New Excalibur has had a difficult time over the last few months.  With Chris Claremont taking an extended absence due to ill health, Frank Tieri has a challenging task as the fill-in writer. 

It's very hard to kill time for that long, bearing in mind that Claremont has to be able to pick up more or less where he left off.  On top of that, New Excalibur was still in its relatively early days and establishing its main plotlines.  And it's a book which seems to exist for the primary reason of giving Chris Claremont a vehicle.  Without him, what is the title actually for?

Quite sensibly, Tieri has written stories that aren't focussed on the team.  Instead, we get "The Last Days of Camelot", a time travel story in which Excalibur go back to help King Arthur.  It guest stars both the original Black Knight and the current version, and it's really their story.  Strangely, Tieri has taken this opportunity to try and straighten out continuity about the significance of the Black Knight's cursed sword.  Specifically, he's trying to answer the "Well if it's cursed, why don't they just destroy it?" question.

It's a fair enough question, and Tieri's solution has its merits.  But it's very much a Black Knight story and, unless the plan is to add him permanently to the cast, it seems a strange story to tell in this book.

In the background, there's a big fight between the knights of Camelot and some dragons - which doesn't quite maintain the epic feel it ought to have - and a few character moments for the regular cast.  Most of them involve Tieri using Pete Wisdom for comic relief, which isn't a problem in itself, but suggests that he's badly misread the character.  Tieri's version of Wisdom is a character who's pretty much clueless in the social skills department, continually misreads the situation, and generally thinks he's much cooler than he really is.  That misses the point by a mile.  As usually written, Wisdom is oblivious to whether he offends people, not because he isn't aware of what they think, but because he doesn't care.  He's much more self-aware than Tieri's take on him, which misses the mark badly enough to verge on being an outright invalid interpretation of the character.

The issue also suffers from a ludicrous deus ex machina ending when Sage - as usual - suddenly defeats all the dragons singlehandedly by coming up with the magic macguffin out of nowhere.  Tieri might have got away with this if it had been properly foreshadowed, since his idea is at least somewhat cute.  It involves the dragons turning out to be invading aliens from the Makluans (the same race as Fin Fang Foom), which means they can be defeated in the same way. 

Now, this makes a modicum of sense, in that it's been previously established that the Makluans were invading Earth around that time.  But that was in Iron Man roughly fifteen years ago, and if your big finale is going to turn on that fact - not to mention the heroes re-using the same device that defeated Fin Fang Foom in Strange Tales #89 - you've really got to set it up properly.  A couple of vague comments to the effect of "Hey, these aren't normal dragons" isn't quite enough.  The magic herbs still come out of the blue as a completely arbitrary solution.

Badly flawed, then.  But there's a decent Black Knight story in here, and with a bit of polishing, it would have made a decent miniseries for him.

Rating: C+

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