Rick Remender Archives

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers comic books via omnibuses and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Collecting Avengers Graphic Novels: A Definitive Guide. Last updated November 2024 with titles scheduled for release through March 2025.

Secret Warriors was a rarity when it launched in 2009 – a brand new team book not relying on an existing name and from a creator not only new to Marvel, but new to comics in general!

(You could perhaps argue that the concept was a mashup of the youthful New Warriors and the variable-cast Secret Defenders, that it was a play on Bendis’s Secret War event with Nick Fury, or even that it was an early Hickman hint of his impending Secret Wars(!) – but that’s an ultra-geeky conversion for another time!)

That creator behind the new title was Jonathan Hickman and the rest, as they say, is history.

Jonathan Hickman became one of the most famous writers in comics in the span of just half a decade. Secret Warriors was the first building block of his extensive examination of Marvel’s secret history both on Earth and across the universe, tied together by Nick Fury and culminating in Secret Wars in 2015.

While Secret Warriors was still running, Marvel spun off a new Avengers team at the top of The Heroic Age in fall 2010 called Secret Avengers. Though it had no direct connection to Secret Warriors, the theme was similar – as America’s top cop, Steve Rogers assembled a rotating strikeforce of covert Avengers to tackle the biggest mysteries and threats.

Secret Warriors ended its run as a self-contained series, but the Secret Avengers branding stuck – the title would see additional volumes that collapsed the concepts of the two books, with SHIELD running the secret team of Avengers. Both series bear a strong resemblance to the television show Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD – it has re-used many of Hickman’s concepts and characters from Secret Warriors. [Read more…] about Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers – Collecting Guide & Reading Order

X-Force comic books in a definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated December 2024 with titles scheduled for release through June 2025.

X-Force was born in an act of pure marketing. Over time, it became synonymous with the idea of a team of X-Men that aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

Artist Rob Liefeld grew to be one of the hottest artists in the industry as he drew the final year of New Mutants. Comics were reaching the early height of the speculator craze, and Liefeld wanted to take the team in a new, more X-TREME direction. Thus, New Mutants ended and X-Force was born – a team of proactive young mutants lead by Cable, for whom the ends always justified the means.

Liefeld didn’t last very long on the title before defecting to Image, but X-Force as the proactive X-team has remained part of the X-Men brand ever since. Fabian Nicieza continued writing through Liefeld’s departure until issue #43, setting the tone and voice for many of the recurring characters.

Generally, the X-Force cast consisted of some combination of Cannonball, Boom Boom, Warpath, Sunspot, Rictor, Shatterstar, & Siryn, as mentored by Cable and Domino. The cast also sometimes included Feral, Dani Moonstar, & Karma. (Though Wolfsbane is associated with these characters via New Mutants, at the time she was appearing in X-Factor and Excalibur.)

In 2001, X-Force took a detour to reality TV-inspired, mature-readers X-Statix, followed by brief return by Liefeld and his familiar cast in 2004.

The title returned to popularity and acclaim in 2008 as a team of covert team killers lead by Logan and authorized by Cyclops. This team included connections to earlier incarnations with Warpath, Domino, Wolfsbane, & (eventually) Boom Boom, to which it added Wolverine (X-23) and Archangel. Elixir and Vanisher supported the team.

After that series ended with the “Second Coming” crossover, X-Force returned under the coveted “Uncanny” adjective. There may have never been a series more deserving! Rick Remender penned a fierce, all-time classic story that began as a hunt for Apocalypse but turned into much more. Remender brought Psylocke to the X-Force brand and turned her into its marquee star, along with Grant Morrison’s Fantomex and a team that included Wolverine and Deadpool.

In Marvel Now, Marvel launched not one but two X-Force titles at the end of 2012. Cable & X-Force was a familiar, 90s-tinged version of the team. A new volume of Uncanny X-Force lead by Psylocke and included Storm, Bishop, Spiral, Puck, & Fantomex. Both books were later consolidated into the darkly comedic X-Force (2014) with both Cable and Psylocke, as penned by Si Spurrier.

The title went on a brief hiatus from 2015-2018. The 2017 ResurrXion line replaced it with a familiar-feeling Weapon X title starring Warpath and Sabretooth. Marvel briefly revived the classic Cannonball & Boom Boom cast in 2018 for a 10-issue run by Ed Brisson that followed his Extermination mini-series.

In 2019, the entire X-line launched into the Age of Krakoa from the clean start of Jonathan Hickman’s House of X and Powers of X. This recast X-Force as a combination Krakoan FBI & CIA in a title anchored by Wolverine, Quentin Quire, Domino, and Forge, among others.