After a couple of single issue stories, Exiles begins another story arc, in a somewhat unexpected direction.

Taking a break from the usual (and increasingly repetitive) parade of alternate realities, the Exiles are all hauled off to the Mojoverse, where Mojo would like to have a word with them.  Unusually for this book, Mojo insists that there's only one of him across the multiverse, and so he's actually met everyone before (except Blink, naturally).

I could have sworn Mojo was killed and deposed back in 1991, but nobody bothered explaining it the last time he was brought back, so I suppose I can't complain too much if Winick wants to ignore it as well.

So it's the classic Mojoverse set-up, where Mojo is the lunatic villain, Spiral is the henchman, and Longshot is the freedom fighter, plus the obsession-with-media gimmick that was added to Mojo by Chris Claremont.  1988 lives!  I can only take this character in small doses, but since we haven't seen him at all for about five years, I'm actually quite happy to see him again.  A Mojo story.  Why not?

Characters as weird as Mojo only work in a very specific type of story, but Exiles has already got enough comedy and weirdness to get away with bringing him in.  The angle is that he used to have Morph as a performer, and he's desperate to get him back.  (Didn't we do this one with the X-Babies?  Well, there's only a finite number of Mojo stories, let's be honest.)

By Mojoverse standards the story is played fairly straight, which tends to expose the rather basic plotting.  Stories really don't get much more straightforward than this.  (Character X gets kidnapped by villain Y, teammates must rescue him.)  Still, it's Judd Winick and Mike McKone doing a Mojo and Morph story.  You can't complain too much about that.  Once every five years, anyway.

Rating: B+

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