Every week, we will be examining comic book stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically "overturned" by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent). Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of The Abandoned An' Forsaked. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.
Today, courtesy of my pal, worstblogever from CBR, we look at the complicated relationship between X-Force member Sunspot and X-Force villain Reignfire...
Reignfire showed up in X-Force #26 (by Fabian Nicieza and Matt Broome, with inks by Bud LaRosa and Scott Hanna) as the new leader of the Mutant Liberation Front (formerly led by Stryfe)...
He clashed with X-Force in #27 and 28 (both by Nicieza, with #27 by Broome/LaRosa and #28 by incoming regular X-Force artists Tony Daniel and Kevin Conrad)
In #28, it is revealed that he knows Cable's real name...
After X-Force member Feral defects and joins Reignfire's MLF, Cable blasts her. However, things look bleak...
Note that Sunspot and Reignfire were both at the same place and the same time.
So Sunspot was missing for many months.
In X-Force #43, the last issue of Nicieza's run, with art by Daniel and Conrad, Cannonball gets close to finding his old friend, Sunspot. Instead, they first meet Locus, who explains that her teleportation powers also can take you into the future...
She implies that that is what happened to Bobby and her - they went into the future.
We cut to the MLF, where Dani Moonstar (who was working undercover as a member of the team) has been discovered by the rest of the group and things look bleak for HER...
As you can see, this is tied up with the storyline that led to the Age of Apocalypse.
In the next issue, Jeph Loeb abd Adam Pollina took over the book (Mark Farmer inked Pollina on the first issue), and Loeb quickly got rid of the Reignfire plot by saying that Cable erased that personality from Bobby's mind...
This confirmed that Bobby WAS Reignfire, though.
Things changed, though, in X-Force #78, written by John Francis Moore and drawn by Pollina and Mark Morales...
Dani Moonstar gets the same treatment...
And later, Sunspot meets Reignfire....
In the next issue, we see how Reignfire orchestrated the whole thing...
We also learn how he came about, as Dr. Joshua (who had, indeed, been experimenting on Sunspot back in the early issues of X-Force) made the connection between the two mutants...
Naturally, Reignfire was defeated by X-Force.
He showed up again but was killed before we learned anything more about him.
Thanks to worstblogever for all the helpful research for this piece!