THE CREATORS: David Hine and Lan Medina.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2005: The "Underground" arc with the killer earthworm mutant; the two-parter with Billy pining after a waitress; and the House of M crossover miniseries Mutopia X.

I'm going to take District X and Mutopia X together, since to all intents and purposes they're the same comic.  In fact, the final issue of Mutopia X has nothing to do with House of M at all, and actually just ties up the main storyline from the parent title.  Still, must have helped sales.

Obviously, District X was dead the moment Marvel decided to go with the Decimation concept.  You can't have a massive reduction in the number of mutants and still have enough left to populate their own district of New York. 

But with sales below even Rogue and Gambit, this book was heading for cancellation anyway.  In large part, that was probably inevitable - it just wasn't the sort of thing most X-Men fans were looking for from the line.  In a way that's a shame, because more than many X-Men spinoffs, this was a natural extension of the same core themes.  At the end of the day, though, it's still a superhero line and perhaps people just don't come to the X-books for this kind of story. 

We've seen a lot of superhero hybrid books crash and burn over the last couple of years, and perhaps it's time to acknowledge that outside a small subset of superhero readers, there really isn't much of an audience for comics like this.  Creators want to make them, hardcore comics fans want to encourage them, but ultimately not that many readers want to buy them.  For the majority of readers, perhaps when they want something different from a superhero comic, their solution is to buy something that isn't a superhero comic.  Viewing the audience from a perspective within the comics bubble may have led publishers and creators to spend several years targeting a non-existent crossover demographic.

Aside from these inherent difficulties, after a strong start in 2004, District X rather tailed off with its second year.  The second arc, "Underground", was overextended at six issues.  Marvel finally seem to have recognised the problem and shifted to shorter arc which still have suitable break points for the trade paperback. Quite why this obvious solution didn't commend itself to them from the start is a bit of a mystery.

"Underground" suffered from a rather unconvincing villain, a murderous worm-mutant who never seemed anywhere near as dangerous as the script wanted us to believe.  The visual just wasn't quite right - it was hard to believe a creature with those stubby little hands and feet managing to hurt anyone.

But Hine and Medina did much better with the central storyline of Izzy's breakdown and estrangement from his family.  While cancellation forced a rather rushed ending, at least the situation was left somewhat open, with the feeling that they'd turned a corner rather than sorted everything out.  It felt like the right place to leave the characters.

In the midst of all this was the five-issue Mutopia X miniseries, a House of M crossover presumably commissioned back before the axe had fallen.  In retrospect it's a little unfortunate that the book ended up spending four issues looking at the same characters going through much the same events.  Nothing terribly illuminating came out of it, and the issues could have been better used on a full final storyline.  But it did do wonders for sales, on a book which was doomed anyway, and in that sense it's hard to say it was a bad call.

Ultimately, District X feels like a case of potential never quite realised - and not just because it got cut off by a change in the direction of the line.

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