Would I enjoy Warren Ellis’ Astonishing X-Men: Ghost more if it weren’t an X-Men story? Yes. And not only because he takes characters I’m familiar with in directions that don’t seem consistent with their histories.

The X-Men here are as savage as I’ve seen them. The team, composed of Cyclops, Emma Frost, Beast, Wolverine, Armor and a visiting Storm, seem to have lost their way. They’re nihilistic, prone to torture and murder, jumping in and wrecking things with no regard for consequences. Only Storm voices disapproval or surprise. The rest have grown accustomed to new ways of action, anchored in a sense that extinction is possible for mutants as a group.

This could be an interesting new direction for the X-men; indeed, it looks to be the way the franchise is trying to go (I’m not fully up to date). But what would be a new angle for a cohesive franchise seems like more grist for the mill for one that scatters its output—and viewpoints—over multiple channels every month. To argue “the X-men are changing,” you need to have a definitive take on who the X-men are, which doesn’t seem possible these days.

Ellis has to shoehorn his dimension-spanning story into an awkward set-up revolving around the old “no more mutants” House of M crossover. While he largely succeeds, it’s hard to feel it wouldn’t be better if he could set his own clean slate.

There are other small problems with the narrative. All the pieces needed to solve the mystery drop neatly into the characters laps. The characters are all a little too quippy; the dialogue can be amusing, but it also feels like Ellis fills too much panel space for a few world-weary takedowns.

The X-men are exempt from the carnage they dole out. In key scenes, a laser passes through a defensive shield only where it can do the least damage and a human-level combatant goes toe-to-toe with some monster. Worse, the miniseries dismissively discards a longstanding character only to conclude he was basically right. It doesn’t feel like much care was put into the overall tone and cohesiveness.

Simone Bianchi’s art doesn’t add to the appeal. It’s detailed but murky, with an overall low-contrast approach that has little leap from the page. The action is stiff and confusing.

But for X-men fans, the minseries is still worth reading. Ellis has enough fun concepts to burn that you wish he had more issues to devote to them. Reading it, I imagined it as part of an ongoing series, with space between issues to build the mystery—and its implications.