Wood leaving Xmen

Agree. I really liked what Liu did with Astonishing, as a whole, so I think something like this written by her might've made a good read.

I never felt the line-up was contrived. I felt like they were all long-time X-Men with a good mix of powers, who have a lot of experience working together, and who came together because they all happened to be available.

It didn't feel like it was ignoring the contributions of the male X-Men - Beast was there, after all, and about the only other long-time male X-Man at the school was Wolverine, and frankly, the less I see of that douche, the better.

I'm not sure what students would've been more appropriate to show up. There's some characters I would've liked to have shown up, but the ones we got seemed pretty reasonable to me.

Wood's a better writer than Liu, so I was fine with Wood writing the book.

I loved the lineup(Rachel is a favorite for me so anything that gets her focus is a good thing)and especially seeing Rogue fly and be strong again in the first issues. It's ridiculous to me that with many of the X-Books now, the writers not only don't seem to know how to write female characters as something other than caricature or cliche, they also don't seem to know how to really focus on them unless they largely sideline the male characters like Wood did with both X-Men and his run on Ultimate X-Men. Claremont managed to weave the two genders together into a tapestry. A lot of attention is given to his treatment of female characters, but the reality is he gave good treatment to the male characters as well, the women stood out because they weren't treated as "female" superheroes, they got the same level of story lines, the same complexity the male characters got. The characters also interacted in a way that seemed to strengthen them all, now one character will be diminished to elevate another. I feel like Liu was in a lot of ways Claremont's heir, and I can't help but wonder if that perception by some of the fans hurt her with editorial. I think Marvel likes the idea of writers working on the X-Men, not the X-Men having a definitive writer.

I also can't say that I followed Wood's work either, but if it opens the doors for another inspiring X-Men writer, then more power to both parties.