It's time to kill it off, so to say.

You may recall my rant after the first issue of the new X-Force came out. After expressing concerns for the first issue and the premise as a whole, I finished up with the line, "[O]nly one issue’s come out thus far. I’ll keep getting it to see where it goes ..."

Turns out I was lying. Two issues into X-Force and I'm getting out.

The more I look at it, the more I think that I stuck with Kyle and Yost through New X-Men for so long because I enjoyed the characters (created by Nunzio DeFillipis and Christina Weir) and the premise. Yeah, it started off dark after M-Day - and for all sense and purpose, it should have - but surely the youth book would get lighter and happier like it used to be. Nope - instead we got death after death after death to the point where you really stopped caring anymore. In their first six issues, the writers' death count hit double digits. They didn't get through a single arc without at some point leaving a character dead/dying at the end of a cliffhanger. It was the drawing point of the book.

So now that the 'youth' aspect is gone, Kyle and Yost get to keep the 'death' part, and use less-than-appropriate characters to crank it up to 11. Three of the book's cast (thus far) of four have claws, the other has twin knives. They're good for stabbing. Stab, stab, stabby stab, stab. After two issues of stabbing and killing with a very weak plot basis (Cyclops is all for this against Emma Frost's wishes?) I've had enough. Turns out that if I don't enjoy a title enough, I will actually drop it. Hell, New Excalibur lasted four issues before I realized I wasn't going to keep paying for it.

To pull off an extreme-violence book, you need to back it up with well-done storytelling. Garth Ennis has been doing this forever with his Punisher series. Sure, there's a lot of gruesome violence, but it's a compelling read as well. X-Force lacks the latter. It's violence for violence sake - that's the premise of the title, and for me, that's rubbish - and finally I've decided to put my money where my mouth is - or more like back in my pocket and quit buying stuff I don't like.

So X-Force's spot will go to Captain Britain and MI: 13, which I am very interested in. After all, it can't be as bad as New Excalibur, right?