up anger and bad blood and bitterness between these three, and previously the only thing separating them were about 5,000 years of time in the future: Bishop was in the 68th century, Hope and Cable had settled back down here in the present, but none of these characters are exactly known for holding off or being subtle or walking away from a fight.
Now having Bishop back in the present gives us an opportunity to really let loose all of those emotions that these characters have had.
Bishop is like this bogeyman figure in Hope's childhood — he ruined it, he turned her childhood into a war zone. And Bishop has come to the point in his life where he has realized that was wrong, and that's something that's almost impossible to atone for. So he's got all these pent-up emotions as well as trying to figure out how to make it right with Cable and Hope, if that's even possible.
Hopeless: Cable and Hope have been pretty preoccupied with their relationship and what's been going on with Cable's X-Force. They've been running all over the globe trying to save the world while also being tracked by Havok and the Uncanny Avengers.
At the end of our previous story arc, they've gotten their stuff together — Hope is now part of Cable's team and they're working together and they finally have this relationship where it makes sense. The worst possible thing that could happen at this moment was for Hope to find out that Bishop's in the present, and this bogeyman from her past is in the here and now and she wants to go deal with that. It's a worst-case scenario.
Humphries: And then we throw Stryfe into the mix. He's basically Cable's clone — Cable with a tortured childhood and years and years of rejection. That's another powder keg of bad blood we're throwing into this bonfire of a story.
Q. Is it explosive from a start, or are you guys building up to a hellacious climax?
Humphries: It pretty much goes to hell right from the beginning. (Laughs)
Hopeless: Not every character is involved in the initial explosions of the thing, but for a couple of them, yeah, it's pretty rough. It just keeps snowballing and getting worse for everyone as it goes along.
Q. What will be the most surprising thing about this story for longtime X-Force readers?
Humphries: The matchups between the members of Uncanny X-Force and Cable and the X-Force and how they're going to shake out on the battlefield.
Q. Will there be alliances and friendships tested?
Hopeless: Definitely. These characters, they're not unfamiliar with one another — there's a lot of history between the two teams and a lot of immediate animosity. Cable is not pleased there was another team of X-Men out there that knew Bishop was in the present and didn't contact him to let him know. Now his daughter is in the mix with this thing out of nowhere.
Humphries: The whole story wouldn't have happened if all these characters got along perfectly and they all trusted each other 100% and they all kept up and talked on the phone every day. Those kind of relationships would have stopped "Vendetta" before it even started.
The whole story comes down to these characters who have known each other for years, have fought together and have gone through some pretty intense grinders in their lives and come out the other side changed and not really knowing what to make of each other.
Psylocke and Colossus have been through a ton in the past few years — Psylocke has had to come to terms with her bad karma coming out of Rick's Uncanny X-Force and Colossus went through a lot during Avengers vs. X-Men. That doesn't even touch on the intense relationship between Storm and Forge.
It does come down to how your characters are going to collide and how their histories impact those collisions.
Hopeless: And the obvious sexual tension that will occur between Puck and Boom-Boom.
Humphries: That's almost more obvious than Bishop, Cable and Hope.
Q. What's your favorite aspect of each other's book?
Humphries: I loved Dennis' high concept right from the get-go: This super team that is unfairly villainized as terrorists and they can never catch a break, they can never relax, they can hardly ever refuel or reload their ammo but they're driven by this higher calling of saving the world from threats that only they can see or perceive.
His lineup is so solid — they all approach that central concept from different directions, but every character has a different relationship with every other character in that book.
Hopeless: Sam's book is just chock full of cool. I love so many little details about it, from Psylocke's crazy flying Bentley to Spiral as a DJ to the fire-breathing demon bear that lives inside Psylocke's head. It's just the coolest X-Force book ever.
I love all those parts, and I love the idea that I get to play with them inappropriately in this crossover.
Q. The X-Men have been around for 50 years, but X-Force has only been around for 22 — it's just out of college compared to the old man. What's different about tackling an X-Force book than other X-comics?
Hopeless: When (Marvel editor in chief) Axel Alonso first talked to me about X-Force, he said one of the cool things is it's a title that always reinvents itself. Every new incarnation of X-Force is a different thing, from Peter Milligan and Michael Allred's X-Statix X-Force to the grim, crazy, dark death squad after that with Craig Kyle and Christoper Yost to Rick's book that took it in a completely different groundbreaking direction.
When we started, they were these two books that had almost nothing in common other than the fact they're awesome and called X-Force. We could change what X-Force means and what X-Force does.
Humphries: The X-Men is a high-profile franchise to say the least. It's great to have the history and the strength of those characters in your books, while also being a little left of center and on the edge of the spotlight. When you're off to the side, you can get away with a lot of stuff you can't get away with in the main books. Like having a psychic bear live in Psylocke's head.
It's intimidating to be in the X-Men universe, but if you have that kind of freedom, you can start to relax and have fun. When you start to have fun, that's when the really cool stories start to come out.
Q. What were your introductions to X-Force?
Humphries: I bought the very first X-Force No. 1 by Fabian Nacieza and Rob Liefeld the day it came out (in 1991).
Hopeless: Sam and I were the perfect age for that stuff when it was coming out. That early stuff had a big effect on me as a kid.
My favorite X-Force run of all time was Rick's. What Rick did in the previous incarnation of the book is some of the best Marvel comics of the past 10 or 15 years.
Humphries: I love Rick's run a lot obviously but I think there's a lot to be said of the Milligan/Allred run because it's completely unlike any other superhero comic, much less any X-Force comic.
Q. Is there anything that you've borrowed from the original '91 team or conceit?
Hopeless: My book is all about shoulder pads and giant guns that are impossible in real life. What I tend to do is jump into the characters' heads and do a lot of relationship drama on top of whatever else I'm doing. With my X-Force, I try to make it as much of a throwback to that old early '90s action movie aesthetic while also doing my fun Colossus/Domino relationship drama and the Hope/Cable father/daughter stuff in there because that's how my mind works.
I leaned into that stuff as hard as I possibly could because if you have a Cable-run X-Force book with Domino and a bunch of other crazy characters in there, it just makes sense.
Humphries: I always loved the misfits aspect of the original X-Force. These are a bunch of characters thrown together by different circumstances and I loved the character dynamics that come out of that.
That's the kind of web I try to weave in Uncanny X-Force. It generates all these interesting conversations and conflicting emotions and sticky motivations, and then you throw them into this crazy world on the bleeding edges of the Marvel Universe and you get a lot of interesting conundrums out of it.
Hopeless: You also got to have your team fight evil versions of themselves, which is what constantly happened in that first one.
Humphries: Yeah, exactly.
Hopeless: It's a little more literal in your book.
Humphries: For fans of classic X-Force stuff, we haven't seen Stryfe in a while and this Stryfe's coming back with a new agenda. We have a lot of callbacks and references to those old classic stories, and fans of those are going to find a lot to love in "Vendetta."
Q. Is this crossover the greatest X-Force story ever told?
Humphries: Absolutely. 100%, of course. (Laughs) There's a lot of great X-Force stories and runs out there, but there's never been X-Force vs. X-Force. That sets this story head and shoulders above any comic book ever published.
“For so long, my life has been out of control. Chaos and serendipity, wrapped in insanity. I have suffered, I have lost. Not just my life, but my very soul, my self. But no more. Now I know who I am.” – Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Braddock, daughter of Otherworld, mutant, telepath, telekinetic, defender of the realm and, above all, X-Man.
