It's a weirdly lopsided week for the X-books' schedule, with just the one ongoing title, rounded out with four miniseries.  Oh, and two of those minis are written by Akira Yoshida.  And a third is written by Rob Liefeld.  I can barely control my enthusiasm.

But we kick off with Exiles, the lone ongoing title.  It's part two of the four-part "Timebreakers" story, and as you'd probably expect, this is the big exposition scene.  Actually, the plot runs into a bit of a stumbling block there, because the only character who knows what's going on is Hyperion.  So Tony Bedard has to search for a reason for Hyperion to tell the Exiles what's going on, rather than just killing them.

The result is a story which kind of makes sense, but doesn't quite, and makes even less sense the more I think about it. 

The basic idea is relatively straightforward.  After he got killed back at the end of the Chuck Austen run, the insects who were behind the Timebroker swept him up and put him into their morgue.  But Hyperion regenerated and hijacked the whole operation.  Okay, now in principle, that's a fairly good start.  Except... the Exiles missions had already gone weird before Hyperion died.  In fact, the mission he died in consisted of the Exiles and Weapon X being ordered to kill one another, so what's the explanation for that one? 

For that matter, we're also asked to accept that Hyperion wants to use the Panoptichron (the Timebroker's home base) to conquer all the timelines that take his interest.  But he also starts offering the Exiles the chance to join him, because he's lonely.  His whole attitude to the Exiles is horribly confused here, and I'm not convinced that it's entirely deliberate on the writer's part.  Why bother leaving them to continue with their missions at all?  And if he still needed them to fix the timelines, why doesn't he want them to go back and finish the job?  And why was he trying to make life harder for them? 

Austen never really developed Hyperion's character much beyond "power-crazed nut", and the attempt to give him a need for companionship doesn't flesh him out much more than that.  He's kind of needed for this plot because he's the only credible arch-enemy the Exiles have, but he's still not the most exciting character in the world.

Bedard and Sakakibara have enough energy and pacing to distract attention from some of these problems, and the issue certainly reads quite nicely.  It's a fun comic, at least on the first read through.  But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether the plot actually holds together.

Rating: B-

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