I expected to be really, really irritated by Excalibur #2.  But I wasn't.  I wasn't irritated at all.

I was too busy laughing for that.

Chris Claremont is a bizarrely inconsistent writer these days.  X-Treme X-Men oscillated between "quite interesting" and "absolutely terrible."  It seems to depend largely on whether he's stretching himself and exploring new ideas, or whether he's sticking doggedly to pet themes.  The former tends to be fairly decent.  The latter is frequently horrific - as, for example, with the last arc of X-Treme X-Men.

Reload seems to have led to a curious split.  Uncanny X-Men is perfectly readable and fairly enjoyable.  Excalibur, on the other hand, is absolute dross.  It's impossible to be genuinely irritated by this issue.  Instead, I find myself sniggering at the sheer desperate petulance of the whole enterprise.

As I've said before, there's nothing inherently wrong with bringing back Magneto.  He was only really killed in order to add a sense of finality to "Planet X", and those sorts of deaths are fair game for reversal.  However, Claremont simply bulldozes the entire storyline aside by blithely dismissing Morrison's Magneto as "an impostor."  Which, by the way, completely screws up Morrison's storyline, because thematically it has to be the real Magneto.

To be fair to Claremont, X-Men is also unpicking the same story - proving that when Morrison leaves, the X-office really can go from nought to clueless in sixty seconds - and it may well be that a proper explanation is being reserved for that book.  Still, it doesn't take much examination to see the plot of this issue crumble, Austen-style, into an ill-thought-out mess.

For example: Xavier was apparently not surprised to see Magneto alive in Genosha.  It seems they were expecting to meet up.  That means there was communication.  If there was communication, why doesn't Magneto know about the death of Jean Grey and "his" attack on New York?   If he can contact the outside world, wouldn't he have noticed this sort of thing?  If he can't contact the outside world, how did Xavier contact him?  And even then, why didn't Xavier tell him?

If, on the other hand, Xavier wasn't expecting to find Magneto there, why didn't he show any signs of surprise?  On either view, why does Xavier assume that this Magneto is the real one and the one from New X-Men was the fake?  And why should anyone else?

Come to think of it, given that Magneto was in a wheelchair the last time we saw him, how did he get restored to health when he's apparently spent the whole time trapped in a radioactive wasteland with no hospitals?  (At least Morrison's plot has the justification that he leaves Genosha at some point - Claremont's version has apparently been trapped here, or at least has chosen not to leave, throughout.)  In fact, given that Genosha was reduced to an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland, how did any of these people survive at all?

All of these points at least need to be addressed in order to give the story the slightest believability - but Claremont apparently feels otherwise.  In fact, his revisions of Magneto's history go further back, as apparently we're also meant to forget the fact that just before Morrison came along, Magneto was raising an army and planning to conquer the world.  Come to think of it, he didn't blackmail the UN into handing over Genosha, either.  It was Alda Huxley's idea to give it to him.  He accepted the deal because he'd just burnt out his powers in the middle of another old-school world conquest attempt, and it was the best deal on the table.

Excalibur comes across, at the very least, as an exercise in arrogant and petulant disdain for the work of other writers.  Claremont's hardcore fanbase will doubtless be delighted with the book, but the broader commercial wisdom of this approach is extremely doubtful.  After all, Morrison was outselling Claremont by more than two to one.

Throw in a general lack of drama, no interesting villains and some entirely annoying supporting characters, and the result is an absolute mess.  The art doesn't do much to save it - Lopresti's linework is competent enough but hardly striking, and the whole book is marred with some very dodgy colouring.  Liquid! seem to have developed a love for texture patterns, and as a result the book is full of two-dimensional textures dumped awkwardly onto objects that are being viewed at an angle (and seemingly retaining the same resolution no matter how far from the camera they are).  Look, for example, at the walls on page 3, panel 2.  Or the floors on page 5.  It really doesn't look good.

Two issues in, then, and Excalibur is looking like an absolute trainwreck.  Worse than I'd ever anticipated.

Rating: D+

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