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THIS WEEK:
Astonishing X-Men
Cable & Deadpool
District X
Exiles
New X-Men
Ultimate X-Men
Uncanny X-Men
Wolverine
X-Men
X-Men Unlimited
The rest (1)
The rest (2)
The rest (3)

CAPTAIN UNIVERSE / X-23 was the third part of a five-part Captain Universe event rather optimistically aimed at generating interest in a Captain Universe series in the spring.  Interesting, it sold better than the other chapters around it, which apparently means X-23 is a bigger draw than Daredevil or the Silver Surfer.  The actual story is generically competent.  But the sales figures were interesting.

Reviews: Captain Universe / X-23

DECIMATION: HOUSE OF M - THE DAY AFTER is effectively House of M #9, but since it's got a different creative team, it gets to appear as a one-shot instead.  It's intended to serve as a lead-in to all the various Decimation arcs, which means that it's ultimately a whole issue of people reacting to M-Day.  And, in an old school sort of way, it's actually quite good fun.  The remit is to sell us the idea that M-Day is an enormous, earth-shattering event, and the one-shot achieves that nicely.  Good at what it does.

Reviews: Decimation: House of M - The Day After

Chris Claremont's Genoshan incarnation of EXCALIBUR never really found its feet, and never seemed to be going anywhere.  Eventually Marvel just gave up and zapped the thing after fourteen issues.  Presumably that was done in the name of line restructuring, since the sales figues weren't as bad as all that.  There was a half-decent premise behind this version of Excalibur, and a comic that actually showed Xavier and Magneto working to rebuild a country together might actually have worked.  The comic we actually got was directionless torpor, and I won't miss it in the slightest.

Reviews: Excalibur #9 | #10 | #11 | #12 | #13 | #14

GAMBIT was one of a wave of instant bombs launched by Marvel in 2004.  Rogue, Nightcrawler and Jubilee all launched at the same time, and all crashed to an equally dismal fate.  Hopefully Marvel have learned something from this: the X-books' brand has been horrifically overstretched over the last few years, and it no longer has the power to launch a new comic.  Consolidation is urgently required.  This is all a bit unfortunate for poor Gambit, which really wasn't a bad comic at all.  After a very slow opening arc in 2004, it wisely dropped the 6-issue storylines in favour of shorter arcs.  The pace picked up enormously, and later issues were really starting to capture the fun of the character.  But nobody was interested.

Reviews: Gambit #6 | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10 | #11 | #12

GENERATION M, currently in progress, is a Decimation crossover book charged with following up on some of the mutants who lost their powers.  Or at least, that's the way it's promoted.  In reality, it's a story about an alcoholic journalist and an off-panel serial killer, with established characters making brief cameo appearances.  It's quite good on its own terms, but it's not really what people had been expecting.  And some of the cameos are atrociously written, notably a Jubilee appearance where she seems to have suddenly acquired a retroactive career as a political activist - something that couldn't be more at odds with the character.

Reviews: Generation M #1 |#2

GIANT-SIZE X-MEN was exhumed from limbo to pick up again with issue #3.  (Issue #2 was a reprint book from 1975, if you're wondering.)  Basically, both issues have short stories set in the past and a ton of reprints.  They're difficult to recommend because if you want reprints from that period, you can get them much more cheaply in the Essentials volumes.  And if you want new material, well, they're horribly overpriced.  It's an ill-conceived format for the modern marketplace, where reprints are readily available in economical formats.  This doesn't seem to be putting Marvel off, though.

Reviews: Giant-Size X-Men #3 | #4

HOUSE OF M was the flagship crossover of the summer.  The core miniseries, however, is perhaps the most boring attempt at a superhero event comic yet seen.  It's at least three issues too long, the resolution involves characters who have been largely off panel until the final act, and the heroes don't really play any part in the finale other than showing up to have a gratuitous fight.  It's not a good piece of writing by any reasonable standards, and it's a sad waste of a perfectly good concept.  The more of this stuff I read, the more convinced I become that Brian Bendis, for all his talent, is hopelessly inappropriate for this type of story.  The series will be remember almost exclusively for the big event that came after, and hardly at all for the story itself.

Reviews: House of M #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7 | #8

JUBILEE scraped into 2005 before being cancelled in February with issue #6.  A very strange comic that apparently wanted to be a high school drama and reluctantly shoved in the superpowers, it's hard to know quite who this was supposed to appeal to.  Most people have probably already forgotten that it ever came out, and Jubilee herself has been quietly depowered after House of M.  A footnote in X-Men history.

Reviews: Jubilee #5 | #6

MADROX gets a listing here because the final issue of his miniseries came out in January 2005.  This, of course, was the miniseries that served as a pilot for the new X-Factor series.  In the midst of a period when I was regularly demanding that more X-books should be cancelled, I was delighted to hear that the book was returning as an ongoing series, which should tell you how good it was.  Peter David found a compelling new angle on the Madrox character, and made this one of the highlights of the last couple of years.

Reviews: Madrox #5

MYSTIQUE was a great little spy comic that never quite fitted into the X-Men line, and ended up quietly getting the chop at the start of the year.  It was a fun book which deserved better - even though the X-books desperately needed to trim back the line, this is one that I would happily have kept around.  Ah well.

Reviews: Mystique #23 | #24

NEW EXCALIBUR is only two issues in.  It's a relaunch of the original Excalibur rather than the most recent Excalibur, which is why I'm not lumping those titles in together.  So far, it's been a rather confusing comic.  We're well into its opening storyline, and the book was trailed by a four-issue arc in Uncanny X-Men.  Yet I still have absolutely no idea what the concept of the book is, other than "set in England."  And if that's the premise, god help us.  If it isn't, then it'd be really nice if somebody would get around to explaining it quickly, because right now, this just looks like Generic Superhero Comic #73.

Reviews: New Excalibur #1 | #2

NEW X-MEN: HELLIONS was a spin-off from New X-Men commissioned before DeFilippis and Weir were kicked off the book.  Ironically, it's probably one of their best efforts - with the Hellions on holiday, and no other characters to clutter up the book, it's got a level of focus and clarity that the parent title never quite achieved.  It also has them going out and fighting people, which is something that New X-Men itself shunned away from.  Plus, the Hellions are just great characters, and frequently more compelling than the New Mutants themselves.  Given a choice, I'd rather read about these guys.

Reviews: New X-Men: Hellions #1 | #3 | #4