Exiles wraps up its first storyline under Tony Bedard.  Actually, it's somewhat interesting to note that it's a three-issue storyline at all.  For the last few years, the gold standard has been somewhere between four and six issues, for convenience of trade paperback reprinting.

There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye on the trade paperback format.  After all, if all goes well, the story will have a much longer life in that format than it ever will in serialisation.  But just because the trades have to fall into coherent blocks, it doesn't follow that every trade paperback needs to have a single storyline.  That may be the error which has led to so many over-extended stories of late.

Anyway, the tone of Bedard and Sakakibara's Exiles is pretty well established by now.  It's a fun, light book, where people in brightly coloured costumes hit one another.  It's unpretentious, it seems to be enjoying itself tremendously, and as a result, it's easy to enjoy.  Sakakibara's art seems wonderfully suited for this sort of story - she does wonderful versions of the Thing and Sasquatch (who looks like a violent cuddly toy), and turns in a nice Morph/Mr Fantastic fight.

It looks like the main purpose of this arc was to finish overhauling the team line-up, and give the book a marginally stronger tie to the mainstream X-books.  We've had the Exiles visit the Marvel Universe before, but Bedard's now doing it the other way around by putting an unwanted Marvel Universe character, Beak, onto the Exiles team.  Meanwhile, Nocturne gets left behind on the mainstream Earth.

All of this doesn't really match the established set-up of the Exiles, but that's not a problem.  The suspiciously inconsistent ground rules are part of the plot.  Bedard seems to be running with the idea, previously canvassed by Chuck Austen, that the Timebroker is lying to the Exiles about some or all of the plot.  Fine by me - it gives the Exiles some sort of story arc, and also allows for characters to join and leave the team in a more dramatically satisfying way.  The episodic "go to universe, perform mission" structure has been flagging, so a change of emphasis makes sense.

A good, fun comic.  I'm looking forward to seeing where Bedard is going with this book.

Rating: B+

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