A familiar superhero team, but not as you know them. Say hello to X-Force, number 99.
You can't go walking in the comic book world without stepping in an X-Men spinoff-shaped cowpat, but one spin-off in particular is worth your precious time: X-Force. Created by Rob Liefeld, who earned his graphic novel world fame on Marvel's New Mutants, X-Force is for people who grew up with X-Men but are looking for something tougher.
What you need to decide is which X-Force will be your favourite? The New Beginning, where a young group of mutants are groomed to be media starlets? Or maybe Angels and Demons, where the X-Men are given black commando uniforms and carry out black-ops style missions? There's a lot for you to choose from, and hard to decide which comes out on top.
Liefeld gave the X-Men universe big, sharp teeth and set it loose on the page. The themes that dominate the graphic novel are violence, retribution and cruelty, with blood splatters and forced-heroin injections everyday stuff. For the mature graphic novel reader, X-Force offers violence and destruction that is difficult to top, and throws in good characters to boot.
So, the characters. First off, the X-force team are not the X-Men (though later Wolverine leads the team). Liefeld started his saga with Boom Boom, Cable, Cannonball, Domino, Feral, Shatterstar and Warpath. A rag-tag bunch of well-drawn characters, this roster gave fan's heroes they could root for, as well as stories that drew you in.
This, couple with Liefeld's artwork, made X-Force a major success. So successful that it is currently the second highest-selling American comic ever. No mean feat, yet we also know that numbers don't mean everything. After all, one Saturday night X-Factor pulls in more viewers than the entire five series of The Wire. So what we have to ask ourselves is, does X-Force earn it's status as one of the top graphic novels? Well, just ask most of the people who have read it. They'll consider your question, and whisper, "yes".