THE CREATORS: Joseph Harris (writer), Georges Jeanty (penciller), Art Thibert (inker)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Half of issue #4.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Bishop got taken to a far future ruled by Trevor Fitzroy, hooked up with a bunch of mutants and formed a new X-Men team.

This is an odd one. Given that pretty much anything outside mainstream continuity seems condemned to low sales these days, the decision to set Bishop's solo series in a far future only loosely connected to the other X-books seemed odd. Thematically, it makes sense - putting Bishop in a far future where he's the legend and everyone looks up to him is a nice reversal of his introduction to the X-Men in 1991. But it hardly guarantees an audience.

What the book has given us so far is an example of the sci-fi subgenre of stories set in post-apocalyptic quasi-feudal societies ruled by nasty people. Marvel have done this before; it's territory already explored in Cable's home timeline. And I wasn't that interested in it then, either.

The problem with this title is that it isn't really standing out from its genre. Marvel have gone to the trouble of sticking Bishop in this continuity backwater and haven't really delivered a book that does anything greatly different with him once he's there. It does its genre perfectly adequately, but there's nothing to make the book stand out.

A neglected X-Men character in a fringe X-title making a brave attempt to revive interest in a moribund genre? I'm thinking it's this year's Maverick, I'm afraid.

THE CREATORS: Joe Casey/Joe Pruett (writers), Jose Ladronn/Rob Liefeld (pencillers), Juan Vlasco/Larry Stucker (inkers)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Three - although that represents half of Rob Liefeld's run.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The Acidroid story; the Sign of the End Times three-parter; that one with the chronologists; the weird one with the nutter in the basement with a time machine; and the Pruett/Liefeld run which is just an adjunct to the Twelve crossover.

Not a good year. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm not a particularly big admirer of the Casey and Ladronn run. I know this is the minority view and loads of you think it's one of the best things to happen to the X-books in years. You're all wrong, and I'm going to keep reminding you of it until you agree with me. It's a run which has all the surface trappings of good work but when you get right down to it, turns out to be pretty vacant stuff.

Which isn't to say there wasn't good material in this year. The three-part Sign of the End Times story managed to create the sense of epic chaos it was after, and the character work on Cable's supporting cast was consistently good. But the book has been let down by plotting that falls apart if you think about it too closely - the End Times story relies for its dramatic tension on everybody accepting on faith an unexplained prophecy that if New York is destroyed by Apocalypse then he will automatically lose in the long run. And everyone DOES accept this prophecy, even though it comes from one of Apocalypse's henchmen and makes no logical sense. This is just lame plotting, and it's the sort of thing that recurs throughout Casey's run. Issue #69 - the chronologists' story - is full of it.

Nonetheless, there's been a noticeable drop in quality since Casey and Ladronn's departure. This isn't entirely the fault of Joe Pruett and Rob Liefeld. For years this book has been building towards the big fight with Apocalypse, that being the reason Cable came back to this time in the first place. Now, that story has been hijacked by the X-Men titles, leaving this book flailing around on the margins of what should have been its story.

Even allowing for this, Rob Liefeld's three issues have been down to his usual levels of artistic ineptness, and issue #75 was one of the most pointlessly circular stories written this year, completely blowing years of build-up on an inconclusive and badly drawn fight scene. (So far, nobody has admitted to writing it.) The fill-in issues drawn by Bernard Chang have been rather better, but the book is still stuck on the outskirts of the plot.

A terrible year, in which the book has gone from being wildly overrated to being really bad. Sad to watch.

THE CREATORS: Fabian Nicieza (writer), Steve Skroce (penciller) and Rob Hunter (inker)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Three

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The Muir Isle story; the one with the weird gas; the vampire story with Blade in it; the X-Cutioner story; the Pig Pen two-parter; the Shattering; the one about the time-travelling jewel; the one with the Constrictor; and the beginning of the story set in 1891.

Ladies and gentlemen, your X-book of the year. Why more people aren't buying this is beyond me. How many good reviews do I have to give it? Look, it's self-contained, you don't need to read the other X-books, and it's managed to make one of the most annoying characters of the nineties into an engaging hero. You will like it. Even if you think you won't.

At the beginning of the year, the only problem with the book was that Steve Skroce's artwork was often too cluttered to follow, particularly in the complex stunt sequences. That cleared up early on, and since then his art has been dazzling in all the right ways.

The series has kept amazingly well to a scheme of making every step in the storyline a self-contained story in its own right. Even the Shattering tie-in delivered a great story that managed to make interesting use of Mr Sinister (something of a feat in itself). It's a very satisfying series to read, perhaps because it makes such heavy use of one or two issue stories, while retaining some very dense plotting for the overall storyline.

Fabian Nicieza has suggested that Gambit works better in a solo title because in a team book he ends up being defined purely by his relationship to Rogue and his habit of being a bit mysterious. He seems to have a point; this year has allowed him to develop Gambit's character enormously, and he's actually quite likeable now.

You should be reading this.

THE CREATORS: Howard Mackie (writer), Cary Nord (penciller) and Andrew Pepoy (inker)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Three

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The end of the Goblin Queen storyline and the beginning of the US government turning against mutants.

It's all gone horribly wrong.

Mutant X began rather well in 1998, with some nice ideas for alternate versions of the X-Men and some potentially interesting ideas about a world in which mutants were popular. This year has seen it crash hopelessly off the rails, let down by a total lack of imagination.

The year-long Goblin Queen story ended on a crushing anti-climax as she was simply defeated by her son (the story offered no explanation for why he hadn't simply done this eight issues previously). The book has spent far too much time doing inverted versions of Marvel Universe characters which are nowhere near as clever as the creators seem to think - the Hellfire Club as a civil rights group, for example. SHIELD as villains. Sebastian Shaw in a cocoon. It's awful.

The big advantage of alternate reality stories is that you can do things that have a global effect, without worrying about the impact on other titles. This should be allowing daring new stories exploring a completely different human/mutant dynamic. So what are we getting? The US government doesn't like mutants and wants to arrest them all. Operation: Zero Tolerance Lite. How pathetically dull. How tediously unimaginative.

The book is also starting to show signs of Howard Mackie's bad habit of rewriting history as he goes along. Issue #12 ended with Havok revealing to his teammates that he was from another reality. So presumably the first six months of the series, in which Havok tried without success to persuade his teammates of this, didn't happen? This is the sort of cavalier rubbish that crashed X-Factor.

The bright spot has been the artwork of Cary Nord, who gets very little to work with but at least knows how to tell a story. His alternative character designs have been a bit dodgy (Captain America in a T-shirt?), but he's certainly the best thing about this book.

Another bad year.

THE CREATORS: Erik Larsen (writer), Jeff Matsuda/Leinil Francis Yu (pencillers), Jonathan Sibal/Dexter Vines (inker)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Two

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The tail end of Wolverine in space; an Arnim Zola story; a string of stories with the fake Wolverine; and the Twelve crossover.

Now, I liked Erik Larsen's writing on Nova. That was good. It was funny, clever, endearingly silly, and just a generally good read. His writing on Wolverine, on the other hand... oh dear.

This has been a pretty bad year for Wolverine. Admittedly, Larsen drew the short straw in being told that he couldn't use his lead character for half the year, but surely he could have managed better than the pointless fight scenes that clogged up the book for most of the year? Many of this years stories had virtually nothing to them besides Wolverine fighting minor villains for twenty pages. And action without context equals boredom.

Granted, the book picked up from the chronically misguided Galactus arc, which tied up at the beginning of the year after six mind-numbing issues. The departure of Jeff Matsuda, an artist who was at best miscast on the book, was also a plus, though Leinil Francis Yu's return was undermined for me by the atmosphere-free inking of Dexter Vines. Yu's first run on the book had looked gorgeous; this, frankly, didn't.

Things have picked up slightly towards the end of the year with the Twelve crossover and the return of the actual Wolverine, and I have to concede that the restoration of his adamantium skeleton was well handled (even though I still think it's a bad idea in the first place). Overall, though, this is a year of weak stories not particularly well told.

THE CREATORS: Terry Kavanagh (writer), Luke Ross/Mike Miller (pencillers), Bud LaRosa (inker)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Two

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: A crossover with Generation X; the end of the Gauntlet plot; a reunion with Scott and Jean; some stuff with Mysterio; the subplot with Threnody and her baby; and a tie-in with the Twelve storyline.

And here's the worst X-book of the year. No, it's never dipped to the levels of Cable #75, but for sheer low quality sustained over the course of a year, X-Man wins hands down.

This has been yet another year in which this directionless title has wandered around in circles and come out with nothing to show for it. The long running Gauntlet subplot fizzled out in yet another boring retread of "nasty government agency hunts hero." Ness and Madelyne Pryor continued to hang around without ever emerging as interesting characters. The potential of a reunion with Scott and Jean or the suggestion that Threnody was carrying Nate's child were totally squandered in storylines that never really got to grips with any of the really interesting stuff.

What this book needs - and yes, I know we've been saying this for five years - is to pick a direction and stick to it. It's frustrating, since the book has plenty of potential; it's just been saddled throughout its lifetime by creators who don't know how to make it work. Maybe next year.