|
By my calculations, if Chuck
Austen's output continues to grow at current rates, then by
2007 he will be responsible for 40% of fiction in the English
language. What a prospect that is.
The latest step in Austen's
campaign for global dominance is Exiles #26, the
beginning of his extended fill-in run. A fill-in run is
required because regular writer Judd Winick is in the middle
of a year-long exclusive contract with DC. While he
wrote a year's worth of stories in advance, Marvel wanted to
do eighteen issues. And so here comes Chuck Austen to
give us the remaining six.
In some respects Exiles
should be one of the easier books to write fill-ins for.
Character arcs aside, it doesn't have an ongoing storyline,
and its plot is based around episodic jumps from world to
world. I suspect that the plan is for Austen to focus on
Magik, a character who was introduced in the closing panels of
Winick's final Exiles story. If she's gone by the
end of Austen's run, we can probably infer that she's an
additional plot element who's been spliced in for the next few
months to keep the story ticking over.
The background story is the usual
bog standard stuff for this series: take one potentially
apocalyptic villain, multiply up a bit, and use as
interchangeable backdrop. At least it's not another
dystopian world. This time round the idea is that all
the superheroes work for Heroes For Hire, whose heroic
tendencies are tempered by a tendency to ask for money
upfront. For a villain, Austen dredges up Moses Magnum,
who's engaged in exactly the same plot from when he fought the
X-Men back in 1978. It's nothing imaginative but it
doesn't matter, because it's really just background detail.
Austen doesn't really get into
the details of Magik's powers; as near as can be seen from
this issue, she's just a woman with a sword. However,
she's placed upfront in the role of "traitor in the ranks",
which would be consistent with the character's demonic
tendencies. A little more in the way of background
wouldn't have gone amiss, nonetheless. Let's not forget
that Magik's been dead since 1993, and she hasn't been an
active character since 1988. However affectionately she
might be remembered, it's a fair bet that a large chunk of
today's readers neither know nor care about her.
Austen does have quite a clever
riff on the Exiles set-up, however. Going back to the
first issue, he takes Winick at face value with the idea that
the Timebroker isn't a character at all, but a projection of
the group's collective subconscious. The suggestion is
that the missions they're given actually stem from the
members' personalities; consequently, now that they've got a
very dodgy character like Magik hanging around, the
instructions are getting odd. I'm not sure how far
Austen can really take this idea as a fill-in writer, since it
gets to the heart of the set-up - where are these instructions
really coming from, anyway? - but it's still an interesting
idea to flag up, with the obvious "free will versus
determinism" stuff that comes with it.
New artist Clayton Henry debuts
this issue. He's got quite an attractive, clean style.
His Tokyo doesn't really sell the level of carnage that the
characters seem to be talking about - the wreckage seems
strangely antiseptic, as if somebody's set light to a model -
but his work on the characters is pretty good. It
certainly fits with the established tone of the series.
Not bad, at least by fill-in
standards. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary for
this title, though.
Rating: B
back |
continue |
