THE CREATORS: Chris Claremont writing, with Alan Davis on art through to issue #463 (with loads of fill-ins), and Chris Bachalo taking over after that.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2005: The final part of "Chasing Hellfire"; yet another trip to the Savage Land in "World's End"; a Mojo two-parter; a House of M crossover launching New Excalibur; and the slaughter of Jean Grey's relatives.

It's now over five years since Chris Claremont returned to the X-Men, and unfortunately we're no closer to the heights of his 1980s run.  In retrospect, in fact, the high point of his current stint turns out to be the middle year of X-Treme X-Men, which had a sequence of solid storylines.

Uncanny X-Men, on the other hand, seems completely lost.  There's a mildly interesting storyline about Psylocke's return from the dead, but that's about it.  The lynchpin of this year's Uncanny was a lengthy trip to the Savage Land, which allowed Alan Davis to draw some lovely pictures, but didn't seem to have any particular point in mind.

Crucially, there's no real sense that Claremont has anything left to say about these characters.  They just wander around having adventures, which generally seem inconsequential.  What is this comic about, other than the notion of Chris Claremont writing the X-Men?  I honestly don't know, and after five years, the novelty of Claremont writing the X-Men has thoroughly worn off.

The big selling point of this comic was Alan Davis' art, but he's now moved on.  In his place we have the ever-erratic Chris Bachalo, who seems to have developed an interesting new trick in 2005.  While most artists get considerably worse when they're racing to meet deadline and have their pencils inked by seven men, Chris Bachalo actually gets much much better.  I can only assume it's because he doesn't have time to overthink things and just resorts to telling the story instead of trying to be clever.  Perhaps he should try this even when he isn't in a hurry, since not only would it make for better comics, but it would presumably give him a lot more free time.

So far, Bachalo's been generally acceptable on this book, and issue #467 was certainly an interesting storytelling experiment (the whole issue takes place at a rate of one second per page).

To be fair, there are no obvious duds in 2005's Uncanny output.  The big problem is that there's just no sense of purpose here.  It feels like all involved are just filling the pages with whatever seemed mildly entertaining at the time.  When your comic is struggling for direction and identity, the last thing you need is five issues in the Savage Land and another four setting up New Excalibur in the course of a House of M crossover - but that's what we got. 

Admittedly, editorial constraints must continue to provide problems for Claremont.  Removing Storm from the cast between issues so that she can be shunted off to appear in Black Panther was just asinine.  But it's not as though the other writers don't have to deal with similar problems.  Aside from the two issues with Psylocke's return and the slaughter of the Grey family, there's not much here to stick in the memory.

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