On to the first of the new X-books, and New Excalibur.

This is a little confusing.  New Excalibur is replacing Excalibur on the schedules.  But it's not a sequel to Excalibur.  Well, not that Excalibur.  It's a sequel to the original ongoing Excalibur series.  The one that the second Excalibur ongoing series was named after, but had absolutely nothing to do with. 

But this time round it's called New Excalibur because... well, because when they came up with this book, Marvel was still going through its phase of adding the word "New" before everything.  It's not a good title, not least because you can only have so many comics called "New Whatever" before it becomes silly and meaningless.  Marvel seem to have stopped using the dreaded adjective in subsequent launches, so I wouldn't be entirely shocked if they dumped it from books like this in the next couple of years.

Anyway, with this incarnation of the book, Chris Claremont is back with Captain Britain and England.  The other link with the original series is Pete Wisdom, not one of Claremont's creations, but a character he seems to have taken a shine to.  Otherwise, it's an oddball line-up of characters who weren't doing anything (which, to be fair, is how the first Excalibur started off too).  Fortunately, the other surviving members of the original team show up to lend the book their legitimacy.

Dazzler is now reduced to playing dodgy clubs in London, where she's booked as a novelty act.  She stumbles into a fight with a bunch of evil doppelganger X-Men, and gets killed (for a few pages).  Meanwhile, Captain Britain and the rest of the cast get dragged in to investigate. 

There are some decent ideas here with Dazzler's reduced status, and the duplicate X-Men come off surprisingly well for such a hoary old cliche.  Michael Ryan's artwork is, as ever, thoroughly readable.  It's an entirely solid first issue, albeit not spectacular.

However, it does have a glaring implausibility at the centre of the plot - Dazzler is revived by CPR after how long?! - and perhaps most importantly, it doesn't really tell me what the point of the book is.  At this stage, we've got Captain Britain and some impromptu allies carrying out an investigation.  There's also an angle about them remembering their team-up in the Uncanny X-Men "House of M" crossover.  But while everyone's got a perfectly decent rationale to be in this particular story, we don't know why these guys are going to stay together or what sort of team this book is going to be about.  To be fair, I've no doubt Claremont is planning to address all this in the course of the opening arc.  But it does mean we have an opening issue that doesn't really explain what the book is going to be about - well, assuming that there must be more to it than "set in England."

A perfectly okay story, but it doesn't quite work as a debut issue, and strains my credibility just a little too far at a crucial moment.

Rating: B

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