THE CREATORS: Peter Milligan and Salvador Larroca to start, followed by Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2006: The "Blood of Apocalypse" storyline for half the year, followed by "Supernovas", with Rogue forming her unlikely new X-Men team.

2006 saw the end of Peter Milligan's unlikely run on the X-Men, and the end of his current involvement with Marvel.  Heaven only knows what he's doing these days; back to his TV scriptwriting work, I imagine.

Milligan's run was not universally popular with fans, to put it mildly.  I rather enjoyed it, but I'd be the first to admit that Milligan was using the sort of detached, exaggerated psychology and quirky humour that seemed more at home in X-Statix and wouldn't be to everyone's taste on a more mainstream title like X-Men.  Milligan has a track record of doing his best work on cultish, semi-underground titles, and struggling to find the right formula for more conventional superhero titles.  Arguably, his final "Blood of Apocalypse" storyline was one of his best efforts in that regard, a straight piece of superhero action where he channelled his weirdness into writing Apocalypse and made some sense of the character's bizarre motivations.

Still, despite being in the minority that enjoyed Milligan's X-Men stories, I don't particularly regret his departure.  There are better vehicles for Milligan's talents, and there are other writers more naturally suited for this series.

The new creative team are Mike Carey, previously best known for his work on the Vertigo series Lucifer, and Chris Bachalo, transferred over from Uncanny X-Men.  At first glance, Carey doesn't seem like an obvious choice for this book, but as we've seen on his occasional superhero efforts in the past, he's much more willing to throw himself into the formula.  Instead of reinventing the wheel, Carey appears more concerned about making the best superhero story he can.  That's the right approach to an utterly mainstream title like this, I think.

Chris Bachalo remains something of a mixed blessing.  He's certainly an imaginative artist with an unmistakable voice.  He often delivers great images.  But he's not so good at stringing them together into a coherent narrative, and frankly, when it comes to conveying an action sequence, he's probably one of the weakest high-profile artists in the business.  I've observed before that, bizarrely, Bachalo actually seems to get clearer the more he has to rush (as measured by the number of inkers credited), which suggests that he's prone to overthinking if you give him the opportunity.  He's been somewhat better than usual this year, but there are still parts of his work on X-Men which are genuinely hard to follow, and there's really no excuse for that on this sort of title.  It's entertainment, not high art.

With three monthly X-Men books, the writers (and no doubt the editors) are evidently conscious of the need t make them distinct.  Astonishing is, notionally, the main one.  Uncanny is off in space doing its sci-fi fantasy schtick.  And X-Men is now an unlikely splinter team run by Rogue.  It's worth noting that this is the sort of concept that would once have been used as a spin-off book.  Marvel wisely culled the plethora of second-tier X-Men teams a few years back, realising that the world didn't actually need X-Factor, X-Force and Excalibur alongside the X-Men when they weren't all that different.  But with books like this and X-Treme X-Men, the same sort of thing is being reintroduced through the back door.  I still think there are too many X-Men books - counting Ultimate X-Men, there are four monthly titles, which is absurd.

But if we're going to have this many titles, at least Carey is giving this one an identity.  Casting Rogue as the erratic leader of a group that doesn't make tremendous sense, and deliberately raising questions about whether she's a counter-intuitive genius or just a dangerous incompetent on a streak of good luck, is a neat angle.  It finally allows Rogue to step out of the shadow of her relationship with Gambit, which has defined the character for fifteen years, and makes her interesting again simply by giving her something new to do, and showing her in a different light.

The opening "Children of the Vault" arc was flawed - the villains weren't fleshed out as well as they should have been, and the final part has some weird narrative glitches.  But the overall direction of this book seems strong, and I'm looking forward to reading more from Carey in the upcoming year.

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