Excalibur wraps up its first arc, and it's still coming across as a lame duck.

This issue finishes bringing together the core cast, by dumping Karima and Shola on the island for... well, no immediately discernible reason.  For those of you who aren't so familiar with the backwaters of X-continuity, Karima was the girlfriend of the third Thunderbird, and her only previous appearance was in his origin story in X-Men Unlimited.  Shola was a supporting character from the Mekanix miniseries.

So we've got a cast comprising Xavier, Magneto, Callisto (with silly tentacles), a bunch of new characters who don't interest me in the slightest, and some very minor people who don't do much to interest me either.  Ho hum.

The one point that does mildly interest me is the Magneto subplot, where it's now becoming a little more blatant that things are not what they seem.  Nobody else recognises Magneto, and for some reason he seems to get headaches whenever he tries to do anything offensive.  I'm coming round to the theory that Xavier has pulled a mindwipe somewhere along the line, and that the "impostor" stuff is going to turn out to be nonsense.  And I could live with that.

But otherwise, the plot and characters just don't interest me.  Crucially, we're four issues in and we haven't even properly established the setting.  When the premise of the book is supposed to be Xavier rebuilding Genosha, and we've spent four issues in the country, then we ought to have a clear understanding of the current status by this point.

Instead we have a bit of a mess.  Quite literally, I don't even have a sense of how many people are on this island, to the nearest 1,000.  Is there even a population here?  Is this a nation at all, or just a handful of people?  There are some surprisingly well-dressed people wandering around in gangs, which seems to bring the population of Hammer Bay to, what, twenty?  Or is there meant to be a whole community of survivors out there?  What have they been living on, all these months?  There's no sense whatsoever of Genosha as a real place, and that's fatal to the book.

This really isn't working.  Severe retooling is urgently required.

Rating: C-

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