THE CREATORS: Chris Claremont and Aaron Lopresti.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil.  (To be fair to Marvel, they've really got fill-in art under control.  Now they just run hopelessly late instead.)

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2004:  Xavier turns up in Genosha and starts rebuilding the country.  Or, more accurately, keeps saying he's going to do so, but doesn't actually do anything until the start of issue #8.

Okay, happy positive time over.  Excalibur now.

This is one of the new titles to emerge from Reload.  The high concept is that Professor X turns up on Genosha to help the survivors of the massacre rebuild their country.  On a certain level, this is a potentially interesting idea.  In practice, the book is absolutely dreadful.

It's difficult to know where to start.  The hamfisted Magneto retcon is perhaps the most obvious irritant, but it's actually the least of the book's problems, since Claremont has done a reasonably decent job of dropping hints that all is not as it seems.  No, the problems are far more fundamental than that.

Basically, what we have here is a book with huge credibility gaps all over the place, a load of uninspired and uninteresting new characters, and bizarre ideas which no doubt appeal to Claremont but hold little interest to anyone else.  Quite what Claremont sees in Callisto's tentacle hentai look is a mystery, for example.

Only with this week's issue #8 does Xavier finally get around to doing anything to rebuild the country.  For that matter, only at this stage does he try to give any sort of reason for why he's bothering - a vague and unconvincing speech about the symbolism of letting Genosha remain a wasteland.  The basic idea of rebuilding the place is not completely absurd; after all, they rebuilt Hiroshima.  But to get this far into the series with such a watery understanding of why any of the characters are bothering gives an overwhelming impression that none of this has been thought through.  (The same issue also includes the first vague attempt to explain why the book is called Excalibur; one wonders whether the editors finally put their foot down and demanded that Claremont actually make some effort to address these fundamental issues.)

That impression is only reinforced by the bizarre status of Genosha, where there's apparently no food, but the survivors are still hanging in there - having been completely missed by the earlier rescue efforts, and despite the fact that the Genoshan massacre was published back in 2001!  If they aren't dead by now, then they must already have something in place; failing to even vaguely address these points leaves the series drowning in credibility gaps.

Most fundamentally, though, it's simply boring.  None of the new characters have much personality to speak of, and some, such as the goth teenager Wicked, are just plain embarrassing.  There's no sense of direction, or momentum, or purpose.  It all seems hopelessly self-indulgent.

Excalibur is simply not working.  On the strength of the material we've seen so far, it shouldn't have been commissioned in the first place, and if quality is any consideration, the plug should be pulled immediately.  Unfortunately, sales probably preclude that - although it's interesting to note that after initially levelling out, the audience has begun to drop away. This book achieves its sales on the basis of a combination of hype and Claremont's creaking, 20-year-old reputation.  It's a blot on the landscape.

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