THE CREATORS: Writer Joss Whedon and artist John Cassaday.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil, but the book has slipped a month behind schedule.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2004: Cyclops puts the team back in spandex, Ord from the Breakworld is introduced, and Colossus makes his triumphant return from the dead.

In December 2003, I sat down to write the X-Axis year in review, worked out how many X-books had been published that year, and nearly had a fit.  Largely, this was because I was trying to work out when I would ever find time to write a column of that length.  Eventually I ploughed through it anyway, and produced an eighteen-part epic, the longest X-Axis column I've ever written.

This year, if I was giving every ongoing title its own page, we'd be up to something like part 25.  This is ridiculous.  I take a degree of comfort from the fact that many of the new launches have failed, with sales swandiving gracefully into oblivion from day one.  I can only hope that the essential point - that there are too many of the damn things, and that the X-Men brand has been diluted into meaninglessness - will finally penetrate Marvel's thick skulls, although god knows I'm not optimistic.

Those of you who read my Article 10 review of the year will probably have twigged that there is going to be a fair amount of this sort of ranting in the pages which follow.

Anyhow, even I have to draw the line somewhere.  So in order to keep this year's column vaguely within the bounds of reason, I'm not going to bother with anything that shipped six issues or fewer in 2004.  You'll find them at the end with the miniseries.  Once upon a time I'd have made more of an effort, but in this day and age, six issues of a new title is just one excruciatingly slow storyline, and functionally indistinguishable from a miniseries anyway.

The biggest issue facing the X-books at the moment is that there are just too damned many of them.  With that in mind, I'll be approaching every title with two simple questions in mind - questions which, sadly, Marvel rarely seem to ask themselves.  First, was there any point in publishing this book in the first place?  Second, should it be axed?

If only by alphabetical coincidence, we start with Astonishing X-Men, which allows a little light and optimism into this otherwise bitter and cynical introduction.  For the last few years, the X-Men titles have been dominated by Grant Morrison's New X-Men as their flagship book.  With Morrison out of the way, and all the other X-Men titles languishing below him in the charts, clearly Marvel needed to find something else serve as the lead X-book.

The result was Astonishing X-Men, sold primarily on the name of Joss Whedon.  Fortunately, Whedon is a writer who's capable of delivering on the hype.  Marvel also took the wise step of pairing him with artist John Cassaday, more of a respected talent than a big commercial name, but still somebody who was bound to make Whedon's stories look as good as possible.  Cassaday has been hopelessly wasted by Marvel over recent years, working on some awful Captain America stories, and it's refreshing to see him finally given a decent script to work with.

Whedon's approach, in keeping with the general thrust of the line, was to go back to superhero basics.  And that's fair enough - after Morrison's run, the two main options were to imitate it or to swing back in a more conventional direction.  There's nothing inherently wrong with the latter idea, as long as it's done well.  Astonishing X-Men is not a book that delivers dazzling new ideas or radical innovations; it's simply a good, solid superhero book, with quality creators demonstrating what happens when you do it right.  Whedon is evidently a huge fan of the stories Claremont was producing during his creative peak 20 years ago, the creators combine the spirit of those stories with their own style, producing a great example of what a mainstream X-Men comic in 2004 ought to look like.

The return of Colossus could easily have misfired, by coming off as fanboy wish-fulfilment.  But Whedon managed to pull it off - partly because nobody really liked the original story in the first place, partly by offering a simple and straightforward explanation which wasn't too much of a stretch, but mainly by playing it successfully as an extraordinary event which the characters actually cared about, rather than just another outrageous event for them to be blase over.

Astonishing was a huge success for Marvel, both creatively and commercially - it provided them with a rare hit book that actually sustained its sales beyond the first couple of issues, something which has largely eluded them lately.  It was plainly worth commissioning; the bigger question is whether it really needed to be an additional X-book rather than simply taking over (or at least replacing) an existing title.  The answer to that question is unequivocally no.

Whedon and Cassaday are only signed up for twelve issues, so at some point in 2005, Marvel will have to announce what comes next.  There are presently too many X-Men comics.  Unless Marvel have a very good creative team lined up, axing this book rather than turning it over to lesser hands would probably be the safest way to go.

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