In the early days of New Excalibur, I frequently asked myself: What exactly is the point of this book?  The answer, as near as I could figure out, was to provide Chris Claremont with a vehicle, off on the fringes of the Marvel Universe, where he could do what he wanted and entertain his fanbase.

But that's only a partial answer.  It explains the publishing strategy, but it doesn't explain what the book is about.  The concept of New Excalibur seemed to boil down to "yet another group of superheroes, but this time in London."  And even that setting only seemed to be relevant insofar as it allowed Captain Britain to be present; in any other respect, the series could have been set as easily in Vancouver or Oslo.

Now, with issue #24, the book has been cancelled.  Marvel have been rather quiet about this.  They just stopped soliciting the thing.  Since Paul Cornell had previously been announced as the next writer, I had rather assumed that the book was simply going on hiatus, presumably to return after X-Men: Die By The Sword.  But no.  Issue #24 ends with an editorial page confirming that New Excalibur is just cancelled, with the loose ends apparently being tied up in that miniseries.

Where does that leave Cornell?  One possibility is that he doesn't really want to do Excalibur at all, and instead he's going to write stories about his MI-13 team from the Wisdom miniseries.  I have no problem with that.  I'd much rather read an MI-13 book.  But it would be a completely different series, with an almost completely different cast.  So if that's the direction they're going in, relaunching the book under a new name would be entirely justifiable.

Or maybe they've just sobered up, realised how poorly Wisdom sold (despite being very good), and decided not to bother.  We'll find out in due course.

New Excalibur has led a largely unimpressive existence.  The series amounts to a random collection of cast-off characters, brought together in England.  The same charge could have been levelled at the original Excalibur, but that book was defined by its tone.  It was a mildly surreal, off-the-wall comedy-adventure book, which genuinely stood out at the time as something different.  New Excalibur, in contrast, was simply the latest vehicle for Chris Claremont, which he used in much the same way as his other recent vehicles.  So the first arc involved Excalibur fighting evil doppelgangers of the X-Men, wearing the obligatory leather.  It wasn't especially interesting.

Claremont's health problems then derailed the book altogether.  Christopher Yost had to step in as co-writer to complete issues #7 and #8, after which the series was forced to run fill-in issues for another six months.  Claremont returned with the two-part "Fallen Friend", in which Nocturne is hospitalised with a stroke.  This was by far the best thing in the run, partly because it had a clear point, which got across effectively, and partly because the story felt as though there was something genuinely personal to it.

But after that, we were back to the doldrums.  The remainder of the series, issues #18 to 24, have been taken up with an overextended seven-part storyline.  The big idea is that Albion, a rogue Captain Britain counterpart, shows up with some other dodgy Captains in tow, and tries to take over the country.  He shuts down all the modern technology, which causes chaos.  Excalibur team up with the evil X-Men to stop them, although why these X-Men care is a little unclear.  There are subplots, involving Sage getting mind-controlled by the bad guys, and Lionheart - the female Captain Britain whose run in Avengers never really got started - dabbling with the wrong side.  But mainly, it's just people hitting one another.

The frustrating thing about this storyline is that issue #18, which set out Albion's back story, showed some promise.  The character was a play on Captain Britain's origin story, in which he chooses the "amulet of right" over the "sword of might" and gets to be a superhero.  We've previously seen a whole load of other Captain Britains from parallel worlds with similar origins.  Albion was presented as the leader of the guys who chose the sword.  In itself, this is a fairly obvious twist.  But, in his origin story, Albion was presented more as a hawk than a villain.  His objection to the Captain Britain Corps was that they weren't taking a hard enough line to wipe out evil, and therefore they needed to be replaced.  He was a hardliner, rather than a complete nutcase.

This isn't a bad idea, and you could certainly do something with this hawks-and-doves theme.  But the remainder of the storyline doesn't do that.  Albion's vaguely well-intentioned goals end up taking a back seat, and he becomes a generic conqueror.  What's missing is any convincing explanation of why he believes he's doing people a favour by taking over Britain.  Even something as basic as "There's a major threat coming and only I can deal with it, so I'm taking over for your own good" would at least have resonated with the themes set up in issue #18, and allowed Albion to maintain the aura of well-intentioned zealotry established in that issue.  Without any such motivation, he's just a rather boring villain.  His cause becomes incoherent, and he just doesn't work any more.

Instead, this final issue builds to a clumsy scene in which Excalibur deliver a token lecture about the importance of finding a better way.  And how do they beat the villains?  Not by finding a better way.  The heroes just pummel them.  That might have worked as an ironic ending - that is, if the heroes end up standing around realising that they've won in a way that proves Albion's point - but there's no suggestion of that here.  If this storyline was supposed to be driven by a moral conflict between hawks and doves - as issue #18 seemed to suggest - then the story hasn't dramatised that conflict.  Consequently, it doesn't feel like a story about anything in particular.  It's just a load of people hitting one another, and then making a token moral point, disconnected from the action of the story.

On the level of a basic action story, the book was passably competent.  People run around and punch one another and some sort of resolution is achieved.  Some of the plot mechanics are garbled, mind you, such as Sage's return to her normal personality.  Guest artist Jeremy Haun is generally decent, a couple of awkward figures notwithstanding.  But there's nothing really to it, and it does nothing to explain why the book is here and what it's supposed to be doing.

It used to be said that Chris Claremont's strength lies in long-term plotting.  You had to give him the chance to run with a book for several years, if you wanted to get the best out of him.  There's a lot of truth to this, and there are certainly signs of that with this book - subplots set up in the early issues still haven't paid off.  But two years into this book, and after a year and a half of Claremont's stories (plus a four-month lead-in from Uncanny X-Men), a point has yet to emerge. 

This hasn't been such a problem with Claremont's run on Exiles.  The individual stories have quite clearly been about something.  A broader direction is also emerging, in which Claremont seems to be exploiting the opportunity to escape the contemporary Marvel Universe and present characters in different versions that provide a different line of descent from the comics made by his generation of creators.  Whether these themes are working is more debatable, but they're there.  I have at least some idea of what Claremont's Exiles is about, above and beyond the purely mechanical premise of visiting parallel worlds.

New Excalibur never seemed to be about anything in particular.  If you can still say that two years into a series, there's a problem.

Rating: C+

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