With Captain Marvel axed, X-Statix now holds the dubious honour of being the lowest-selling Marvel book that hasn't been axed yet (other than Spider-Girl and Runaways, both of which are way below Marvel's regular cancellation point but appear to be getting special dispensation because they're part of the Marvel Age digest programme).

This month sees the book shunted over to the Marvel Knights imprint.  As this was one of the big promotional pushes for April, Marvel were presumably hoping it would help increase sales somewhat.   However, the fact that artist Mike Allred has described this arc on a message board as "the perfect swan song for X-Statix" tends to suggest that the end is near.

Anyway.  This is the first part of "The Good and the Famous", which has been promoted as X-Statix versus the Avengers.  Presumably it's going to be a little more than that, given the nature of the book.  I see that Milligan's opted for a "classic" Avengers line-up (Ant-Man?) rather than the current roster, presumably because they're here to represent traditional Marvel heroism.

Nominally this is based on the Avengers/Defenders War, a crossover dating from over twenty years ago which is mainly notable for being quite long by the standards of the day, and using a "hunt the object" device as a shameless justification for the two teams to fight one another in one-on-one combat.  Milligan clearly has huge respect for the original, since he's also combined it with elements of the classic Star Trek episode, "Spock's Brain."

Somewhat more to the point, we also seem to be heading for an explanation of the origin of Doop, who turns out to be neither a mutant nor an alien.  For the moment, though, we have the Avengers trying to recover Doop because he's potentially dangerous, and everything going horribly wrong.  Not unreasonably, the Avengers don't trust X-Statix (after all, would you trust them to watch your house, let alone save the world?).  And... uh, there's going to be a quest for the bits of Doop's brain.

Yup, it's not exactly a piece of overly complex plotting.  It's great fun, and there are some fantastic throwaway lines, but this is in large part X-Statix doing an affectionate pisstake of more conventional superhero books - though the Avengers actually come out of it looking quite good.  It's very entertaining, but a bit lightweight compared to some of what we've seen in this title before..

Rating: B

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