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Exiles is still running
Chuck Austen stories. Oh glory day. Honestly,
after last week's fiasco, the last thing I need is another
Chuck Austen comic. This week saw the publication of six
- Exiles #28, Uncanny X-Men #425, X-Men
Unlimited #48, Call #3, Eternal #1, and a
Captain America trade paperback. You have no idea
how depressing I find that sentence.
This is a three-parter which
brings the Exiles to the mainstream Earth so that they can
meet up with Austen's X-Men. Good news: it's still got
attractive art, and there's no mad Catholics. The bad
news...
Well, if you have a hankering for
the Marvel comics of the mid-nineties, you'll love this.
Come to think of it, you'll love most of Austen's work.
We have a gratuitous guest starring role for the X-Men,
presumably to breathe some interest into a fill-in run.
We have the continuation of a subplot from that series which
has nothing whatsoever to do with this book - the one about
werewolves. And it's not as if those villains were worth
bringing back in the first place. They didn't have two
personality traits to rub together. Take away Asamiya's
character designs and there's nothing there.
And why on earth Exiles is
being used to introduce a subplot about Burt Worthington
(Warren's uncle, an obscure supervillain from about thirty
years ago), I have no clue.
Just to make the story even more
pointlessly arcane, Austen works in the idea that Alex is
still sharing a body with the mind of his counterpart from the
Mutant X universe. This makes the basic mission
so complicated that the story is forced to kick off with three
pages of soulless exposition just to explain the plot.
And even that doesn't make sense. The idea is that when
Alex dies, the "evil" Alex will take over his body. But
if Alex is dead, surely there won't be a body to take over?
Well, not on Earth-Austen, where a mere change of personality
is enough to have Evil Alex leaping merrily out of bed as soon
as he wakes up, his costume miraculously intact again, even
though a page earlier characters were complaining that his
stomach had been sliced open.
Then there's the bit at the end
where Warren sees Illyana and Mariko and asks them what they
want. One might have thought a more natural question
would be "Aren't you dead?"
Whatever. I can sit here
cataloguing plot defects, silly behaviour and so forth all
day. It's readable, I suppose. It looks alright.
But the plot is a mess and the villains were hopeless the first
time round. It's not aggressively horrible or anything,
but it's still riddled with serious problems.
Rating: C
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