Oh god, I try.  I try so hard to be open minded when I pick up a copy of Excalibur.  I work some vague interest in the Magneto subplot.  And then, on page 2, I hit dialogue like this:  "Status, Appraiser?"  "Location, totally secure.  Bootay, totally spaz."

Bootay.  Totally spaz.  Oh hell, granddad's dancing in public again.  Granddad says he loves that hiphop sound.  It's way totally street.  Good lord, there are four editors credited on this book!  Can't one of them pluck up the nerve to tell him?  Back in your wheelchair, granddad.  You'll break a hip if you're not careful.

I might be able to look past this kind of thing if I actually cared.  But Excalibur is an awkward pile-up of weak ideas which seem to be going nowhere.  The big idea of this book is supposedly that Xavier and his group are there to rebuild Genosha; but as so often with Claremont, he sets his characters an agenda but does nothing to actually advance it.  Instead, they're left to defend Genosha from a resource-stripping villain called Stripmine (bit specialist for a supervillain career, isn't it?), and six issues in, we've yet to clearly establish why anyone even cares about Genosha.  "Stripmine plans to loot Genosha," we're told.  Loot it for what?  Is second-hand rubble commanding high prices on Ebay?

Xavier points out that Genosha had lots of natural resources, which would be fair enough.  But the only one he points to is the mutants, and they're all dead - all but "a handful", which is the first time he's even given us an indication of how many people are supposed to be living on this island.  So what have we got here?  A wasteland with a tiny population and some kind of energy field that stops technology working.

And Xavier wants to set up a new society here?  In the name of god, why?  Why not just evacuate the innocents, arrest the bad guys and head back home?  If he just wants to set up a mutant town, there's plenty of desert in the USA to build one in.  The whole idea seems like a demented folly.  What's the point?  For that matter, why do any of these people even want to stay?  Why didn't they hand themselves over to the authorities during the clean-up operation?  That's a really fundamental question which goes to the heart of the series - why do any of these characters want to be in Genosha at all? - but it hasn't even been touched on.

We've got a watery lead cast comprising Xavier, Magneto, Callisto (in the Wolverine role), and a bunch of kids who could just about scrape together half a personality between them.  The lead villain is Unus, and when your leads include both Xavier and Magneto, he hardly cuts it as an antagonist.  We've got a couple of generic pirate-themed types and some entirely out-of-place Asgardian Trolls wandering around.

The Dark Beast turns up at the end, and at least he actually has a connection with Genosha.  Oh no, hold on.  That was the Sugar Man, wasn't it?  I'm not immediately convinced that the Dark Beast is a villain I want to see more of, but I suppose there's always the possibility Claremont has a plan for him.  But given that the rest of the book doesn't make much sense, I'm not holding my breath..

Rating: C-

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