THE CREATORS: After a final fill-in by Frank Tieri and Jim Calafiore, Chris Claremont returns as writer with issue #16.  Scot Eaton draws issues #16-19, after which Jeremy Haun takes over (with a solitary fill-in by Pat Oliffe on issue #22).

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2007: The Juggernaut's origin is revisited again.  Nocturne has a stroke.  Excalibur fight for months and months on end.  Then the series is axed.

Claremont's other title, New Excalibur, was cancelled in October after a two-year run that never really led to anything much.  Much like Exiles, New Excalibur exists mainly as a vehicle for Chris Claremont.  But Exiles has a more defined premise to go along with that - they're a team drawn from different parallel worlds, and they visit other parallel worlds and have adventures.  It's something to work with.

The premise of Excalibur, even after two years, remains a mystery.  They're just a generic group of superheroes based in London, and as such, they appear in generic superhero stories.  It's just not enough to carry a series.

On returning to the series after his health problems, Claremont actually delivered one of his stronger stories of the year - a two-parter in which Nocturne recovers from a stroke.  This was clearly a personal story, and successful on its own terms.

But then the series degenerated into an extended, and frankly tedious, seven-month battle against Albion, the evil Captain Britain.  This was ridiculously over-long, and singularly failed to be the epic that it clearly aspired to become.  Albion had a glimmer of potential, as a character who believed in a more hawkish approach to heroism and who was trying to replace the dangerously weak liberal heroes.  Unfortunately, that idea never played strongly into the story, and instead we just got an overextended fight scene.

I won't miss New Excalibur.  For the most part, it was just a generic and uninspired superhero title.  It never had a strong enough premise to justify a series, and we're better off drawing a line under it.

Although no formal announcement has been made, the book will reportedly be replaced with a new series by Paul Cornell, who wrote the Wisdom miniseries.  Hopefully it will have more in common with his oddball MI-13 team than with Excalibur as we know them.  Wisdom was one of the underappreciated high points of 2007 for the X-books, and I have high hopes for Cornell to do something worthwhile with the new series.

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