THE CREATORS: Written by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir.  Carlo Barberi lasted until New Mutants #11.  Randy Green was supposed to be the regular artist on New X-Men, and lasted two issues.  Michael Ryan finally turned up on New X-Men #5.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Four.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2004: "Ties That Bind" concludes, the school gets blown up in another title, the book is relaunched as New X-Men, everyone gets codenames and costumes, Kevin Ford returns, the teams are slightly reshuffled, and a ghost story begins.

Just in case there's any lingering doubt, we're looking here at the new New X-Men, formerly the new New Mutants.  The original New X-Men is back to calling itself X-Men, and we'll come to it later.  Oh, and just to confuse matters further, the team who star in New X-Men aren't called the New X-Men, but they are called the New Mutants, a name which they didn't actually take on until New Mutants ended and their book was called New X-Men.  They also shouldn't be confused with the original New Mutants.  These are the new New Mutants.  Oh, and before someone e-mails me, yes, I know the logo says New X-Men: Academy X.  And that's how they solicited it, for one issue.  But it's officially just called New X-Men now.  Confused yet?

At least New X-Men got in on the act early, before New Avengers, New Invaders and (catchy!) New Thunderbolts.  This seems to be fairly typical of Marvel's current way of thinking - if doing something once is a good idea, doing it fifteen times must be even better!  Maybe they could rename John Romita Jr as New John Romita.

Oh, alright, I'll get to the point.  New Mutants was a promising and likeable book which somehow never quite clicked.  You wanted it to succeed, because it seemed to have all the right ideas, and yet it somehow never managed to be more than above average.  Things have improved this year with an increased focus on the soap opera - most of these characters don't have what it takes to carry a whole story on their own, and opening with six issues along those lines may have been a mistake.  But put them in a team and some better dynamics start to emerge.  Still, the characters remains just slightly flat.  They're... two-and-a-half dimensional, I guess.

The book received an interesting overhaul as part of Reload.  Partly the new name and title just helped to give it a push up the charts - and it worked, in case anyone's still wondering about the efficacy of issue #1s.  Partly, though, the book did receive some tinkering to keep it in line with the new, and much more conservative, tone of the X-Men books.  That meant costumes, codenames, and small teams - basically, turning the book much more explicitly into a school for superheroes, however much the characters protested otherwise.

But that change was probably for the good, overall.  As an escapist fantasy, the Xavier Institute is a lot more colourful now than it used to be.  The book's a lot more fun.  This isn't a particularly heavy title, and bright and colourful works for it.

The book has suffered horribly from inability to hold down a consistent artist, with Randy Green turning up for two issues and then running to the hills.  Of course, much the same thing happened when New Mutants launched last year.  They've finally settled down with the reliable workhorse Michael Ryan, which should finally bring some stability to the book.

New X-Men is one of the worthwhile spin-off books.  Sure, it isn't quite reaching its potential.  But it's doing something different (at least compared to the rest of the current line - obviously, we've been here before with the original New Mutants and Generation X).  And it's on the right tracks.

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