And the good news just keeps rolling, as Exiles finishes its five issues of fill-ins.  That means we're back to Judd Winick scripts.  Just in case any of you are new to the series, the situation here is that Winick signed up to do a year's exclusive deal with DC, but sidestepped its impact on Exiles by writing a year's worth of scripts in advance.  Marvel then decided that they were going to do eighteen issues a year of Exiles, hence the fill-ins.

So in the original plan, this would have been the first issue after Magik joined the team.  It would have followed directly from a storyline about the Weapon X team, and so we pick up with Magik having already alienated herself from the team - for the reasons that Austen naturally took the opportunity to flesh out in his filler run.  By the way, the fill-in run overran, which is why we're now getting a string of weekly issues to get it back on schedule.  Since these have a different artist, Jim Calafiore, they've presumably been sitting around waiting to go.

Winick's recent issues have tended to suffer from a common problem.  They've been degenerating into formula.  The Exiles turn up, the Exiles are assigned a mission, the world turns out to have a fanfic-style twist where something's nasty, the Exiles win, everyone goes home.  The twist this time is as fanfic as they get - Captain America and the Avengers are all vampires.  In true What If? style, Winick dutifully cites the Captain America story from twenty odd years ago where this could have happened.

All well and good, but it's just not all that exciting a premise.  What if the Avengers were vampires?  Well, they'd be nasty.  And.. that's about it, really.  It's not the most inspiring answer, but it's the one Winick seems to have settled on.  Winick no doubt finds the vampire concept fascinating in its own right.  He was presumably working on his Vertigo series Blood & Water at around the same time as this book.  But while that book set out to reinvent the vampire concept in a less mystical and more contemporary style, this is a fairly traditional take on the idea.

I can think of two fairly obvious reasons for doing this story.  It would have been the first Magik story in the original plan, and so a mystical enemy would be a reasonable match to establish her.  Also, it plays into the running theme of the Mimic being faced with heroes turned bad.  Perhaps something will be made of that in future issues, but nothing really comes of it here - Magik does her "slightly more violent than necessary" routine, in a way that comes across as rather muted in comparison to Austen's issues, and the Mimic is obligingly heroic. 

Unfortunately, it comes across as another plug-in story where the Exiles play the foil to a largely unrelated concept that Winick wanted to write.  Sunfire gets bitten this issue, so I suppose the plan might be to saddle the Exiles with a vampire member rather than kill her outright.  That would explain the point of the exercise.  But Magik's already serving the function of being the unwanted passenger, so I can't see much point in that.  Unless, I suppose, Winick plans to turn even more of the characters in future.

Jim Calafiore's art is as crisp as usual, but while he does the expected solid job on the Exiles, he seems to struggle a bit with the vampire Avengers.  Admittedly, it's not easy to play the dark and mysterious card with characters dressed in primary colours, but something just doesn't work about the vampires here.  The evil grin is not an expression that Calafiore has down.

It's okay, and as you'd expect Winick does have some nice interplay among the Exiles themselves.  But realistically it's nothing special.

Rating: B-

back | continue