THE CREATORS: Chris Claremont and Igor Kordey.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: On an Igor Kordey book?  Are you joking?!  Nil.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2004: The final part of Storm's "Arena" storyline; "Prisoner of Fire"; and a final issue tying in with "Planet X."  (Four months late, but that's modern continuity for you.)

Here for completeness as much as anything, since I've already written about Claremont.

2003 wasn't such a bad year for X-Treme X-Men - "Schism" and "God Loves Man Kills II" were both entertaining stories, and it almost seemed for a bit as though Claremont was starting to regain some of the old touch.  Well, so much for that idea - "Storm: The Arena" and "Prisoner of Fire" were just hopeless messes.

Claremont does like his pet themes, but there are limits.  "Storm: The Arena" - domination and slavery.  "Prisoner of Fire" - mind control and slavery.  Fury storyline in Uncanny?  Mind control.  Hellfire Club storyline in Uncanny?  Slavery.  We get the point, you like slavery and mind control. 

All of which wouldn't be so bad if there was a half-decent storyline around them, but both arcs are drowning in underwritten characters and people who no longer behave like human beings.  Claremont stories increasingly seem to take place in a parallel universe where the laws of human psychology are bafflingly different to our own, and impossible people with enigmatic and cryptic character traits wander around strange societies with weird and arbitrary rules, hunting people and putting them into slavery.  Where are the people?  Where are the characters?  Where's the humanity?

As for Claremont's partner Igor Kordey, 2004 wasn't exactly his year either.  Much as I enjoy Kordey's work, he was never ideally suited to this book, and he wasn't producing his best work on it.  His talents could have been, and doubtless will be, better used elsewhere.

Nonetheless, the circumstances of his departure were extraordinary, and give some indication of Marvel's internal chaos.  X-Treme wasn't really cancelled at all, so much as folded into Uncanny.  (Astonishing replaced it on the schedule.)  Kordey was due to follow Claremont to the spin-off book Excalibur.  As it turned out, he produced art for the first issue, and was then fired.  And then they decided not even to use the art for the first issue. 

Kordey released the art on his website, and it's perfectly okay; there seems to be no reason for his removal other than a belated realisation that it wasn't what they were looking for.  But how could it possibly take them that long to notice what Kordey's art was like?

Anyhow, Kordey is now off pursuing other projects which will doubtless be more suitable all round.  As for X-Treme X-Men, the awful title lingers on as part of the acronym for Storm's XSE, but otherwise, it's no longer with us.

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