THE CREATORS: Joss Whedon and John Cassaday.  By the way, I'm dropping the fill-in art count this year because it's really no longer an issue.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2005: The Danger Room comes to life and fights the X-Men.  And then the book goes on hiatus while Joss Whedon works on Serenity.

Astonishing X-Men is supposed to be the flagship of the line, filling the role left vacant when Grant Morrison ended his run on New X-Men.  And in one respect, it does the job nicely.  It consistently sells very, very well.

But as a flagship, it isn't really doing the job.  For one thing, it's hardly ever there.  Astonishing shipped a mighty five issues in 2005, and most of those were late.  You cannot have an absentee flagship.  You can't build the line around a comic that, to all intents and purposes, doesn't exist most of the time.

On top of that, Joss Whedon isn't using Astonishing to set the agenda for the X-books in the same way that Morrison did.  Whether you liked Morrison's stories or not, at least he was unequivocally striking out for new ground, compass in hand, with a clear direction in mind.  Astonishing doesn't seem to have any such strong ideas about where the X-books should be going, or what they're about. 

If there's a central theme to this book, it's that Joss Whedon really loves the X-Men, and wants to share that with us.  Which is great, but it's hardly groundbreaking.  At its best, Astonishing is a good book in the superhero formula, raised above the norm by John Cassaday's frequently excellent artwork.  There's a place for that, but it doesn't provide the X-books with any sort of agenda or direction.  Two or three years ago, the big ideas of the X-books was the massive increase in mutants, the expansion of the school, the introduction of District X, and so forth.  In 2005, the X-books' big selling point is "Hey, we signed Joss Whedon!"

Even taken as a freestanding comic, Astonishing disappointed in 2005.  The first arc was a solid piece of work and a highly impressive piece of craftsmanship.  "Dangerous", on the other hand, featured ropey plotting, a paralysed man driving a truck, and a power-of-love ending.  And the whole premise of the Danger Room developing sentience is straight out of a filler episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  It might have made for a decent two-parter, but at six issues the thin concept was hopelessly overextended.  Rumours even circulated that much of the arc had been ghostwritten from Whedon's outline.  I have no idea whether that's true, but its plausibility is telling in its own right.  Astonishing was still often quite good in 2005, but it was never great.  And when the big selling point is A-list creators, "quite good" isn't really enough.

With the shift of emphasis to Decimation, it looks like Marvel have finally realised they need a stronger central theme for the X-books than an occasional Joss Whedon script.  Nonetheless, despite the headaches, Marvel have promised another year of Whedon/Cassaday Astonishing in 2006.  Except the book is going to be brought back as a bimonthly, so presumably "one year" actually means six issues, or one more storyline.

Since Whedon has ongoing storylines to resolve, it's hardly surprising that he's going to come back and write them.  Hopefully the 2006 arc will see a return to the standards of the first six issues, now that Serenity is out of the way.  Beyond that point, I'm not honestly that keen to see him stay.  He understandably doesn't have time to commit to a monthly schedule, and it's not as though he's doing anything dramatically unexpected with the franchise.  It's beautiful, of course... but John Cassaday could draw the phone book and it would be beautiful.

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