Three Chuck Austen comics this week.  Feel the ennui.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and at least I get to type one of my favourite phrases: Exiles #45 is Chuck Austen's last issue.  It's the final part of "A Blink in Time", in which the big idea was that the Exiles and Weapon X should slaughter one another in order to bring the team size down to six.  In fact, they end up overshooting the mark and hitting five - but the practical effect of the whole story is just to get rid of Weapon X and dispose of Magik.

Nobody turns up to replace the missing member.  I assume that's being left to new writer Tony Bedard next month in the interests of more coherent trade paperbacks.  Anyway, it leaves this story to serve the role you'd expect - a deck clearing exercise.  And to be fair to Austen, it serves that role effectively enough.  Most of the cast is duly killed off (which always beats actually resolving their character arcs in any meaningful way), the Mimic/Morph feud is smoothed over, and... well, that's it, really.  Otherwise, it's a big fight scene, reasonably well done.

The one new plot point introduced is that Morph could in fact now go home to his own timeline but has privately elected to stay with the team.  I assume that's a plot being set up for Bedard, and it does open some more possibilities by having at least one of the characters with the choice of leaving.

This is what it is, really.  It disposes of all the outstanding plots and leaves things reasonably tidy for the new writer.  It doesn't offer much more than that, unless you like big fight scenes, but it does its job acceptably.

Rating: B-

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