THE CREATORS: Chris Claremont continues to write.  Salvador Larroca pencils through to issue #24, after which Igor Kordey takes over.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2003: "Schism" (the one with the boy taking refuge at the X-Men's school); Cannonball rejoins the team; "God Loves Man Kills II" ties in with the movie; "Intifada" (the one with the humans being driven out of a town); and three-quarters of "Storm: The Arena."

No, you're not seeing things.  They really did ship nineteen issues of X-Treme X-Men in 2003.

And in fact, this hasn't been a bad year for the book.  It's been a while since I've had much enthusiasm for Chris Claremont's writing - he was fantastic in the 1980s, of course, but his "Revolution" run on Uncanny X-Men and X-Men was a mess.  Early issues of X-Treme X-Men weren't much better.

But in the last year, Claremont has hit his stride again, up to a point.  Rather than trying to ignore what's going on with the rest of the X-books so that he can do his own thing, he's hit on a set-up that he seems comfortable with.  X-Treme X-Men isn't really an X-Men title at all, but a spin-off book using the X-Men name.  (And the orders suggest that's how most retailers see it, too.)  Previously, it seemed to be a team which existed solely to give Chris Claremont something to write about.  Now, they've been repositioned as the team who reject the changes brought about by Grant Morrison, on political rather than nostalgic grounds.  As a team of dissident refuseniks, they actually have a persuasive reason to exist for the first time.

"Schism", which guest starred the New X-Men cast, was actually pretty good, and got decent mileage out of the tension between the two books.  More recently, "Intifada" hasn't been so successful.  But at least it had the right idea, and was raising some interesting questions.

To tie in with the movie, the book ended up doing a sequel to "God Loves, Man Kills".  It didn't need a sequel, and the story that we got made somewhat awkward by attempts to tie in with the movie - Lady Deathstrike is shoehorned in, for example.  Still, it was a perfectly readable story.

Artist Salvador Larroca was yanked off the book - by most accounts, very much against his will - in order to work on Bill Jemas' ill-advised Namor series.  That left Igor Kordey to replace him, a drastic style shift which was never going to go down well with all the book's fans.  Personally, I prefer Kordey's work; there's something about Larroca's costume designs which is just plain silly, if you ask me.

At the moment, the book is in the middle of serialising "The Arena", a story by Claremont and Kordey which was originally meant to be a Storm graphic novel.  Unfortunately, it's really quite bad - a pile-up of ideas and themes that Claremont has done much better before.  This is a story that has been in the works for ages and hopefully just represents a throwback to the dodgier work Claremont was producing a couple of years back; I'd hate to think that he was relapsing.

With Claremont moving over to Uncanny, there has to be a question mark over the future of this title, and whether there's still a call for it.  No doubt everything will fall into place once we see what direction the line is taking, post-Morrison.

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