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THE CREATORS: Chuck Austen
writes up to issue #45 (with two fill-ins by Jim Calafiore).
After that, Tony Bedard takes over. Jim Calafiore and
Mizuki Sakakibara divide up the art.
THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT:
Well, in theory only Mizuki Sakakibara is the official regular
penciller on this book, as far as I can make out. But
Calafiore's been drawing about half the book for several years
now, which makes him effectively a regular artist. So
let's be generous and say Nil.
WHAT HAPPENED IN 2004: The
end of "King Hyperion"; Jim Calafiore's "A Nocturne's Tale";
"A Blink in Time", Austen's deck-clearing exercise; "Earn Your
Wings", where the new Exiles visit the Marvel Universe and
pick up Beak; a visit to the Impossible Man; a world where the
Mimic replaces Magneto; an Ego story; a chaos theory story;
and a Kulan Gath story.
 Good god, they
fairly churn these things out. Exiles shipped
seventeen issues in 2004 (actually, they're going to ship 18,
but the final one doesn't come out till next week, so it'll be
reviewed in the first column of 2005).
Exiles entered 2004 having
exhausted all the backlogged scripts which its creator Judd
Winick had left behind on decamping to DC in 2003. Chuck
Austen was effectively in place at the book's regular writer,
a prospect which scarcely filled me with enthusiasm.
Fortunately, after completing a
relatively inoffensive deck-clearing storyline, Austen didn't
stick around. CrossGen refugee Tony Bedard took over the
title and proceeded to... bring them straight back to the
Marvel Universe for the second time in a year. Dangerous
move. Of course, having the Exiles visit the mainstream
universe is a sound enough concept, but when their whole
premise is that they visit alternate worlds, you don't really
want to overdo it. Still, it did allow for something
that hadn't been done the first time round: putting a
mainstream character onto the Exiles team, and dumping one of
their characters here.
In retrospect, that hasn't turned
out as well as might be hoped. Beak has been pretty much
marginalised on the Exiles team, standing around and politely
waiting for the writer to get round to furthering his subplot.
As for Nocturne, she ended up in X-Men, being
hopelessly miswritten by Austen.
 Aside from
that, it's really been business as usual for the Exiles.
Bedard picked up the idea that the Timebroker might not be
trustworthy, which Austen had previously hinted at; it
provides the book with some loose sense of direction, although
there's the obvious difficulty that if they beat him, the
title is finished.
Rather than making that storyline
the focus of the title, however, Bedard has used it as a
simmering subplot. The Exiles spend most of their time
in stock visits of alternate worlds where they fight Marvel
Universe concepts who seemed cool at the time. The book
still struggles to get past its "interchangeable hero"
syndrome - or, perhaps more accurately, just resigns itself to
interchangeable hero syndrome and ploughs on regardless.
There's certainly an audience for
this kind of story; personally, I find the basic formula of
Exiles rather limited, and I think the book is nearing the
end of its natural lifespan. But it's got a loyal
audience, and it's undeniably different. The X-books
really don't need Exiles, but perhaps the answer is
that Exiles doesn't need the X-books either. As
we've seen from most of this year's new launches, the
X-imprint doesn't sell books any more. By this stage, I
suspect Exiles has its own audience, and isn't
dependent on the tenuous X-Men association. I'd be
inclined to send it on its way and reclassify it as a Marvel
Heroes title; increasingly, that's effectively what it is.
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