We're now five issues into New Excalibur, and the good news is that we've finally got the team together.  The bad news is that the book still hasn't established any particular purpose or identity.

You could argue, of course, that the book has a clear enough reason to exist: Chris Claremont still has a loyal fanbase, and this is a comic for them.  And that's fair enough, so far as it goes.  But it doesn't really overcome the fact that Excalibur have no particular reason to stick together other than "There is evil, we must fight it."  It's a generic motivation, and not much of a premise to hang a series on.

To be fair, in theory Claremont is trying to spring this book off M-Day.  Since the comic doesn't actually have anything to do with M-Day, the loose justification is that because all the mutants have disappeared, the world is much more dangerous.  The problem is that I don't really buy this logic.  We haven't been shown any significant numbers of de-powered heroes, and I just don't understand why the world would be more dangerous just because there are fewer people wandering around with superpowers.  Dangerous for the remaining mutants, perhaps, because their enemies have a realistic prospect of wiping them out.  But this book seems to be talking as if it's a dangerous situation for everybody, and I just don't for the life of me understand why that's supposed to be the case.  "Oh no, 90% of supervillains have disappeared overnight - we're in terrible danger!"  Um... why?

As for the actual story, well, it's a fight scene.  Some of the team members fight the Warwolves, while Captain Britain fights some chap called Albion - presumably a new villain rather than the guy from Knights of Pendragon in a new costume.  Albion wants to kill him, for no terribly clear reason, and he's brainwashed Lionheart into playing along.  The Warwolves also just want to kill everyone, apparently because somebody's hired them to do so.

The problem we have here, aside from some slightly shaky visual storytelling in the action squences by fill-in artist Steven Cummings, is that the threat is hopelessly vague and undefined.  To be fair, it's not that the villains don't have motivations; they're quite clearly being deliberately concealed at this stage.  Which is fine so far as it goes, but it gives us very little to hang onto at this stage.  We've got a team staying together for hazy reasons, fighting a bunch of evil X-Men who are hanging around for no obvious purpose, the Warwolves, who are just acting as hired thugs for somebody completely unidentified, and Albion, whose motivations are a total mystery at this stage.  We're effectively left with a random collection of heroes fighting a random selection of villains, and to trust that some sort of point will become evident down the line.  But we're five months down the line already.

Rating: C

back | continue