New Excalibur #17 is the concluding half of "Fallen Friend", the story with which Chris Claremont chose to return to the book after his health problems.

Rather than going back to his ongoing storylines, which have been on hiatus for several months, Claremont has gone for something a little more personal, by giving Nocturne a stroke.  When I reviewed the previous issue, my main concern was that I couldn't see how the story was going to be resolved satisfactorily in one issue.  But Claremont surprises me; rather than trying to resolve everything in one go, he delivers a sound "coming to terms with it" story and then seems to be setting up Nocturne's full recovery as a long-term storyline.

It seems a little odd that Claremont has chosen to pursue this avenue first, before getting back to the long-delayed main storyline.  But then, it's always been his style to follow up promising side avenues when they occur to him.  And the main story hasn't been forgotten; next issue begins a seven-part resolution.  I might still have been inclined to do it the other way around, but we'll have to see what role Nocturne plays in the next arc.  It certainly works this way, at least.

The story makes good use of Nocturne's powers of possession to play off the idea of being trapped in a damaged body.  At first that seems to be setting up the obvious superhero angst route (which would be to have Nocturne crippled and possessing another character in order to go into combat), but fortunately it seems we're going to be spared that in favour of a more conventional recovery story.

The problem, in fact, isn't the approach at all.  It's the overly sentimental dialogue, which topples over into some truly horrid speech-making in the closing scenes.  ("Call us a family, call us a band of brothers - we stand together in common purpose to take care of those around us...")  It's not a subtle story, and to some extent it gets away with that because it's working with events which are very emotional.  But even so, it pushes its luck too far by the end.

Still, the worst I can say about this issue is that it gets a bit mawkish.  It does succeed in what it was trying to do, and it pulls off a workable two-parter without becoming too trite.  On balance, it works.

Rating: B

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