X-Force: 8 best members, ranked by Screen Rant

X-Force has been Marvel's most aggressive mutant team since 1991, and Screen Rant's ranking of its eight best members treats that whole run as one question: who is willing to do the work nobody else wants? The list opens with Hank McCoy and closes with Cable.

Spoiler note first: Screen Rant names specific comic story events and missions below. None of it is film or TV plot, but if you are saving any of these runs, stop here.

The history underneath the list starts in 1991. X-Force debuted with Cable in charge, alongside Domino (then Copycat), Cannonball, Shatterstar, Boom Boom, Warpath and Feral. Everyone except Cable and Domino was a teenager, dropped into what Screen Rant calls a more military branch of the X-Men.

The aggression was the point. Screen Rant says the team was always harder-edged than the other mutant groups and willing to use more than mutant powers, pointing to Cable's giant gun and the two swords Shatterstar carried. Some members were fine with killing, and Screen Rant notes that at one stage it was a requirement of the job.

Krakoa's answer to the C.I.A.

Once Krakoa became home, Screen Rant says X-Force turned into the mutant nation's answer to the C.I.A., handling clandestine missions and preemptive strikes. That work needed someone with questionable morals, and Screen Rant argues Hank McCoy fit better than anyone.

It is not a flattering entry. Screen Rant calls him deplorable and his motives unforgivable, and cites him mind-controlling Wolverine and sending teammates out on a mission he knew would probably kill them. The case for him is narrow: he did what part of the Quiet Council wanted done.

Wade Wilson earned his spot by taking orders, staying stealthy and causing a distraction when the plan needed one. Screen Rant counts two stints on X-Force, one after Cyclops broke the team up and one in the Krakoa era, and calls him a model teammate each time. It grants that he is loud and lands jokes at the wrong moment, then points out that he questioned orders only when they were completely immoral, as when he objected to killing Apocalypse as a child. He joined because he wanted to help mutants.

The team Cyclops asked for

Cyclops wanted a unit that hunted and killed mutant threats, Screen Rant says, and he asked Wolverine to run it. Logan said yes because he would rather get his hands dirty than watch someone else do it.

The job went badly in the ways Logan's jobs usually do. Screen Rant lists a team flung into the future twice, fights against undead mutants with techno-organic bodies, and a trip into the Age of Apocalypse. Wolverine still brought everyone home, or at least took the hits himself.

The founders who kept leaving

James Proudstar is an original member and, per Screen Rant, one of the team's serial quitters. Something always convinces him this is not the life he wants, whether it is the blood or the secrets kept from friends, and he comes back only when called, usually reluctantly. Screen Rant says he hates that the job sometimes requires killing, and would rather be the one who does it than let a friend carry it.

Sam Guthrie was there from the start too, and Screen Rant says he did not stay long, mostly because he outgrew Cable's shadow and moved toward leading the New Mutants. The short stay still counted: Screen Rant credits him with more than one moment where he was the difference between life and death for a teammate, and suggests a less stubborn Cable might have kept him around long enough to lead.

Tabitha Smith is the loyalist. Screen Rant notes she has called Cable a father figure, which is why she trusts him and would follow him anywhere, and says that devotion has a cost. In Tim Seeley's Inglorious X-Force, she believed Domino had tried to kill Cable and would not hear another version of events. Screen Rant reports the next run will put her in charge of a new X-Force team, a move it calls a long time coming.

The second in command

Domino's luck powers keep placing her wherever the team needs her, and Screen Rant says she usually ends up as the right hand to whoever is leading. That is not a ceiling on her. She sees what the bosses miss, and she does not obey blindly: Screen Rant recalls her telling Cable and Wolverine they were being idiots, and both of them taking the note.

The commander

Screen Rant on Cable: "Nathan Summers is X-Force."

Cable closes the list, and the entry does not hedge. He started the group and led it for years, and Screen Rant says a version without him never feels right. Screen Rant says his importance to X-Force mirrors Cyclops's importance to the X-Men, and notes the family link: Scott Summers is his father. It also remembers X-Men: Second Coming, when Logan had the job and Cable took over, because Wolverine knows a commander when he sees one. He is first through the door and last out, watching everyone else's back.

That is the shape of Screen Rant's eight: less a power ranking than a job listing, and one where the interview question is whether you will do the ugly part.

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