THE CREATORS: Craig Kyle and Chris Yost writing, with Paco Medina (and several fill-ins) on art.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2006: Grim, depressing, unrelenting slaughter.  Except the December issue, which had a scene in a coffee shop.

New X-Men has been a terribly frustrating book to read this year.  Craig Kyle and Chris Yost are good writers.  They did a lovely X-23 miniseries in 2005, and they're clearly up to the job of writing this book.  They also had a sensible plan to shift the emphasis on this book, moving away from the talky, cuddly soap opera and creating an action title which took some entertaining supporting characters and brought them to the fore.  In theory, this should have worked.

Unfortunately, the reality is that New X-Men has spent 2006 demonstrating what "overkill" means.  And then doing it again.  And again.  And again.

Reasonably enough, the creators want to show that the book now has high dramatic stakes, far removed from the chick-flick plots that used to prevail.  But the way they've chosen to go about that is to embark on a mass slaughter of supporting characters, and a grimly depressing kill-o-thon which droned on for the better part of a year. 

I suspect that this is another example of writers forgetting to pace their stories for the serial.  If you were reading this whole year-long storyline in one go, it would probably work.  But reading it over many months, it just becomes deadening and repetitive.  Turning the book into an action title, while an unadventurous move, should at least result in it becoming more fun.  Instead it just became sole-destroying.  By the end of the year, this was a book that I dreaded having to read because I knew it was going to be a grind.  And don't mistake that for emotional engagement with the characters' tragic losses.  If I actually cared, I'd have had it at the top of the pile.

I'm crossing my fingers that this year has simply been the result of a terrible error of judgment from writers who can do better, and who were committed to the storyline once it was underway.  (And even then, the over-reliance on killing minor characters, which was going on all over the X-books at the time, seemed less than inspired.)  Fortunately, the December issue lends some support for that, with a clear shift towards normalcy and some humanity starting to balance out the nihilism.  I want this book to do well.  But the current arc really needs to prove to me that the creators understand this title.

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