THE CREATORS: Grant Morrison and Marc Silvestri on issues #151-154.  Chuck Austen and Salvador Larroca take over with issue #155.  Austen lasts until issue #164; this week's issue #165 is a filler by Chris Claremont.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2004: "Here Comes Tomorrow" finishes the Grant Morrison run; Chuck Austen writes an epilogue; the Xorn storyline is reduced to needless confusion; Gambit gets blinded (but he's cured at Christmas); and Exodus leads a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants for some reason or other.  Oh, and a Christmas story.

Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men came to a close, with his final storyline, "Here Comes Tomorrow."  At this stage, I really ought to launch into a eulogy for the high quality of Grant's work on the X-Men.  However, it's only fair to acknowledge from the outset that "Here Comes Tomorrow" was disappointing - an underwhelming dark future story, not helped by scratchy and chaotic art from Marc Silvestri and the Top Cow art team.  (The presence of multiple inkers on most issues suggests Silvestri may have been rushing it a bit.)

Nonetheless, Morrison's departure from the X-books is still a milestone, not least because Marvel clearly didn't have a clue what to do next.  Well, that's not strictly true - they had one clue, which was to hire Joss Whedon and let him get on with it.  Otherwise, the strategy was to swing back towards a more conventional superhero style (defensible in itself), and set about dismantling key parts of Morrison's storylines.

Quite why this was felt to be necessary remains somewhat mystifying.  Of course, Magneto was always going to be brought back, and in itself, that wasn't hugely problematic.  The difficulties come from the completely incoherent way in which the books tried to explain everything away, with Excalibur and X-Men giving wholly contradictory explanations of who Xorn was, and X-Men running stories that suggested nobody involved had ever really understood key parts of the Morrison run in the first place.  The idea that Xorn didn't actually have healing powers, or that Cassandra Nova was meant to be Ernst, seemed to have sailed gaily over the heads of all involved.

I understand it, for god's sake.  And I'm not being paid to.

The frustrating thing about all this is that all Marvel really needed to do, to achieve their aim, was declare that Magneto was alive after all, and that Xorn was a real person rather than a completely invented character.  This would have been simple, straightforward, and cleared the way for future stories.  Five pages would have done the job.  But no, they can't even do that right, can they?  Instead, we get a bemusing and directionless spray of retcons which has delivered no good stories whatsoever, but caused huge damage to Morrison's plots.  And for what?

To dismantle one of the best, and best-selling, X-Men stories in years is ill-advised to start with; to do it in this way is flat-out incompetent.

I've already written about Austen earlier on, so I'm not going to spend much time on the other aspects of his run.  Neither arc was as downright hideous as his Uncanny work, and of course both benefited from having Larroca around.  But the Exodus storyline is still a hopeless mess, a half-finished plot which never bothered to try and unravel what the Brotherhood were trying to achieve, or giving Nocturne a sensible reason to be there.  As for the Blind Gambit subplot, which was immediately reversed by Chris Claremont as soon as Austen was gone from the book, god only knows what was in mind there.  Running that story at the same time that Gambit was given his own ongoing title was silly; as it turned out, the only story to really make something of it appeared in Rogue.

Not a good year for X-Men by any stretch of the imagination.  There are, as I've said, too many X-Men titles, and logically this one ought to be first in line for the chop - after all, it's the lowest seller.  Peter Milligan arrives in January and faces the difficult task of giving the book purpose again.  Much as I adored Milligan's work on X-Statix, I'm not getting my hopes up too far on this; he's a great writer on that sort of title, but less reliable when he tries to be more mainstream.  Still, it's got to be a step in the right direction.

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