The numbers really are starting to thin out at last.  Excalibur died two weeks ago - and now that we know something about the replacement book, it's clear that it's genuinely dead, and New Excalibur is something else entirely.  Gambit dies next week.  Rogue dies the week after that.  And this week, it's District X's turn to bite the dust.

Oh, alright - District X isn't entirely dead yet.  It's going to linger on for another five months as the House of M tie-in miniseries Mutopia X.  And there's always the outside possibility that it might stage a comeback after that.  But, given the book's appalling sales figures, it's a fairly safe bet that this is it.  RIP District X, May 2004 to June 2005.  We gave you good reviews at first, and then basically forgot about you.

To an extent, District X has been the victim of Marvel's ludicrous obsession with six-parters.  In the course of fourteen issues, it's got through three storylines - two six-parters and a closing two-parter.  Guess which one didn't feel padded?  In fact, they really needed to get through a few more stories before coming to this one.  What looked at first like a throwaway filler piece to round out the remaining issues turns out to be trying to kick off a new storyline - but it's a bit late for that.

The idea is that Bishop is trying to do his job as a good, honest cop, but the people he's working for have their own ideas.  In a nice twist, this time the corrupt highers-up aren't anti-mutant at all.  They're just all too eager to cover up (and, if necessarily, shoot) anything which might interfere with their primary goal of promoting good relations between humans and mutants.  Bishop would rather investigate it, but we can't be having that.  In an ideal world, Bishop would have done more than two cases by this point, thus making it possible for the villains to claim with some credibility that they can no longer put up with his high moral principles.  As it is, they seem a bit impatient.

More to the point, though, it's always hard to get worked up about new storylines starting in the closing pages of a dead comic, because we all know that they're not going anywhere.  It's basically the creators saying, "See, if more of you had bought the comic, this is what would have been in year two."  It seems a bit of a waste, really.

As a transition into a new storyline, this would have worked rather nicely.  As it is, it's an odd little coda nailed onto two unrelated storylines.  Not really the best way for the book to go out - but then, with the next five months already committed to House of M, I suppose wrapping everything up at this stage wasn't really on the cards.

Rating: B

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