I’ve been reading X-Men comics for more than 35 years, and my favorite stretch just happened to be in the ’90s, the same period as X-Men: The Animated Series and the upcoming continuation, X-Men ’97 on Disney+. But what made that era great was how the core team connected to other groups who had even more interesting mutant adventures. My personal favorites at the time were X-Force and X-Factor. And it turns out, they might be coming to a small screen near us real soon.
That Marvel exec Brad Winderbaum, the same dude who spilled the beans on Nova earlier, spoke with our friends at BlackGirlNerds.com and revealed that more mutant teams are coming to X-Men ’97, including X-Factor and X-Force!
“I’m just going to tell you the truth, and that is yes. When you go into the ’90s comics, so much of it is about not just X-Men. Not just Uncanny, but like X-Factor, [and] X-Force, they’ll all sort of orbiting the same stories. It is challenging to separate one from the other, and certainly, the show is leaning in.”
The first Peter David run on X-Factor is legendary. The government-sanctioned team consisted of Havok aka Alex Summers and Scott “Cyclops” Summers’ younger brother; Polaris aka Lorna Dane who is Magneto’s daughter also with magnetic abilities; Multiple Man aka Jamie Madrox who was my favorite character; Strong Guy aka Guido Carosella; Quicksilver aka Pietro Maximoff who we’ve seen played in live-action by Evan Peters and Aaron Taylor-Johnson; and Wolfsbane aka Rahne Sinclaire who was played by Maisie Williams in The New Mutants movie ya’ll hated so much.
The first version of X-Force was led a Nathan Summers aka Cable, Cyclops’ adult son from the future. He took over The New Mutants and turned them into a more militaristic squad. The team had a large and revolving group of members, many of which were also seen in The New Mutants movie or in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Of course, we saw a comic relief version of X-Force in Deadpool 2.
The two teams butted heads in the pages of my all-time favorite X-Men crossover, X-Cutioner’s Song, and I loved every page of it.
Considering that aspects of both teams have already appeared in the animated series, having them show up now isn’t too shocking. It’s just cool, and I know I’m not the only one happy about it.
X-Men ’97 hits Disney+ on March 20th.
