Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men started all the way back in May 2004.  It was supposed to last two years on a monthly schedule.  And now, here we are at last - with one extra issue, and two extra years.

Now, as regular readers will know, I hold strongly to the view that when you're publishing a story in serial form, pacing isn't just a matter of page count.  It's a matter of how often the episodes actually come out.  The storytelling demands of a weekly comic are different from those of a monthly, and if your series goes horribly off the scheduling rails, the reading experience will almost invariably suffer badly as a result.

And as regular readers will also know, I think Astonishing X-Men would have been stretched a bit thin even if it had come out over the planned two years.  There's a lot of extended fight scenes and gratuitous running around, and viewed as a serial, it would have benefitted hugely from losing, ooh, at least six issues.  All this is partly a side-effect of the series being a hangover from the days when the fashion for decompressed storytelling was at its height, and when every story arc in every book was routinely padded out to make for a chunkier trade paperback.

Of course, all that is behind us now, because Astonishing X-Men is no longer a serial.  From now on, it will be read as a whole.  And in that format, many of its flaws will fall away, or at least become significantly less pronounced.

This is a strong argument, and a rationally persuasive one.  Still, if I'm being totally honest, my main reaction to Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1 is "Thank god that's over.  That took way too long."  It doesn't help, of course, that the ending of the story was essentially blown in Uncanny X-Men a few months ago (though if you were paying attention, it was blindingly obvious that the character in question had stopped showing up in other titles months ago).  I don't blame the other titles for that; they can't hang around waiting for Astonishing indefinitely.  It's just another consequence of doing a series that lurches two years off schedule.

Now, having said all that, what's the final issue like?  Well, it's everything you'd expect from the series so far.  The central story, with the Breakworld firing a giant bullet at Earth, is fine, but not particularly great in itself.  What elevates this book above others isn't the story ideas themselves, but the skill with which Whedon and Cassaday tell it. 

The best parts of the book are in the details.  Plenty of writers would go to the trouble of explaining what the other heroes on Earth are doing about this whole "giant bullet" thing; but this story deals with it in an imaginative way, and gives Cassaday the opportunity to draw a genuinely creepy few panels of motionless heroes smiling.  And while the final stunt where Kitty saves the world was eminently predictable, Cassaday executes it brilliantly.

But that central story...  Whedon never really managed to engage my interest in the Breakworld, and never convinced me that their dog-eat-dog morality could actually make for a viable world.  Fundamentally, I just don't believe in the place, or care about what happens to it.  That's my central problem with this story, and obviously, it's a big one.  There are other glitches - how does a bullet travel from one solar system to another in minutes rather than years? - but that's the sort of thing I can allow to slide, in the name of artistic licence.

Look, here's the bottom line.  If, unlike me, you found the Breakworld stuff interesting, well, this was an excellent series.  But if, like me, you thought the Breakworld wasn't all that great, then what you've got here is an extremely good telling of a merely decent story.  And those details go a long way - for many, the art alone will make this story worth having.  But it falls a little short of being the all-time great that some people would have you believe.

Rating: A-

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