Also this week, some other X-books...

EXILES #97 - Well, it's one of those slightly sentimental stories where the moral is all about what makes people human.  It's a happy world where everyone's a bit of a zombie, although not in a really obvious way.  And that's not a bad concept at all, but in practice it ends up as some fairly standard superheroics.  There are some seemingly unrelated plot threads jostling for space as well, mind you.  Guest artist Steve Scott fits neatly enough with the regular style, and it's all just fine for what it is.  B

NEW EXCALIBUR #22 - This, on the other hand, is more of the same.  Excalibur and the X-Men from another dimension (don't ask) are still fighting Albion and his counterpart Captain Britains, and frankly, we're not much further forward than we were at the end of the previous issue.  This really isn't working; a Britain with no working technology ends up as a bunch of normally-dressed people standing around shrugging their shoulders and making polite plans for the effective use of tinned food.  The sense of scale is missing, despite guest artist Pat Oliffe's best efforts to convey it.  Too much running around, not enough obvious consequence, and the whole storyline feels like it could have lost at least a month with no damage.  C

X-FACTOR #22 - Boy, there's a lot going on here.  We've got soap opera, we've got an isolationist mutant who wants to invoke the Endangered Species Act (a lovely idea which goes to show that Peter David is far and away the writer making the best use of this dead-end storyline), and we've got some beautiful artwork.  And we've also got, very briefly, the anti-mutant folk singing kiddies who are blatantly based on Prussian Blue - but there's not as much of this intriguing concept as you might have expected.  That's my only criticism, really; I would have liked to see more of that plot.  And when that's the only criticism I can make, it's clearly a winner.  A

There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth Art.

Next week, is the monthly Chris Claremont bonanza, with New Excalibur #22 and Exiles #97.  (Actually, New Excalibur is running a week late, but they usually seem to end up in synch somehow or other.)  Bishop's new team of X-Men fight the Sentinels in Ultimate X-Men #85.  And X-Factor meet the anti-mutant movement's answer to Prussian Blue.  Now that's a story I want to read.

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