It's a strange week, with three separate comics all featuring Chris Claremont stories finished off by last-minute collaborators.

First up is New Excalibur #8, with Christopher Yost completing the story.  Yost is credited as co-plotter, which suggests that either Claremont never finished writing the issue, or that Yost is simply working from Claremont's plot outline.  Either way, it's a strange story to appear in this format.  Psylocke appears as a guest star, to angst about recent events in Uncanny X-Men and to mysteriously vanish from earth in preparation for her run in Exiles.  It seems odd to run that story in New Excalibur in the first place, but then Yost is working with what's been left to him.

Despite that curious central theme, for the most part this is a perfectly decent little team book.  The cast do a bit of team bonding, respond to a distress call, battle evil, and generally do what superhero teams are meant to do.  Yost does a decent Claremont emulation without copying his more obvious tics, and it does the job quite adequately.  Considering the circumstances, it's a better issue than you'd expect.

Unfortunately, there's a glaring continuity error at the heart of the plot.  The impostor Professor X from the first storyline turns out to be the Shadow King, who wants revenge on Psylocke for imprisoning him back in X-Men #78.  According to this version of events, he escaped when Vargas killed her in X-Treme X-Men, fled to an alternate reality, and returned on M-Day.

Problem is, that's not possible, because the Shadow King appears in other stories during the period where he's supposed to be in another dimension.  Most obviously, he appeared in the 2001 X-Treme X-Men Annual, written by, er, Chris Claremont.  It's not really the sort of story that you can expect readers to overlook, given that the plot of this issue depends on an even earlier issue of the same series.  Presumably this is the result of Yost or his editor misunderstanding Claremont's plot, because Claremont must surely have a better grasp of his own plots than that.  These things happen, especially when comics are put together in panic mode, but that doesn't alter the fact that it's a genuinely problematic continuity error since it's right at the centre of the plot.

Still, despite that, I thought this was okay.  Aside from the continuity glitches, which are a real stumbling point, it's as good as you're reasonably going to get from a book like this.

Rating: B-

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