With issue #16 of WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN, which hit shelves this week, we unfortunately must say goodbye to artist Chris Bachalo, who moves on to another as-yet-unannounced new project. I owe many many thanks to Chris for kicking off this series in such a great way, for designing the Jean Grey School and for an all-around amazing run. He's been a terrific artist to work with. As wildly inventive as they come. So inventive I had to change the way I wrote my scripts. Chris has so many unique ideas about how to layout a page, that our editor Nick Lowe encouraged me to move to more of a Marvel style, meaning more of a loose plot instead of a full script. So I did, and loved it. My scripts still weren't exactly in the most traditional Marvel style, in that they still included dialogue (when I get a chance in the next few days, maybe I'll post some examples), but it's been an exciting challenge just to break out of my usual routine and a thrill to watch Chris work his magic. I wish we could've done more stuff together. Maybe someday.

As for WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN, we've thankfully got an amazing roster of artists to pick up the slack, like Mike Allred (whose Doop one-shot is coming up next), Jorge Molina (who wraps up our AvX tie-ins in a huge way in issue #18), Steven Sanders (who shows us Angel's all-new mission in issue #20) and of course Nick Bradshaw, who's already cranked out some gorgeous work on this series and returns to help kick off our second year with issue #19 and then handles our crazy new Murder Circus arc beginning with #21. And as if that wasn't enough, come next year we add Ramon Perez to the mix, fresh off his Eisner win for Best Penciller.

I'm one lucky dude.