THE CREATORS: Writer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Allred.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: One.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2004: The end of "Back From The Dead"; Vivisector tries to cure his mutant powers; the Avengers show up for a crossover; and the team get slaughtered in the self-proclaimed "Downbeat yet strangely moving FINAL ISSUE."

Ah, X-Statix.  Happier days.  Can you imagine Marvel commissioning this book today?

And, to be clear, that's really why I miss this book.  It's a hangover from a time when Marvel was simply trying harder, and making more of an effort to produce X-books which were different, rather than endless tons of More Of The Same.  It's not that I actually wanted to see X-Statix itself continue.

On the contrary, the concept had run its course, as the characters themselves acknowledged in their closing issues.  This is not a bad thing.  Not every good idea will sustain an ongoing series indefinitely.  A book like X-Statix should know when to quit.  Officially, it did; in practice, even if it was a truly voluntary decision, sales would have caught up with it pretty quickly in any event.  But this was the right time to stop.

X-Statix began the year still reeling from the Princess Diana fiasco.  If Marvel had simply knocked back that storyline at the beginning it would have been fair enough, but instead Milligan and Allred found themselves trying to salvage a hastily-rewritten first half and produce some vaguely coherent ending.  They more or less pulled it off, but the loss of momentum from the whole mess was never really recovered.

Instead, X-Statix ended its life with a nice little two-parter about Vivisector finding a cure for his mutant powers, and a deliberately absurd storyline guest starring the Avengers.  Nominally, that arc was based around the Avengers/Defenders War, an episodic 1970s crossover remembered mainly because crossovers were just less common in those days.  In practice, it meant stealing plot elements from "Spock's Brain", and sending X-Statix out there to fight proper superheroes in a decidedly X-Statix context. 

Milligan could have taken the cheap way out and mocked the Avengers.  Instead he played the guest stars more or less straight (although his Asgard was hilariously prosaic), and the comedy came from the sheer incongruity of them being in the book at all.  The whole thing came off much better than it had any right to.

It's a book with a finite lifespan, and this was the right time to draw the line under it.  One of my favourite X-books ever, and it'll be a long time before we see its like again.

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