The new creative team takes over New X-Men, and as expected, it's effectively the debut issue of a whole new comic.

The previous incarnation of New X-Men was primarily a teen drama with incidental superpowers.  It's immediately obvious from this story that Marvel are taking the book in a very different and more traditional direction.  Compared to what we've seen before, this reads like something out of the mid-nineties.  It's a superhero book, caught up in Decimation, and the characters are being played accordingly.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing - I don't have a problem with going for a more traditional superhero style as long as it's done well, and this isn't a bad first issue judged by those standards.

The new writers are Craig Kyle and Chris Yost, who previously worked on the X-23 miniseries.  In fact, X-23 joins the cast with this revamp, and I had braced myself for X-23 and her Amazing Friends.  That's not what we get here - X-23 is way off to the side in a two-page subplot, where we learn that apparently she had a history with Wolverine after all, which they've agreed not to talk about.  Well, at least they're trying to explain the continuity - more than a lot of writers do.

Most of the issue, though, has the established cast of New Mutants and Hellions reacting to Decimation.  The issue opens with an expanded version of the Mansion scenes from House of M #8, although the two don't really fit alongside one another.  It's rather odd that the writers were clearly co-ordinating enough to have exactly the same page of Emma waking up in the garden, and yet ended up resolving their scenes in two entirely different ways.  How many times can Emma Frost run to Cerebra in a panic, exactly?  For that matter, would it have been such a trauma to get the artists to agree on whether the kids were in costume or not?

Anyhow, it's certainly the right scene to be doing with this book, since New X-Men is the title that really has its heart torn out by Decimation.  The school gets massively pared back, and we're now dealing with a very different set-up.  It's fair enough that New X-Men does the scene itself rather than just saying "Oh yeah, and there was this crossover..."

So we get a suitably chaotic opening, and some nice little scenes of characters reacting and discovering that they don't have powers any more - or, in Wither's case, jumping to completely the wrong conclusion and trying to give Laurie a big hug.  It's a cute scene.  On the down side, the writers seem to be glossing over some of the characters they weren't planning to use.  Prodigy has lost his powers, but gets precisely one line of dialogue to comment on it.  Come on, the guy's been starring in the book for two years - he deserves better than that.  And after reading the issue twice, I honestly can't work out whether Wind Dancer's supposed to have lost her powers or not.

Admittedly, it's a book with a huge cast.  Slimming down is probably for the best - throughout its lifetime, this book has struggled to cram in a vast number of characters and subplots.  But the outgoing characters needed to be dealt with better than this, where I can only assume many of them simply leave the school between scenes.  It's going to annoy a lot of existing readers, and understandably so.

Overall, though, I rather liked it - although I suspect this is more a reflection of personal taste than anything else.  It feels very much like something from a more traditional and mainstream era of X-Men spin-offs, but it may well make for a more fun comic in the long run.  A seriously flawed issue, but still quite promising.

Rating: B

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