Exiles #99 is a weird issue.  Notionally, it's the fifth and final part of "Home Again." 

The first four chapters involved the Exiles visiting a world where Dr Doom had enslaved the population, and Reed Richards was running a resistance movement.  Part four ended with the world blowing up - which, incidentally, is not wholly dissimilar to the way Chris Claremont ended the preceding arc.

But does part five begin by explaining how the world survived after all?  Er, no.  The world is dead.  Goodbye, world.  Instead, part five turns out to be an entirely separate story in which the team are scattered around various universes, and the crew back at HQ go looking for them.  It turns out to be an excuse to reshuffle the roster, leading into Claremont's Die By The Sword miniseries.

This certainly isn't part five of the story we've been reading in the preceding issues.  It's a single issue story that's been arbitrarily labelled as part five, presumably because it's going to form part of the same trade paperback.  I have my doubts about the wisdom of misrepresenting the structure of the story in that way, if only because it results in readers misinterpreting the real end of the story and assuming that it's just a cliffhanger.  But that's a minor point.

Claremont's main concerns in this issue are to introduce a new character, the clumsily-named Raphael-Raven Darkholme, and to write out Spider-Man 2099.  Raphael shows up in Sabretooth's part of the story, and gets a bare minimum of back story for the sole purpose of establishing that he's a male counterpart of Mystique.  Then, he hooks up with the Exiles, almost unnoticed between panels of a montage sequence, for no clearly explained reason.  At a push, there's an effort to establish that his family are dead, but it's a long way from that to "I've just met a stranger from another dimension - I think I'll go with him."

Spider-Man 2099 is written out in a bizarrely misfiring subplot.  Over the previous few issues, Claremont had put him in a torrid romance with, of all people, a Gwen Stacy counterpart.  She died at the end of the last issue, and now he hooks up with a woman who isn't named but is clearly meant to be at least reminiscent of Mary Jane.  We're supposed to be very happy that he's overcome his grief (after, ooh, eleven pages of profound mourning), found love and settled down.

This doesn't work at all.  For one thing, it plugs Miguel into the normal Spider-Man mythology in a clumsy and contrived fashion.  Far from making us care about Miguel as a character, this just reduces him to the umpteeth iteration of another, more important hero.  To make Miguel work, you have to establish that he's something more than just a cheap knock-off, and you do that by stressing what makes him unique, not by plugging him into old Peter Parker stories.

For another, the preceding four issues hinged entirely on the concept that Doom had messed about with the whole human race in order to make them more compliant, and so everyone on that world was lacking some sort of spark that made them essentially human.  You know the sort of thing - power of the soul, autonomy, all that.  Well, Miguel's Gwen was one of those people.  So Claremont is riding two horses at once - he wants us to believe that Doom's people are a bit soulless and damaged, yet he also wants us to buy Miguel's relationship with Gwen as something terribly important and powerful to him.  Inevitably, the result is that we're left to wonder why Miguel is so torn up about the death of his mannequin.

The issue also shows up the limitations of Clayton Henry's art, as the story visits several different worlds, all of which look pretty much the same.  Interestingly, Tomm Coker's cover art shows Sabretooth fighting Victorian-style henchmen in top hats with pistols.  When the same scene comes around in the interior art, they've turned into generic soldiers in a stock woodland setting with a few gravestones, and only Raphael's waistcoat says "slightly dated."  Something is being lost here.

Not a good issue.  But with issue #100 solicited as the last one, and something called New Exiles around the corner, we're evidently heading for a reboot.  Hopefully that means Claremont is at least building towards something more interesting.

Rating: C-

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