This is "Walkin' Backwards," a new feature where I look into how superheroes who turned to villainy were walked back from their heel turn and turned into superheroes once more.

Today, we look at how Forge got past trying to invade Earth from another dimension.

As you may or may not know, Forge was a longtime ally of the X-Men who eventually became a member of the team in the early 1990s when he and former X-Men Banshee decided to put the X-Men back together after the team had broken up following a stint being based in Australia after the team had faked their deaths in the United States (and had themselves magically erased from all recording devices, so people couldn't prove that they were still alive). Forge's mutant power is that he could create any sort of mechanical device that he could imagine. At the same time, he was also well-versed in magic and was an excellent marksman, as well. The X-Men's initial faked death occurred after they actually DID sacrifice themselves to beat an evil magic guy who had fought Forge in the past known as the Adversary.

If you didn't know better, though, he was just the X-Man with the big guns.

Once the X-Men merged with X-Factor to form a really big team of X-Men (who were then split into two strike forces), Forge pulled back from active membership and took on a support staff position with the team. He was dating Storm during this period. After they broke up, he left the team to go try to take care of Mystique, who had been entrusted to his care following a mental breakdown after the death of her longtime love, Destiny.

During this period, he was also then put in charge of X-Factor, where he brought Mystique with him to work as an operative on the government-sponsored team...

He eventually went back to his support staff position as a character who was just sort of in the background, supplying X-Men characters with amazing inventions whenever it happened to be needed.

Well, as it turned out, those inventions of his went to a very dark place eventually.

In Astonishing X-Men #25 (the first issue by the then-new creative team of Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi), the X-Men discovered an artificially created mutant...

They ultimately discovered that this was all part of a plan where Forge has been experimenting on beings from another dimension that he accessed through an inter-dimensional teleporter known as a Ghost Box.

Now, Earth was poised to be invaded (or "Annexed") by this other dimension. The X-Men confronted Forge about it in Astonishing X-Men #30 and he admitted everything, explaining that it was his part to "fix" the loss of the mutant race following Scarlet Witch altering reality itself at the end of the House of M where she said "no more mutants." So Forge decided to MAKE new mutants...

Forge was prepared to send the X-Men to the other dimension through the Ghost Box to stop the annexation, which would kill them in the process. Instead, Abigail Brand and SHIELD's SWORD branch just destroyed his base of operations, seemingly ending the whole mess (and killing Forge in the process)...

How do you get a hero back from that?

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In Marvel Now! Point One #1, in a story by Dennis Hopeless and Gabriel Walta, we see Forge somehow survived the explosion and he is fighting some sort of brain monster...

Ultimately, we realize that this is all in his mind and Cable has used his telepathy to help Forge cure his insanity...

Forge then went to work with Cable on a new version of X-Force. Later in the series, we learn that the Adversary had been hiding in Forge's mind this whole time...

And while they did not explicitly say as much, it is heavily implied that this was the reason why Forge had gone insane in the first place and thus he was not really ever a villain, not in the typical sense. He was just driven to evil by the Adversary controlling his brain.

So Forge is now firmly on the side of angels.

Okay, folks, feel free to suggest more examples of this sort of thing! Obscure ones, famous ones, whatever! Send your suggestions to brianc@cbr.com!