THE CREATORS: Many and varied.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2005: Assorted stories of little consequence.  Just like every year.

Okay, hands up if you can remember anything from X-Men Unlimited in 2005.

No, me neither.  I had to look it up.  As usual, the big question here is what on earth this comic is for, and why it's still around.  First created back in the nineties as an equivalent to Giant-Size X-Men, the book has lumbered around the schedules ever since, never displaying any terribly clear idea of why it exists. 

Nominally, the idea of the latest relaunch was to turn it into a vehicle for new creators, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside now.  Instead, it's just a book that turns up every couple of months, publishes a couple of decent but forgettable short stories, and gets bought solely by completists.  There are so many X-books on the market that it's hard to believe anyone is truly buying this comic because they have a desperate yearning for another X-Men story.  You buy X-Men Unlimited because you want everything, and it is a thing.  And that's it.

There are some genuinely good stories in this year's selection.  Issue #7's "The Boy Who Wasn't There" is a good piece about a mutant dissipating into the atmosphere, and the X-Men failing to help him.  And David Hahn's Sunspot story in issue #11 is solid too.  Most of the rest, to be fair, are slightly above average.

But there's nothing here so overpoweringly good as to make it unmissable reading for the X-Men fan already swamped under a mountain of core titles.  It's just another thing, at the end of the day. It takes money from completists, and beyond that, it serves no discernible purpose at all.

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