THE CREATORS: Writer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Allred.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: One.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2003: The latter half of "Moons of Venus" (the Bad Guy storyline); the introduction of El Guapo; Edie's diary; Dead Girl's solo story; and the Not Diana fiasco.

X-Statix has had a very strange year indeed.  Only eleven issues in 2003, by the way, but that's because the book was on hold for two months while the Wolverine/Doop miniseries came out.

The first half of the year proceeded along normal X-Statix lines - a mixture of satirical humour, metatextual awareness, and actual characters.  A lot of the skill in this series lies in how it makes the characters strangely believable even though, at the same time, it's bending over backwards to remind you of how ludicrous and contrived it is.  After all, perhaps the strongest issue this year was Edie's diary flashback in issue #10 - one of Milligan's most conventional stories, which shows how the characters really do stand up in their own right.

But that's not the real story for X-Statix in 2003, of course.

The big story is the chaotic mess surrounding the Diana storyline, "Di Another Day."  The big idea was that Princess Diana would come back from the dead, and join X-Statix.  They would then be stuck with somebody even more popular than they are - naturally, a situation which they could never live with.  This would have fitted in perfectly well with the tone and themes of the book; it would also, naturally, be a deliberate piece of controversy-baiting.

And so, having commissioned a deliberately controversial story, and put out a press release because they knew how controversial it was, Marvel then decided not to publish it, because it was too controversial.  Apparently it came to the attention of people much higher up in the organisation who were deeply unimpressed.

The result has been the redacted version of the storyline, "Back From The Dead" - a spastic piece of writing in which early chapters are chaotically revised to remove Diana and substitute her for a different character, while at the same time making it blindingly obvious that she's meant to be Diana.  (Her favourite charities are AIDS, landmines and bulimia, for christ's sake.)

As the story staggers towards its conclusion, Milligan and Allred have stopped paying any attention to Henrietta at all.  She's entirely marginalised in this week's issue, leaving the plot to focus on X-Statix' unfortunate history of selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein, and the subplot about random killings which obvious echoes the Washington Sniper.

Because you can make jokes about the Iraq war and the Washington sniper, you see.  That's okay, because they just killed anonymous people, who don't really count.  But making jokes about Our Lady in Versace isn't allowed.  That would be tasteless, because she was on TV lots. 

Marginalising Dianrietta has at least allowed the series to get back on course, but inevitably the whole mess has dragged the book into difficult territory and damaged the quality of the work.  Hopefully in 2004 it can get back in its stride.

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