Excalibur #3 doesn't even have the decency to be amusingly bad.  It's just very, very dull.  To be honest, I got rather more entertainment value from skimming message board and watching the Claremont fans' reaction.  "Well, okay, it's a little slow.  And it's not quite what I expected.  But, y'know... maybe the next arc will be better?"

The silly-looking character on the front cover is an inexplicable redesign of a pre-existing character.  Readers could be forgiven for failing to recognise her, mind you, since she's only been seen once before, and that was four years ago.  Remember the third Thunderbird?  The Indian one that nobody liked?  Well, this is his girlfriend from that origin story in X-Men Unlimited.  The policewoman who got turned into an Omega Sentinel by Operation: Zero Tolerance.  If you ask me, she looked rather better in the original design.  She's a rather obscure character to be dredging up here, unless the return of Thunderbird is on the horizon - a prospect that fills me with apathy.

The big threat, such as it is, is supposed to be that the Omega Sentinel is coming to Genosha and is going to kill everyone.  Since she's effectively a robot, and Magneto is in the cast, you'll forgive me if I'm not unduly alarmed.  It's not like she stands much of a chance, is it?

What else?  Well, there's another bunch of spunky teenage characters, who can collectively just about summon up two dimensions between them.  With Hack, Hub, Purge, Freakshow and (please god change the name please please please) Wicked, Claremont seems to be setting up some kind of teenage training team.  What any of these characters are doing in Genosha in the first place, and how they survived the Sentinel attack, remains a bit of a mystery, but I can't honestly say I care.  With Claremont's attempts at teenage dialogue opening up whole new vistas of stiltedness ("That totally rocks!"), it's the writing equivalent of watching your dad dancing at a wedding reception.  Is this how the kids are dancing these days, son?  When I was a boy, it was all soda pop and Bobby Darin...

As for Xavier and Magneto, their plot continues to make little or no sense.  Xavier is randomly hallucinating about ghosts for no apparent reason, yet seems to regard this as entirely normal and not as a sign of anything particularly troublesome.  Magneto, meanwhile, overshoots even Claremont's normal level of affection for him, and ends up as Cuddly Uncle Magnus, Who Wouldn't Hurt A Fly.  Next month, Magnus pops to the mainland to buy a new cardigan!  So bizarre is their behaviour that it's tempting to suggest that Claremont's setting up for a big reveal where they both turn out to be insane and/or under somebody's control.  For the moment, though, we're just left with utterly implausible and unconvincing behaviour from the two lead characters.

Faintly embarrassing and mildly painful.

Rating: C-

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