Another nice quiet week, at least by 2005 standards, with only four X-books.  And hey, one them's cancelled with this week's issue, reducing the number of ongoing titles to a mere seventeen!  (Of which, to be fair, another three - X-Force, Mystique and NYX - are also due to be cancelled over the coming months.)  And with a load of recent launches selling dreadfully, there will surely be more to come.

As long as they don't all get replaced, we might finally be starting to crawl back towards a sane number of X-books.  Or at least, a number which is merely mentally ill, rather than outright deranged.

One of the books on the endangered list is District X, which launched to a good critical reaction but hasn't managed to translate it into actual sales.  With sales already below the cancelled Emma Frost, it surely can't be long for this world unless it turns things around sharpish.  The solicitations show another six issue arc starting with issue #13, which is remarkably generous on Marvel's part.  But the book must be facing an uphill struggle to get past issue #18.

It would be nice at this point to sing the book's praises.  And the current "Underground" story is okay.  But it's not really up to the standards set by early issues.  Hine has some interesting ideas about a more realistic version of the Morlocks, but four issues into this storyline it seems like we're going round in circles a bit.  The tension is meant to be that Bishop has to solve the problem within his deadline, or the SWAT teams will go in and kill everyone.  And so Bishop duly gives it a go, but what we get is a scene where he approaches the underground community and asks nicely if they'd mind coming to the surface. And then leaves.  It's not much of a plan, is it?

I'm also in two minds about the direction being taken with Bishop's partner, Izzy.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the speed of that direction.  In only a few issues he's slid from being a basically nice guy with some flaws, to a pill-popping asshole.  Of course, Izzy was always a little bit morally ambiguous - he was introduced in issue #1 trying to cover up for the fact that his partner had killed somebody - but this personality shift seems to come over him too quickly.  It doesn't ring true.

Still, there's a lot of good material in here as well.  The details are one of this book's biggest strengths, and characters such as Winston's parents are impressively fleshed out in a very short space, making them feel like proper personalities when in most hands they'd just be there to advance the plot.  The flashback scene catching up on the kid from this book's trailer story in X-Men Unlimited is nicely done as well.

So it's a good issue.  But the early issues of this title promised great things, and having set itself those high standards, District X isn't quite getting there at the moment.

Rating: B

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