Rick Remender on Uncanny X-Force may be hailed as one of the most dangerously ambitious epics of fearless writing, senses-shattering and violent storytelling in Marvel history.
Remender tells Comic Book Resources he’s leaving the title with December’s Uncanny X-Force #35. The last chapter of Final Execution will be the series finale.
“There were a lot of different factors involved. It was a very tough decision to make and it came down to a conversation I had about it with Kieron Gillen about how long I would stay past this. He said, “Know when to get off the stage.” That’s something that we maybe overlook.
I’m now doing “Uncanny Avengers” and “Captain America” and I realized that in order for me to do those and not want to blow my brains out, I might have to walk away from “Venom,” “Secret Avengers” and “Uncanny X-Force.” That was a bummer because I put so much into building them and getting the trains out of the station. I love all the characters, but that’s just the reality. With “X-Force,” I feel like this final story, which I’m very excited and have been building towards for a while now, pretty much wraps up everything we’ve been doing. It says everything I wanted to say about a kill squad while also really digging into the X-Universe that I loved so much as a kid growing up. So it really did come down to the fact that it was time to get off the stage.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to stick a nice landing with “Final Execution” and people will really enjoy it, so the series will never have that part where it tapered and stopped being as good. That’s the upshot. You do your best work — and we all have — and then you wrap things up and walk away from it.”
In this week’s Uncanny X-Force #31 what’s left of Wolverine’s unit takes the fight to the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
Remender is moving on to Uncanny Avengers and Captain America. Marvel has teased Sam Humphries and Ron Garney on a Marvel NOW book with the teaser KILLERS – a perfect description of Wolverine’s black ops squad. The series may be coming to an end but it’s a good bet the X-Force concept will live to kill again.
By Editor