How the current X-titles are received (July 2016)

[Galerion]

Kinda similar to the sales thread that get made every month. This is focusing on the opinion of critics though. I did something like this in May so I actually skipped a month here but that's OK. It just means more issues have been released that might have changed things or not.

Rating system is simple and can be summarized as

10-7.5: Green, good
7.4-5.0: Yellow, okay
4.9-0.0: Red, bad

Extraordinary X-Men
Avg. rating of May: 6.8

Rating of new issues:
#10: 7.0
#11: 7.8

Avg. rating of July: 6.9 +0.1

Uncanny X-Men
Avg. rating of May: 6.5

Rating of new issues:
#7: 6.2
#8: 5.2
#9: 4.0

Avg. rating of July: 6.1 -0.4

All-New X-Men
Avg. rating of May: 6.8

New issues:
#9: 7.9
#10: 6.7

Avg rating of July: 6.9 +0.1

Civil War II: X-Men
Avg. rating of July: 5.8

Uncanny Avengers
Avg. rating of May: 6.4

New issues:
#9: 7.9
#10: 5.8

Avg rating of July: 6.5 +0.1

X-Men '92
Avg. rating of May: 7.6

New issues:
#4: No reviews

Avg. rating of July: 7.2 -0.4

Deadpool
Avg. rating of May: 7.7

New issues:
#11: 7.9
#12: 7.0
#13: 8.9
#14: 5.8

Avg rating of July: 7.6 -0.1

Deadpool v Gambit
Avg. rating of July: 6.6

All-New Wolverine
Avg. rating of May: 8.0

New issues:
#8: 8.3
#9: 7.9

Avg. rating of July: 8.1 +0.1

Old Man Logan
Avg. rating of May: 8.2

New issues:
#6: 7.8
#7: 8.3

Avg. rating of July: 8.2 +/-0.0



One thing first. This will probably be last time I will feature X-Men '92 in this. Both issue 3 and 4 have no reviews at all. The change in score happened only because of new reviews for issue 1 and 2. Making an ongoing comparison is therefore obviously useless in this case since it will sit eternally at the same score based on the first two issues and there is no indication that that will change.

Excluding X-Men '92 for the above reason we have 4 titles who managed to improve their standing from May. Then we have two which got worse and then we have one which is unchanged.
Then we have two newcomers here. One is Deadpool v Gambit. It's currently on par with most of the other books and while it didn't have a stellar and perfect start it also has not one of the worst ones.
Sadly that brings us to the second one which is Civil War II: X-Men which indeed has the worst start of out of all books listed here. There is certainly some room for improvement when it comes to that one.

[Narasinha]

I don't understand your "average rating for July"? Is that the average of all reviews for all issues published till that date? (In that case, it's kinda pointless: as soon as there is a few issues published, it won't be able to vary much)

(And what about the root mean square deviation ? )

[RLAAMJR.]

EXM is doing well. UXM deserves a better rating but ANX should have the lowest score.

[Knives]

EXM is doing well. UXM deserves a better rating but ANX should have the lowest score.

I fully agree.

EXM has improved slowly every issue and although consider ANX the worst among the three for some reason many like and sales keep the same level.

[Beaubier]

It is beyond me how EXM and ANXM get better ratings than Uncanny.

[Factor]

It is beyond me how EXM and ANXM get better ratings than Uncanny.

Agreed. UXM is the only I still haven't dropped. And that's saying a lot when I stuck around with the flagship since I started reading more than 10 years ago. I guess even the bad runs were more interesting than the utter mediocricity of Lemire's EXM.

[Magneto]

It is beyond me how EXM and ANXM get better ratings than Uncanny.

This

10char

[Dante Milton]

It is beyond me how EXM and ANXM get better ratings than Uncanny.

Because this forum is essentially a big echo chamber of mostly people who enjoy Uncanny, which is not necessarily indicative of general fan or critical reception. Because critics seem to be getting tired of the anti-hero trend, which I completely agree with. Land art.

[dragonmp93]

It is beyond me how EXM and ANXM get better ratings than Uncanny.

Because the critics in general are not confortable with a X-book that basically amount to the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

[Galerion]

I don't understand your "average rating for July"? Is that the average of all reviews for all issues published till that date?

That is correct.

(In that case, it's kinda pointless: as soon as there is a few issues published, it won't be able to vary much)

You obviously won't be going from zero to hero instantly. One or two issues don't invalidate everything that happened previously but if that is continued then the rating will fall or rise based on that. This months results clearly show that already.

(And what about the root mean square deviation ? )

You have to explain that one because I honestly don't know what you mean.

[Beaubier]

Because this forum is essentially a big echo chamber of mostly people who enjoy Uncanny, which is not necessarily indicative of general fan or critical reception. Because critics seem to be getting tired of the anti-hero trend, which I completely agree with. Land art.

I very much agree about the Land art. Lashley's, however, has been quite nice.

I don't think Uncanny is the best ever, but I do think it's better than the other 2 titles, which have been incredibly boring imo.

[Coin Biter]

Issue 1s of comics are widely reviewed. The difficulty with aggregating reviews for later issues of comics is that, well, they don't tend to be as frequently considered.

On comicbookroundup.com exactly one review for Uncanny X-Men 9 is given - and that review is a 4. It might actually be as bad as that, I haven't read it yet, but it's just one review.

Extraordinary X-Men in contrast has three reviews on comicbookroundup - one an 8, one a 7.6... and one a 4.

Maybe you're using more reviews than they are, but the critical community for comics is not particularly wide.

[BFF]

Issue 1s of comics are widely reviewed. The difficulty with aggregating reviews for later issues of comics is that, well, they don't tend to be as frequently considered.

On comicbookroundup.com exactly one review for Uncanny X-Men 9 is given - and that review is a 4. It might actually be as bad as that, I haven't read it yet, but it's just one review.

Extraordinary X-Men in contrast has three reviews on comicbookroundup - one an 8, one a 7.6... and one a 4.

This is a good point. Roundup often doesn't have a big enough sample size for either their regular ratings or their user ratings.

Anyone know of a better review site? I guess not because I only see Roundup ever cited.

[Ambaryerno]

Issue 1s of comics are widely reviewed. The difficulty with aggregating reviews for later issues of comics is that, well, they don't tend to be as frequently considered.

On comicbookroundup.com exactly one review for Uncanny X-Men 9 is given - and that review is a 4. It might actually be as bad as that, I haven't read it yet, but it's just one review.

Extraordinary X-Men in contrast has three reviews on comicbookroundup - one an 8, one a 7.6... and one a 4.

Maybe you're using more reviews than they are, but the critical community for comics is not particularly wide.

And with that few reviews, even one bad review can seriously skew the average. Look at All-New Wolverine for the month: Remove the CBR review (which is a quite significant outlier) and it beats Old Man Logan quite handily. With such a small sample size, you almost have to break it down and look at the individual reviews.

[Narasinha]

You have to explain that one because I honestly don't know what you mean.

The root mean square deviation is a way to measure the variance of a serie of measures (the differences between the various values). Applied to the various reviewers rating, it would give an indication of the "consistency" of the scores. Applied to each issues, it would give an indication of the overall consistency of the quality of the whole book (ie is the average rating the result of books with widely different quality or are all the books of a constant quality).

It's something like this: sqrt( sum( (x-mean(x))^2 )/(N-1)

Edit:
You are doing an average and, based on it, calculate how the score evolved (+0.1, -0.1...) compared to the previous month. But as I said, if there is many issues, a single issue won't affect the result so it's kinda pointless. A RMS won't have this problem and won't be affected by the size of the population.