Exiles is now into its extended fill-in period.  Coming up shortly is an entire additional storyline by Chuck Austen, mandated by the requirement to get an extra six issues out this year to meet the Marvel publishing schedule even though Judd Winick is under exclusive contract to DC for this year.  (The rest of his scripts were written in advance before signing the contract, which to my mind somewhat destroys the point of exclusivity, but there you go.)

But first, we have what was presumably originally intended as a break between storylines, but is now a break between a storyline and a break.  Weapon X, the "dark" Exiles, are back.  On the last page.  The rest of the issue is set-up.

I've said before that Exiles seems overreliant on stories about nasty monsters conquering the Earth - surely there must be other ways that realities can go "wrong" without them all turning into dystopian nightmares.  Well, there's no conquering alien race here, but we do have an evil Iron Man ruling the world.  In case you hadn't noticed that he's evil, he's also started wearing Dr Doom's cloak, which seems an inadvisable PR move.

The purpose of this issue is to explain how Iron Man came to rule the world, and generally build him up as an opponent for Weapon X.  There's also a subplot with the Inhumans, but basically it's Iron Man's issue.  But I'm not really sold on the character.  There's no real sense of this being any reflection of Iron Man's normal character traits; consequently, it reads as a gratuitous "what if such-and-such was a villain" routine.  It's not a mirror of the normal character, but a completely different character.  And not a desperately interesting one - he has a range of all the usual "arrogant dictator" personality traits, but remains ultimately one-dimensional.

The guest artist for this storyline is Kev Walker, whose rougher, sketchy style is a notable contrast from the usual clean and crisp artwork we get on this title.  Presumably the thinking is that the style change is suitable because this is a dark storyline.  For the most part, it's perfectly acceptable storytelling, although there's something odd about his textures - whether deliberately or not, most of his metal surfaces look as if somebody's been assaulting them with a hammer.

Middling.  "Evil scheming bastard takes over the world" is a passable premise for an alternate reality, but this isn't a desperately original take on it.  It's just not a sufficiently original premise to stand up to an entire issue of set-up.

Rating: B-

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