THE CREATORS: Chris Claremont and Michael Ryan start off, but after Claremont's health problems take over, Frank Tieri begins a fill-in run with issue #9, while the fill-in artists also begin to mount up.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2006: Excalibur fight the shadow X-Men (who are apparently called the Shadow Mob, if you were wondering); the Warwolves and Albion show up to foreshadow a storyline that Claremont doesn't get around to writing before being taken ill; and Frank Tieri fills time with a Chamber story, a trip to Avalon, and a look at the Juggernaut's rehabilitation.

Continuing our theme, we come to New Excalibur, which had the terrible misfortune to lose Chris Claremont as its writer just as his main storyline was about to hit its stride.

Bluntly, this book hasn't been very impressive so far.  Under Claremont, the book spent its first few months wandering around with no apparent purpose, gathering a seemingly random collection of heroes, and nailing them together as a team with no especially clear agenda.  When the book should have been defining itself, it was messing about with evil versions of the X-Men, a theme that Claremont long since ran into the ground.

The reality is that New Excalibur does have a central idea, but it's a publishing concept, not a story concept.  The concept is simple: there's still an old school audience of Chris Claremont fans who want to read a Chris Claremont team book.  New Excalibur is that book.  That's the function of the title.

This is perfectly solid reasoning - Claremont's hardcore audience has always been big enough to support a spin-off title.  By all means, publish a book for them.  But when Chris Claremont falls ill and disappears for months on end, you've got a problem, because you've got a book that exists for the sole purpose of running Chris Claremont stories, and he's not around to write them.

The unenviable task of writing the fill-in issues fell on Frank Tieri.  He got off to a curious start by writing a Chamber story that appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with this book, but instead served as a dual epilogue to his own Weapon X and Apocalypse vs Dracula books.  Subsequent stories have worked better, though, with the Black Knight as a sensible choice of guest star, providing a focus that allows Tieri to tell some meaningful stories without messing up Claremont's plans.  The current arc, in which Juggernaut tries to come to terms with his power loss, is perfectly solid stuff, certainly when judged by fill-in standards.  In fact, the main downside with Tieri is his bizarre mishandling of Pete Wisdom, a character who he doesn't seem to get in the slightest.

Claremont returns early in the new year, and he'll be trying to pick up his storyline.  Sales on this book haven't been spectacular, and it still hasn't really found its level.  Obviously, months of fill-in stories won't have helped, but they've been unavoidable.  The book really needs to get some momentum back, so Claremont needs to hit the ground running here.  But if we're being honest, the story wasn't looking that great before he left, so I'm not holding my breath.

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