So what's happened? Well, Black Tom Cassidy and the Juggernaut took a bunch of businessmen hostage at the World Trade Center and X-Force (with the help of special guest star, Spider-man!) had to stop them, a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants teamed up with the Morlocks and attacked the team at their own secret headquarters, and then Domino was revealed to be a traitor working for the mysterious Mr. Tolliver, leading to the destruction of their HQ.... at the same time a SHIELD strike team with a grudge against Cable shows up for a fight. Oh, and then Domino is revealed to be an imposter and the real Domino was really Tolliver's captive the whole time. So Cable killed him. And even with all this action, they still had time for a couple filler, nothing's happening, let's take a couple pages to check in on each team member while they train for battle issues.
The World Trade Center issues were kind of interesting. They blew up one of the towers! Oops. Also, that story contained a crossover with Spider-man so I kind of missed out on part of that one. Mind you, I have that issue of Spidey, but I'm reading through X-Force, if I was going to try to read all the crossover events that pass through I'd never finish!
In issue 3, right before the Spider-man issue, we discover some new and exciting lesser known mutant powers! For example, did you know Black Tom had the ability to suck in and regrow his beard at will? Check it out!
Amazing! And as if that weren't impressive enough, check out Gideon's hair:
In the first panel he's got that stupid, gravity defying ponytail. In the second, he seems to have added a mullet? But wait, in panel three you see that it's not a full mullet, it's just long hair right behind the ears. But that's not all folks! When he gets attacked, he seems to lose control of his hair growing mutant power and everything goes awry:
MUTANT POWERS!
Issue 4 was also cool in that it was sideways. You had to turn the book 90 degrees and flip the pages up as you read. You don't see that very often, so that's neat. According to Wikipedia, Rob Liefeld had previously gown in trouble while working for DC Comics because he drew an entire issue of Hawk & Dove sideways without the editors' OK.
Also cool was issue 8's guest penciler, Hellboy's Mike Mignola! It's pretty cool. Mignola makes no attempt to ape Liefeld's art style or anything Marvel was doing art-wise at the time, and just does all the characters in his own bold, heavily shadowed style. It's kind of awesome. According to this Rob Liefeld blog entry (which also contains an interesting comparison of Liefeld's layouts with Mignola's final pages), he was getting fatigued and needed someone to spell him for an issue. That seems a bit fishy though, as Liefeld would only draw one more issue of X-Force... ever! He was having issues with Marvel over merchandising rights for X-Force and this was when he left along with other Marvel superstars like Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee to form Image Comics. So was he really just needing a breather, or was he already on his way out by then? You start seeing ads for his debut Image title, Youngblood as early as the next issue.
I'd like some more behind the scenes information about this period. Liefeld hadn't actually been scripting issues since it was called The New Mutants (he was plotting them while Fabian Nicieza was writing them). So since he stopped drawing issues and was only credited with plotting from 10-12, how much input did he really have on those issues? Was Nicieza just writing based on some notes Liefeld left for him at that point? Did Liefeld have grand plans in store for X-Force that never came to fruition? Tolliver gets killed in issue 15 after he was done even plotting, did he have more plans for him as a villain that never happened? Did he have plans for a full story arc involving the Externals and Cannonball being the immortal savior of mutantkind or was it just a loose idea he came up with that would have eventually faded away and gotten forgotten anyway? It'd be interesting to know.
It's also kind of strange to me that there was no announcement of any kind in the book about Liefeld's departure from the book. If you were reading at the time (pre-internet) the only way you would have known he was leaving the book was from people lamenting it in the letter column. I understand he probably wasn't leaving on the greatest of terms, but he had created what was one of the best selling comics on the shelves, you'd think they'd at least mention he was leaving.
Finally, now that Rob Liefeld has left the building and I won't get to enjoy his beautiful artwork anymore, let's send him off in style with this.
Well, time to get lost in X-Cutioner's song (An X-Men crossover saga). And I don't mean get lost in the story, I mean literally not knowing what's going on. I've been informed (by the letter column) not to read issue 16 until I've read two issues of X-Men and an issue of X-Factor. Then I'll miss the same amount of story before it returns in issue 17 and again for 18.
Currently reading: Roadwork by Richard Bachman
In the stereo: Sings Live by Colin Meloy
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